Rivals become friends in Gal Gohan’s fifth volume

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As Marii Taiyou’s charming, cheeky romcom Gal Gohan has proceeded, we’ve started to see a slight element of “conflict” introduced into proceedings, primarily in the form of rivals for leading man Shinji Yabe’s affection. At this point, we not only have leading lady Miku Okazaki gunning for him as only a gal can gun, we also have student council rep Fujiwara making constant puppy-dog eyes at him — and now his college not-sweetheard Nagisa, too.

While the story could have easily moved in a direction where these three were at each other’s throats, leading to plenty of bitterness and spitefulness, Gal Gohan has never really been that kind of story. Despite its core narrative component being a taboo relationship between student and teacher, the whole thing is wrapped in a pleasant layer of wholesomeness, meaning it simply wouldn’t do to have a “villain” of the piece. And as such, it’s not long before Miku’s love rivals actually become quite close friends — with their main means of bonding being their frustration over how blissfully unaware Yabe appears to be over all their feelings!

This is one of the main topics that Gal Gohan’s fifth volume explores, but it’s not just about that. Before we explore that further, it’s important to acknowledge an important aspect of the series’ overall character development.

Gal Gohan volume 5

Chronologically speaking, by this point in the overall narrative, Miku is moving into her second year at high school. It’s fair to say that, although we don’t see it all that much, Miku has a bit of a reputation. She’s known as “the school’s number one gal”, for one thing, but it also seems that her academic failures — the reason she joined the cooking club in the first place, as seen in the first volume — are somewhat notorious, too.

With that in mind, it’s understandable to see other students in the volume’s opening chapter expressing genuine surprise at Miku attending classes — but given that it’s a home economics class she’s seen attending, this of course will not be altogether surprising to the audience. That said, by this point we know she’s been trying hard in her other subjects, too; part of the reason she’s developed a strong friendship with Fujiwara by this point is because Fujiwara has been helping to tutor her in the areas she’s been struggling in.

The Miku we see in the first chapter of volume 5 is a very different Miku to what the rest of the school is apparently used to. She’s focused, she’s knowledgeable and she’s helpful — though her reputation as “the school’s number one gal” in particular causes the boys in particular to feel some rather doki-doki moments any time she gets a bit close. Unlike the way she is with Yabe, though, her “closeness” in this instance is completely innocent in nature — her peers aren’t at all accustomed to this side of things, it’s clear.

Gal Gohan vol. 5

Of course, this image of wholesomeness and responsibility is brought crashing down the moment Miku slips over and spills an entire bowl of cream over herself. The resultant scene is, unsurprisingly, deliberately designed to look like a cumshot image from a hentai manga — and Miku herself comments on this, demonstrating that certain aspects of her personality will never change, regardless of the maturity and responsibility she has managed to acquire by this point.

This interruption aside, it’s clear we’re looking at a very different Miku to the one introduced in the first volume of Gal Gohan. And the other students are noticing not only the change in her general demeanour, but also the fact that she is remarkably close to Yabe. Since they’re in front of an entire class, Miku actually manages to restrain herself from anything completely inappropriate — cream-covered incident aside — but her classmates still note how they are very much on one another’s wavelength, working together to achieve things.

No-one’s quite sure what to make of it — but they want to know more. Yabe is, of course, quick to deny anything untoward, noting that Miku is “a great kid, very attentive”, while Miku, of course, bellows out the fact that she has a “huge crush” on Yabe. In a little 4-panel comic that comes between chapters, though, we see that Miku is actually rather proud of how Yabe described her as being “very attentive” — while she knows that this was a very “teacher” thing to say rather than anything even a little romantic or sexual, we can tell from this that she is genuinely pleased at how far she knows she has come.

Gal Gohan vol. 5

Elsewhere in volume 5, we have the opportunity to get to know Nagisa a bit better. We learn that she’s a musician who not only runs the school choir, she also uses music as a means of expressing herself. While we’re led to believe that Yabe is all but oblivious to the feelings of people around him, we also know that he and Nagisa were close in college, despite their relationship never escalating into anything romantic.

Yabe demonstrates this by pre-empting Nagisa’s feelings on multiple occasions over the course of the narrative. In this instance, we see him recognising that she is stressed out for some reason — actually a combination of the vice principal’s behaviour and her feelings of inferiority when comparing herself to Fujiwara’s directness in declaring her feelings — and making her a smoothie. As it happens, she was just on her way to do that for herself when he accosts her — and she’s happy to accept his smoothie, since she knows he’s much better at making them than she is.

