| My age: | I am 24 | |
| Available to: | Male | |
| Eyes colour: | Clear hazel | |
| Hair color: | Gray hair | |
| Languages: | I can speak English and Korean | |
| I prefer to drink: | Absinthe | |
| In my spare time I love: | Hunting |
He gives her a place to stay because he genuinely wants her to be off the streets and out of skeevy assholes' bedsheets. There's a time and a place for cheesecake, but this particular premise is neither. Sayu has forced herself to stay emotionally detached, especially from someone like Yoshida who could kick her out at any time, which is understandable considering the transactional and fleeting nature of her living arrangements.
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Still, it seemed like every few minutes, there was a moment that made me tense up with fear, like him conversing with her about her cup size or telling her she was cute when she laughed. Is Yoshida going to end up with Sayu, anyways? For all my misgivings, it'd be nice to have this show turn out to not be creepy or leering.
However, time and again, thanks to the nuance of its writing, Higehiro danced right up to that line before stepping back. Rebecca Silverman Rating:.
Nicholas Dupree Rating:. It's pretty skeezy, especially in Anime girl running away series that's specifically about who has been abused and exploited. But what's telling is that by the end of the episode, she is smiling and laughing—being herself with her guard down for the first time in a long time.
Koikimoaka It's Sickening to Call This Love already handled the subject of a man in his 20's stalking a high school girl about as poorly as possible, but luckily, Higehiro looks to be cut from an entirely different cloth. Considering she's clean and not starving, it appears she's had quite a few takers, until she meets Yoshida, who takes her in but refuses to accept her offers of sex. Take the first meeting between our ostensible protagonists. He meets a high school girl on his way home after drinking. There was one question hanging over this premiere from the outset: How creepy is this going to be?
Yoshida might be a bit of a stereotypically chivalrous self-insert, what with his ability to be an ideal paternal figure to Sayu while bravely staving off her constant seductive advances, but you know what, he at least has the good sense to know that what he is doing is definitely kind of sketchy, and he seems to be motivated out of genuinely good intentions.
Of the two shows airing this season that feature relationships between adult men and teenage girls, Higehiro is looking like the more tasteful. I spent the entire episode of Higehiro with my heart in my throat. Richard Eisenbeis Rating:. This does largely go away after Yoshida lays down the ground rules of their living together, so maybe it's just a flubbed attempt to get us into the protagonist's head or something, but I would very much appreciate it going away.
Despite Sayu's attempts to seduce him, which we learn is a rather unfortunate habit she's picked up in the six months since she's left home, Yoshida makes it emphatically clear that he isn't interested in making advances on a teenager. James Beckett Rating:. In her mind, everything in life is a form of give-and-take.
He's absolutely correct, and it's sad that so few men can even achieve that.
Yet at the same time, I'm wary. So Anime girl running away the full title of Higehiro had me bracing for more of the same, prepping for another miserable odd minutes. Not only does he take her in, he consistently turns down her advances. Suddenly, the right thing to do is no longer so clear-cut, and when it comes down to it, the only way Yoshida can guarantee her safety from that point onwards is if she continues to stay with him until she can survive safely on her own.
The concept of an adult man taking in a teenager who offered him sex feels like incredibly dangerous ground, rich with potential for exploitation and abusive situations. I'm trying to understand! When Sayu calls him kind for going outside to smoke, he rejects her compliment and claims that he's really just doing the bare minimum. Or to put it another way, there were so many points in this first episode where this series could have lost me. While I would be more than happy if Yoshida and Sayu remained friends, and each of them found partners more appropriate for them, I'm not going to expect or need the story to conform to my personal sense of what makes for a sexy cartoon.
High school girls are terribly sexualized in many places around the world, but one of the places it's particularly bad is Japan, where their distinctive uniforms have become an object of fetishization in and of themselves. It feels like faint praise to congratulate a show for NOT indulging in statutory, but apparently that's where we're at, so credit where its due.
Sayu, however, sees Yoshida as a client, and thinks that she has only one thing of value that she can sell in return for his kindness: herself. I promise, in only a few years you will understand that I am speaking the gospel truth, here. There's a lot of delicacy and sensitivity to the writing around Sayu's situation as Yoshida tries to sort things out.
Therefore, receiving kindness without any strings attached makes her fearful and nervous. You hear that, Koikimo? While Yoshida steadfastly refuses to see Sayu sexually, I wish I could say the same for the camera work.
Yoshida chides the girl for the suggestion but eventually lets her stay with him. Thankfully, this first episode mostly avoids that. Our protagonist, Yoshida, takes in the runaway Sayu when he drunkenly stumbles upon her sitting alone in the middle of the road.
