Yoshida is secretly still stressing about being a virgin. When he once again meets that cute high school girl who inexplicably has a crush on him (and who he still doesn't realize is Murakami, a guy in drag), he wonders if he might soon have an opportunity to lose his virginity.

After that, the volume focuses on a new transfer student, Takeru Azuma. Azuma hates Yoshida on sight even though, as far as Yoshida knows, they've never met. Nishida may know what's going on, but first Yoshida has to track him down – the guy is constantly busy saving people.

At the start of this series, Sato essentially forced himself on Yoshida, and Yoshida was too nervous/confused/attracted to turn him down. However, their relationship soon developed into something more mutually affectionate and loving. For that reason, Yoshida really annoyed me in this volume.

It really bothered him that Sato wasn't a virgin while he was, but instead of thinking about how their relationship had been progressing to the point where they'd soon be having sex, he seemed to be stuck on the idea that he wanted to have sex with a girl. A guy like Sato wouldn't count. At one point, he thought, “Sure I want to lose my virginity...but!...I've got the overwhelming feeling that I might give up something even more important. What's the matter with me lately?” (12-13) Gee, I don't know, maybe it's your conscience reminding you that you're in a committed relationship with Sato, who would almost certainly be hurt if you had sex with someone else?

Thankfully, he did get past this without doing something stupid and irrevocable, but I wasn't 100% convinced that he knew why it would have been a bad idea to hook up with the one girl who seemed interested in him. It made me feel bad for Sato, which was a little weird, since I used to hate the guy.

The second part of the volume was lots of drama, more about the transfer student and Nishida than anything. I loved the flashback to their childhood, which included an amusing moment of fourth wall breaking, and I'm interested to see how things turn out for Azuma. I'm not sure it's a good idea for him to enlist Sato as his teacher, though.

There was another development in this volume that I really enjoyed but can't say too much about without spoiling things. At any rate, I was pleased at how smoothly it went. It would have been easy for Tanaka to use that moment for extra drama and even cruelty, so for once I was glad that the girls continued to be just as cartoonishly jealous and scheming as they had always been.

Extras:

One full-color illustration and a brief non-spoilery author's note ("Then something big but sorta not so big happened" is a perfect description of the moment near the end of the volume).

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

In the first chapter, Sato tells Yoshida he wants Valentine's Day chocolate from him. He also enacts a plan to keep all the girls at school from giving him chocolate. Then Sato, Yoshida, and Yoshida's friends investigate the creepy rumors that have been going around the school, much to poor, easily frightened, ghost-fearing Yoshida's dismay. Finally, Sato, Yoshida, and friends “vacation” at Tsuyako's tropical island, leaving Yoshida with some intense memories.

I enjoyed this volume, although it didn't have as many memorable events as some of the previous ones – it's been long enough since I read it that I had to flip through it in order to remind myself what happened.

Murakami was back, and hamming it up. He really should join the Drama Club. I appreciated that

although then the Drama Club went and proved once again that the girls at this school are generally just the worst. Ugh. On the plus side, Sato smiling as he carried Yoshida away was adorable. And it'd be wonderful if the T-shirt he was wearing on the title page for the next chapter actually existed in the story itself. I can just see it now: Sato proudly wearing a shirt with a giant image of Yoshida's face on it, while Yoshida cringes in horror and embarrassment.

The “ghostly” rumor investigations were okay. The best part was when Sato very nearly told Yoshida's friends that he likes Yoshida. I'm actually a little surprised that there has been no evidence, so far, that Sato is hurt by Yoshida's continued fear that word of their true relationship will get out. Even if he understands why Yoshida doesn't want anyone else to know, I'd think he'd still be at least a little upset about it, especially when you consider how obvious it is that he'd like to tell people and is past caring how people might react.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Clueless Makimura has a brand new crush: the beautiful student council president. What he doesn't realize is that he's being used by her to gather information about Sato – he's close to Yoshida, who is known to spend a lot of time with Sato. The student council president has pretended to be uninterested in Sato in order to wait for what she thinks is her best chance to win him for herself: a marathon in which the grand prize is a one-day pass with Sato (who wasn't consulted about this and never gave his permission to be used as a prize).