Not only this, we see Yabe recognise that the piece of music she was playing on the piano was the one she always used to play in college when she was stressed out or tired. Our Yabe is clearly not as oblivious as we might have been led to believe up until this point, which puts a slightly different spin on most of the relationships we’ve seen him engaging with up until this point; he’s quite obviously aware of what’s going on in most instances, yet has an admirable amount of self-control that prevents him from doing anything inappropriate, unprofessional or, at worst, illegal.

Again, this is firmly in keeping with Gal Gohan’s overall “wholesome” feel; while the very premise is a taboo relationship, the fact that it’s never taken “over the line” from a legal perspective heads off what could have been a source of further conflict and drama. Gal Gohan isn’t about drama; it’s about light-hearted, romantic, occasionally mildly cheeky, ecchi silliness. And Yabe’s borderline superhuman sense of self-control is part of what helps the series maintain that feel — particularly as it’s also often as source of humour.

Gal Gohan vol. 5

Miku, Fujiwara and Nagisa finally come together in a chapter where all of them want to help celebrate Yabe’s birthday. Each of them, of course, have their own ideas on how to approach it — surprisingly, Nagisa is the one to suggest an overtly romantic/sexual “your present is me” approach before being promptly shot down by both Miku and Fujiwara — and they eventually settle on making a great cake for him. Even then, Fujiwara wants to go ridiculously extravagant on the ingredients, but it’s Nagisa who brings everyone back down to earth with a straightforward recipe. Everyone agrees that this should be a good way to make Yabe feel the love.

When Fujiwara and Miku start making the cake together, Fujiwara realises that it is the first time she and Miku have been left alone with one another since she declared herself Miku’s “rival” for Yabe’s affections. Miku doesn’t appear at all bothered by this, but Fujiwara is deeply uncomfortable, and in a delightfully hilarious scene, attempts to adopt what she believes are Miku’s speech patterns to try and appear more at ease. Naturally, this is brilliantly awkward, with her declaring the cake they are making both “cray-cray” and “wanky” (with Miku urging her to never say the latter ever again) and the whole situation only leaving Fujiwara feeling even more ill at ease.

It’s questionable as to whether Miku recognises exactly what is going through Fujiwara’s head at this point, but one of the most touching scenes in Gal Gohan’s fifth volume comes when she offers up the fact that she is not angry at Fujiwara’s confession, but rather happy that she was finally able to admit how she felt. She wanted the pair of them to be able to celebrate Yabe’s birthday together, not as rivals at one another’s throats, but as friends with a mutual appreciation for something unattainable. It’s a lovely, sweet moment that demonstrates Miku has more emotional maturity about her than one might assume from some of her other behaviour.

It also emboldens Fujiwara to be rather more assertive than she might otherwise have been, with her making an indirect but nonetheless outright confession to Yabe during the school sports festival by grabbing him as “the one you love” during a scavenger hunt event. At one point, we see Fujiwara trip and apparently fall while racing to the finish clutching Yabe by the hand; exactly what occurs remains strictly “off-camera” but we see Fujiwara and Yabe come in last place in the race as a result, and Fujiwara concludes the chapter with a cheeky assertion — obviously levelled directly at the reader — that “this memory was for me alone”.

Gal Gohan vol. 5

Of course, Miku gets her own moment to shine, too — at Fujiwara’s insistence, even; she admits to Miku that “the scavenger hunt was all the memories I need; you go make some of your own” — and Miku follows this up by dragging Yabe away from the post-sports festival celebrations, pulling him into the empty swimming pool and confessing to him underwater. Yabe, attempting to defuse the awkwardness of the situation somewhat, comments on the seeming non-sequitur of how beautiful the moon is that night — apparently forgetting (or being unaware of) the fact that “tsuki ga kirei desu ne” or “the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?” is a common, poetic means of saying “I love you” in Japanese. But is he really unaware…?

Moreover, given that Nagisa seemingly makes a move on Yabe in private at a summer festival as the cliffhanger for this volume, what could possibly happen next? Well, we’ll just have to explore the next volume to find out, won’t we?

Gal Gohan volume 5 is available physically via Amazon. Alternative places to buy physical and digital versions can be found on Seven Seas’ website.

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Pete Davison
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