Hana Kimi, As You Like It, Twelfth Night: The Curious Case of Cross-dressing Girls

How far would you be willing to go for love? Will you, in Dracula’s words from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film, be willing to cross oceans of time to find the one you love? Not everyone is an ancient undead with time to kill, so realistically, would you be willing to cross an ocean for the one you love? What about going so far as to hide your identity and enroll in a school exclusively for members of the opposite sex?  

This is exactly what Mizuki Ashiya, Hana Kimi’s protagonist, decides to do. When Mizuki sees Izumi Sano, a high jumper on TV, she’s instantly smitten. She’s so amazed by his skills that Mizuki decides to move bag and baggage to Japan from the U.S., enrolling in the same high school as him. There’s just one tiny setback: it’s an all-boys high school, but Mizuki is undeterred. Chopping off her hair and disguising herself as a boy, she’s determined to win over Sano and convince him to get back to high jumping, one way or another. And so, begins the comedy of errors that is Hana Kimi.  

Hana Kimi has been around for a long time. The manga was originally serialized in Hana to Yume (a shoujo magazine) from 1996, culminating finally in 2004. It has received numerous adaptations from Drama CDs to Live Action Dramas, but oddly enough, it never received an anime adaptation, even during the pinnacle of the shoujo anime era in the early 2000s. Now, nearly twenty years since Mizuki first appeared on paper, her story is finally making its way onto the two-dimensional world of anime.  

Hana Kimi is actually the progenitor of the shoujo subgenre of cross-dressing/boarding school shenanigans and is the manga responsible for popularizing the genre. There’s something about the whole scenario of going undercover, creating havoc, and making everyone question their sense of sanity while masquerading as the opposite sex that’s captivated humanity for centuries. It can be traced back all the way to the first century in the Achilleid by Roman poet Statius. In the chapter Achilles on Skyros, Achilles dresses up as a lady-in-waiting in the court of the king of Skyros. While this particular episode may not have been in Homer’s epic Iliad, it is one of the first documented appearances of this trope. 

William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, written later in 1599, features a girl named Rosalind in the guise of a young boy, Ganymede. Rosalind’s reason for dressing up as Ganymede is primarily for protection; by her own admission, “beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.” Over the course of the play, as Ganymede, she decides to “cure” Orlando (who she loves) of his love for Rosalind and proceeds to act as a substitute for Rosalind in Orlando’s eyes. Sounds complicated? Wait till you hear what the bard wrote next.   

Shakespeare revisited this trope in Twelfth Night, written shortly after, around 1601. Twins Sebastian and Viola are separated on the coast of Illyria after a shipwreck. Believing that her brother perished, Viola assumes the identity of Cesario and enters the service of Duke Orsino as a page boy. Duke Orsino, meanwhile, is in love with Countess Olivia and sends the so-called Cesario as a middleman to profess his love. Olivia, on the other hand, falls head over heels in love with Cesario, who is in love with Duke Orsino, cementing one of the most famous love triangles in literature.   

Twelfth Night has received numerous adaptations. Most notably, two teen comedies set in high school: Just One of the Guys (1985) and She’s the Man (2006). In Just One of the Guys, aspiring journalist Terri believes she’s passed up for an internship opportunity by her teachers because she’s a girl and enrolls in another high school masquerading as a boy named Terry to test out her theory. She’s the Man follows the plot of Twelfth Night more closely, retaining the names of the characters. Viola pretends to be her twin brother Sebastian to prove to her football coach that girls can play soccer just as well as boys, or in her case, even better. 

In Shakespeare’s time, when women were not allowed to do theatre, the female roles would be given to young male actors. In other words, Rosalind and Viola are played by boys pretending to be girls who are pretending to be boys (and in Rosalind’s case, pretending to be a substitute for a girl)! Without exception, the cross-dressing trope is used as a plot device and a catalyst to provoke reactions that would be impossible otherwise while creating humorous scenarios. It let women fill unique roles which would have undoubtedly and strictly been only for boys or men. In Viola and Mizuki’s cases, it allows them to become confidants of Duke Orsino and Izumi Sano, respectively.   

Back in Shakespeare’s time, of course, characters like Rosalind and Viola went against conventional gender expectations placed on women. By simply donning men’s clothing, they are perceived to be men; not only does this change the way they act, but it also influences the others who interact with them. In Hana Kimi, Mizuki’s classmate and friend Shūichi Nakatsu goes through a sexuality crisis simply because he believes he’s in love with a boy. Olivia falls in love with a boy in Twelfth Night, not knowing the boy in question is a girl.  

But the late 16^th century and the early 2000s had a completely different outlook on gender roles and expectations. And now in the 2020s, the question doesn’t even come into play, and the term gender is no longer defined by what chromosomes your body contains.

Mizuki, Rosalind, and Viola are all girls masquerading as boys, while being in love with boys. In She’s the Man, Viola is good at soccer. In Hana Kimi, Mizuki excels at athletics, beating records set by her male cohorts. These narrative choices position them as tomboys who also embrace traditionally feminine traits, a notion that is somewhat taboo in today’s discourse around what’s feminine and what’s not. 

Fans of the source material would be happy to see their favorites animated on screen, but the jury’s still out for the younger fans who are discovering Hana Kimi now. It’s also infinitely more difficult to pull a stunt like Mizuki’s in today’s era of cellphones and social media. 

It’s for this reason that Hana Kimi’s adaptation is an interesting phenomenon. The manga is set in the early 2000s, the humor is that of the early 2000s, and that certainly comes through in its anime adaptation. The early shoujo manga and anime themselves have a distinct style characterized by doe-eyed female protagonists framed by flowers and pastels. The art is soft yet intricate, from the characters’ eyes to their clothes. The anime finds a middle ground, incorporating everything from the aesthetics of the early aughts to today’s widely popular vibrant color palette. The same goes for the setting, Wataru Nihonbashi, Mizuki’s schoolmate, stalks the halls photographing other students and selling the prints for money. In the manga, at a time when smartphones didn’t exist, Wataru’s questionable side hustle makes sense. In the anime, this is retained, though his customers complain, “I don’t want a print, I want files,” causing Wataru to offer a rebuttal that doing so would ruin his “business.”  

Hana Kimi’s anime adaptation feels oddly nostalgic because there frankly aren’t enough shoujo anime or romcoms like this anymore. It’s stuck in a time warp when things were simpler, and the mental gymnastics that Mizuki causes everyone to go through were weirdly believable. Hana Kimi fills that void of comedy that we weren’t even aware was missing. Whether you’re a fan of this shoujo classic or want to unwind with something lighthearted and cringe at the questionable decisions of a teenage girl, it is undeniable that Hana Kimi feels like a warm hug from an old friend.  

Watch now on Crunchyroll.