We’re back with another volume of high school boys (and girls) engaging in more silly shenanigans! I will say immediately that this volume’s problem was that it had to live up to the near perfection of volume 3, and it does fall short in that regard. But overall, it’s hard to hate a volume where our three main characters — Tadakuni, Hidenori, and Yoshitake — learn from high school girl Tanaka that she’s dating Hidenori’s older brother.
And their mouths could not get any wider in shock than that.
Volume 4 of The Daily Lives of High School Boys has the characters engage in activities that make you feel guilty. For example, we had a high school boy believe at the start of a chapter that seeing a girl’s panties is a symbol of joy and there’s no reason to feel guilty about it. But after setting up a situation where he got to see Ringo’s panties, he immediately realized the student vice president was correct and you do feel really guilty about it. (That boy ended up taking three days off of school because of it.)
We still have the adventures of Yassan, aka Literature Girl, and Hidenori continuing to know each other in a manner that doesn’t spark romance, but instead provide many misunderstandings because they won’t actually talk to each other. We learn the student council in this manga apparently has to complete certain tasks for other local schools for some unknown reason. If you happen to see a high school boy or girl accidentally slip, join them and accidentally slip as well (actually, don’t do what three characters in this volume did). And if you didn’t know that you have to eat rice cakes properly, you’ll see firsthand what happens when you don’t!
But as usual, we just get a couple of different stories that end in one chapter or continue for two chapters; one of them involves Hidenori going to see his grandparents, and he ends up befriending a girl named Emi. That happening after she accidentally kicked him into the river is one thing, but it’s quite another when, after spending time with him, she starts to like him? Talk about a big emotional swing — will this new girl be able to properly confess her feelings to Hidenori before he goes back home?
The answer is of course, no, but the reason why is pretty tough — and Hidenori is none the wiser!
Anywho, you basically get the gist of The Daily Lives of High School Boys: characters engage in dumb stuff you’d about expect for high schoolers (like with Ikushima poorly executing the Mu*cle Buster on Yanagin), chapters are very brief and usually are one-offs, and the art is still just not great at all. But it has its moments of making you laugh thanks to the various scenarios the characters find themselves in, and that’s not going to stop anytime soon!