After the marathon, the students deal with an unusually high volume of litter on the school grounds - specifically, banana peels. Several students slip, lose their memories, and then slip again, regaining their memories. After the banana peel incident, several of the girls give Sato some home-made Madeleine cookies. One girl begs Yoshida to steal her cookies back after she realizes, to her horror, that they're awful. The volume wraps up with a chapter in which it seems like everyone's catching a cold except Sato, who says he never gets sick.

Whereas volume 4 was heavy on character backstory, volume 5 was a return to the series' usual episodic nature, with one difference. This time around, Sato was noticeably more relaxed. He was no longer manipulating the school's girls quite so well, but he seemed happier. Also, except for one moment during the banana incident, he no longer seemed to be as interested in messing with Yoshida's head.

My favorite parts of the volume were the last two chapters, the one with the cookies and the one in which everyone caught a cold. The cookie chapter was great because it was the first time Sato ever visited Yoshida's house (and met Yoshida's mother, although I think both boys would have preferred it if she'd showed up an hour or so later). It was also hilarious watching Yoshida try to trick Sato into leaving his cookies unattended – he was a horrible liar.

The “everyone caught a cold” chapter was silly, but not quite as over-the-top as the banana chapter. It was impressive how many students found an opportunity to accidentally douse Sato with water. I continue to be amazed that so few students have caught on to the fact that Sato and Yoshida are dating. Sato's feelings for Yoshida were incredibly (and publicly!) obvious in this chapter.

All in all, I probably liked this volume more than it deserved, considering that it was filled with fluff. It was such a relief to see Sato beginning to relax and display genuine positive emotions. If I had to complain about one thing, it would be the way Akimoto was handled. Back in volume 3, Sato said something incredibly hurtful to Akimoto and never apologized. This volume was the first time Sato and Akimoto spoke to each other on-page after that incident, and it was like it had never happened – no awkwardness or indication of any kind that Akimoto still felt hurt or that Sato felt guilty.

Actually, while I'm at it, I'll add another complaint: I'm getting tired of the way the girls act around Sato. The student council president was downright cruel, the way she used Makimura to gain info about Sato, and none of the girls see Sato as a person, just as a prize that they might be able to win.

Despite those complaints, this was pretty good. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the next volume.

Extras:

This volume includes one full-color image and a few brief comments from the author.

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

I'm starting to think that the first volume of this series was the roughest, because everything after that one was much better. Volume 4, in particular, was really good.

At the beginning of this volume, Yoshida gets upset when some of the girls call him “ugly” and say that he looks a lot like one of the monsters in an amusement park haunted house. Although Yoshida is terrified of haunted houses, Sato forces him to go to the one the girls mentioned. After that, we get an extended flashback to Sato's elementary and middle school years. When he's 12, his parents tell him he'll be going to a boarding school in England. What they don't tell him is that the “boarding school” is actually a brutal fat camp that uses dangerous and unorthodox methods (like combat against wild animals) to help kids lose weight. The volume ends in the present, with Nishida and Sato battling for the right to date Yoshida and the school's girls battling to win a contest that will give them a full day with Sato.

The beginning of volume 4 was probably the weakest part. I felt a bit sorry for poor Yoshida, being forced to go through a haunted house when just the thought of being there terrified him. Sato couldn't seem to decide whether he was being too hard on Yoshida or whether he was enjoying Yoshida hiding behind his back too much to stop.

The flashback, though, was excellent and gave me something I've been wanting for a while, an extended peek into Sato's mind. This entire part was from his POV: being saved from bullies by Yoshida; the day Yoshida got his cross-shaped scar; being shipped off to England by family members that didn't seem to want him around; surviving his three years at that brutal school and even somehow making friends there; and the weird and upsetting feeling, after he returned to Japan, that his fat self had somehow been erased as though it had never existed.

Sato was about as screwed up as I had expected. In elementary school, he emotionally distanced himself as much as possible from the people around him and the things being done to him. His family members didn't even get proper faces, just big black spots with “Sis,” “Mom,” and “Dad” written on them. He even tried not to care too much about Yoshida's efforts to stop others from bullying him, probably so that Yoshida wouldn't have a chance to disappoint him later on.