On the other hand, there is always the looming danger that the story could simply turn into a fetishization of an adult preying on an underage girl—especially in a story with hints of romantic undertones like this one. Yoshida's first challenge is to convince her that the household chores she has been doing around his apartment are worth her rent, as well as provide her with some clothes and a bed of her own.
And I genuinely hope things even out from here, because there's potential for an engaging story in all this, even if I'm a bit burnt out on Dad Fantasy stories at this point.
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However, Sayu's comments about her family not missing her—and the fact that a missing person's report has never been filed—heavily imply to both Yoshida and the viewer that she suffered serious abuse in one form or another. Oh, probably, and while that's its own can of worms, it's a can of worms that is much easier to wrangle with when your story has a leading pair that are maybe a little good for each other. Who would have thunk it…. Another thing that caught my attention about the writing is how Yoshida refuses to Anime girl running away himself on the back for his fundamental human decency.
There are issues, certainly, but if nothing else I'm thankful that our main character isn't one of the embarrassingly prevalent adult men in anime who wants to bang a high schooler. Higehiro seems to actually understand this and how damaging it is, as while Sayu puts on a good performance, her demeanor changes to something far more relaxed and natural for her age once she realizes Yoshida really doesn't want to have sex with her and she can feel safe around him.
Every wobble, every hint that it might veer off-course had me gasping in fear and worry, but it always managed to recover. Sayu, a uniform-clad runaway has made it from Hokkaido to Tokyo by exchanging sexual favors for places to sleep and eat. If Higehiro is going to play around in these extremely testy waters, I am willing to give it credit for telling a story that functions more as a fantasy than a thinly disguised horror story in the making. Watching Higehiro is like watching a daredevil doing a balancing act. Sayu, the runaway high school girl he meets, says they could sleep together if he lets her stay with him.
The storyboarding is overall pretty prosaic and uninspired, but seems most enthusiastic when zooming in on Sayu's breasts and underwear. While it might not be the kind of thing I'm in the mood for, you absolutely can tell an engaging, even challenging story with the parts at Higehiro 's disposal. Yoshida seems like a clumsy but earnest person who genuinely cares about Sayu's problems, even if he's not entirely sure how to help outside of keeping her off the streets.
I don't know, I told y'all this genre wasn't my thing! The atmosphere shifted dangerously toward romance, before going back toward safer territory. It could still very well fall over the edge and plunge into a lava pit of gross exploitation. The scars left by Usagi Drop 's ending will never heal, and I'll likely never trust this kind of premise without caveat, but here's hoping.
That said, the show's script and direction don't quite seem to be on the same. Drunk off his ass, Yoshida encounters a homeless Sayu, who is planning to prostitute herself for a place to stay for the night. Plus, it does occur to me that so far the show hasn't shamed Sayu for doing what she needed to get by before this, and that's honestly refreshing. It's the start of a fragile trust between them, but one that could be the first step on Sayu's road to recovery. I don't think it's any big secret that fictional relationships between high-schoolers and adults aren't my thing.
I will continue to watch with a mix of optimism and terror. After discovering she is a runaway, he knows he should go to the police. Yoshida may be adamant about not sexualizing a kid, but the show's camera has no such scruples and the first half of this premiere is filled with paradoxical moments where the Anime girl running away is directly admonishing the kind of person who would treat Sayu like a sex object, while the camera pans up and down her body and makes sure to pause at her hemline.
Yoshida's crush had decisively rejected him after he pined for her for five years, and he had decided to drink his sorrow. Sayu is harder to get a read on, but there are plenty of hints that she's more complex than her lackadaisical facade would want you to believe. Higehiro is one of those stories that takes a taboo and builds a narrative around it—in this case a runaway teenage girl being taken in by a twenty-something man who she has never met before.
In fact, both Yoshida and the script in general seem very aware of just how rare that is, stating multiple times that the men who did trade a place to sleep for sexual favors from a teenager are trash. As the rest of the episode unfolds, Yoshida and Sayu's perspectives on their relationship are made clear.
Running away cartoon images
He prioritizes getting her a comfortable bed and trying to shake her out of her usual routine of settling for the worst kind of men. It turns out the secret to making a romantic comedy centered around what may become a taboo age-gap relationship is to make sure neither of your romantic le are literal walking sex crimes! This holds doubly true when he regains sobriety. Played straight, a story like this could be used to explore everything from themes of child abuse to societal issues that lead to such a situation existing in the first place.
And when she's not throwing her boobs in his face, the pair have a solid comedic chemistry that could grow into something really endearing.
