(Araiso Private High School Student Council) Executive Committee 2

Author: Minekura Kazuya
Imprint: Chara Comics
Publisher: Tokuma Shoten
ISBN: 4-7575-0503-5

Reviewed by Jeanne

The second volume of Araiso Private Highschool Student Council Executive Committee consists of one long story in seven chapters, and an unrelated story from a different Minekura series entirely. It also actually has something to do with the student council, for a wonder.

That's because Matsumoto, the council head, has asked Kubota to start going over some oddities in the student council's finances with the treasurer Fujiwara. (If ExecCttee's main characters are their Saiyuuki brothers seen in a drug dream, then short, blond, seductive and malicious Fujiwara is Sanzou. Sanzou getting his a/u comeuppance, let it be said at once.) Besotted and confident Fujiwara is going to take Kubota away from Tokitoh, Tokitoh is furious at seeing Kubota serenely playing along with the interloper, and the Fujiwara/Kubo-chan arc of the story reaches its conclusion, only to reveal another story inside, and another inside that, like a bunch of nesting boxes. The set-up fight staged to get the ExecCttee suspended from their duties temporarily- the plot behind that to discredit the present Student Council- the true goal of the mastermind behind the plot- everything follows in order as we get closer and closer to the heart of the matter.

Alas, we never do get to see what's in the smallest box in the centre, which is the truth of the past relationship between the coolly manipulative but on-the-side-of-the-angels Matsumoto and the poker-face 'ally of justice' Kubota. We hear that they were in junior high together, that they were on the jr. high's Executive Cttee together ('There *was* one?' Tokitoh wonders in understandable bemusement), but we never learn what the 'debt' is that Kubota says he owes Matsumoto, nor why, as Matsumoto's gorgeous and usually silent assistant Tachibana says, Kubota's the one person in the world Matsumoto doesn't want to have against him. We're put off with a gag explanation no-one is going to buy for a minute.

Meanwhile the homoerotic air just goes on getting thicker and thicker. Tachibana makes barbed little comments about Kubota, Matsumoto quietly goads Tokitoh into an explosion, jealousy and unspoken feelings simmer gently in the background of this ostensibly humorous story. Even more when the former friends meet face to face. "We suspect Fujiwara's been embezzling from the Student Council," Matsumoto says to Kubota in an early flashback. "And you want me to get close to him so he'll give himself away?" Kubota answers, "--Since you know you're the one person I won't ever say no to. Right, council president?" "Charmless as ever," Matsumoto smiles, with an edge, "aren't you-- *Makoto*." Suggestiveness has rarely been done so-- suggestively.

What we do get to see, a lot of, is Tokitoh and his vanity and his 'ore no besuto furendo' attitude to Kubota. Tastes vary, but Tokitoh I could rather do without. In a humorous series like this you don't expect the characters to have much depth, but with Minekura one does expect them to resonate. Kubota resonates all over the place, as taciturn characters will, striking archetypal chords in lovely harmony. Matsumoto resonates, with his unreadable smile and his friend-or-foe ambivalence and his tantalizing past history. Matsumoto's quiet bespectacled eminence grise Tachibana resonates. (Learn this Seishinja picture-reading point now: in Minekura, the guy in the unbuttoned white shirt is the seme.) But Tokitoh is just-- a classic shounen manga hero: otoko-rashii and hot-headed and loud-mouthed and terribly transparent-sunao-sincere. (Which is why it's odd to hear him referring to himself as the world's no.1 bishounen. Bishounen are supposed to have an array of soft and dewy-eyed beautiful boy behaviours to go with the soft dewy-eyed face.) Compared to his other Minekuran avatars, Gojyo and Kenren, he seems a very much younger brother, lacking the wistfulness that softens the posturings of the former and the underlying seriousness that gives weight to the latter. There hasn't been enough Wild Adapter Tokitoh to see if he's any different, but we may hope he improves when put into a film noir context. And meanwhile, what *I'd* like to see is some good Kubota/Matsumoto yaoi, that would decide the vexed question of which was seme and whether *that* had anything to do with the present distance between them. (Moushikashite-- could it be??- that neither is seme?)

Minekura ended ExecCttee with the announcement that she, and her characters, were going on, or back, to Wild Adapter. She mentions, as she did in vol 1, that the whole idea of EC owes to the fact that she was once on an exec.cttee at her school whose members behaved rather like this one- 'cut classes, only showed up after school- I found them endlessly fascinating.' She also adds an intriguing note that I take to mean 'Many people have said EC is the series that most resembles me, character-wise.' Minekura said in a Puff interview once that she grew up playing with boys and thought of herself as one of the guys until the inevitable puberty showed her otherwise. Me, I have a feeling that Tokitoh and Kubota are Minekura's male alter egos- the guys she'd have been if she'd been a guy. Or rather, I think Tokitoh is who she'd have been and Kubota is who she'd like to have been. But that's another article for another time.