Tanaka kept the section set during Sato's middle school years from being too grim by making certain elements over-the-top ridiculous. There were races conducted with wild animals running behind the kids as motivation, and combat classes in which the kids had to either defeat wild animals or be carried away on stretchers. I thought it was a little bit too ridiculous, at first, but, combined with some of the other things going on at that school, I think this section would have been too dark if Tanaka had played it all completely straight.

You know how Yoshida found out in volume 3 that Sato wasn't a virgin? Well,

So yeah, even with the wild animal combat sessions this section was a bit dark.

One thing that hadn't really occurred to me, prior to reading this volume, was that it wasn't just Yoshida and Sato who'd gone to elementary school together. Most of the students at their high school had also gone to the same elementary school, and some of the guys who wanted to be Sato and some of the girls who wanted to date him might have been the same ones who bullied him a few years earlier. That had to be a bizarre feeling.

After all that heavy stuff, Tanaka decided to end the volume on a lighter note. I absolutely loved the “battles” between Nishida and Sato, even though I agreed with Yoshida that they should have talked with him first. Sato didn't even try to be a better person than Nishida – he'd have had to be a saint. Instead, he thoroughly embraced his role as the over-the-top villain, complete with a panel in which he shouted corny evil lines while looking down at Nishida from atop a cliff (“Yoshida is mine, and it's about time you knew that...in Hell!” (153)). This entire section had me laughing so hard I cried.

After a so-so beginning, this turned out to be the best His Favorite volume yet. I can't wait to see what else Tanaka comes up with.

Extras:

This volume includes one full-color image and a short postscript.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

The series continues to have a bit of an episodic feel, as each chapter has its own “story.” In this volume: Yoshida feels stressed and preoccupied because a cute girl has asked him out; Yoshida gets upset when he learns that Sato isn't a virgin (I had thought he and Sato had had sex already, but apparently not); a heat wave makes everyone feel gross and cranky; Nishida, an openly gay student, confesses his love to Yoshida; and readers get to see more of Torachin and Yamanaka now that they're a couple.

This series has grown on me, even though I still have some issues with it.

I'm glad that Sato seems to have mellowed out some. He's still a secret jerk, but he doesn't mess with Yoshida quite as often as he did in previous volumes, and there were some nice panels of Sato and Yoshida just hanging out and enjoying each other's company. I still wonder if Tanaka ever plans on digging a little deeper, bringing Sato's emotional issues out into the open, and really dealing with them.

One thing I did not like, however, was how Sato acted during the heat wave chapter. He was absolutely awful to Akimoto, Yoshida's overweight friend. He absolutely destroyed the guy in only two sentences. He claimed it was because Akimoto got between him and Yoshida, but I imagine that his own usually hidden feelings of self-hatred and fat phobia played a large part as well. He's gone from being the guy who was bullied when he was fat to the guy who spews hateful words at Akimoto when the heat causes his “nice guy” mask to slip.

I cheered when Yoshida immediately jumped to Akimoto's defense and demanded that Sato apologize. However, Yoshida seemed to forget how awful Sato had been to one of his best friends the instant he realized that Sato was probably just as stressed out by the heat as everyone else. Okay, yes, the heat was making everyone cranky, but only Sato reacted so viciously. I wish Yoshida had continued to be angry at Sato, or given him the cold shoulder.

I enjoyed most of the rest of the volume, though. Nishida, in particular, was a fun new character. He was ridiculously and hilariously kind, at one point simultaneously helping an old lady carry heavy things, catching a thief, saving a little kid's balloon, and saving a drowning puppy. Although Yoshida didn't seriously considering dumping Sato for him, Nishida's wonderfulness did highlight how much more awful of a person Sato tended to be. I'm still waiting for a satisfactory answer (beyond “Sato won't leave him alone”) for why Yoshida continues to go out with Sato.

I was thrilled to see more of Torachin and Yamanaka, although the end result wasn't quite as good as I had hoped. Torachin was perfect – the tough guy who's a secret softie. The problem was Yamanaka. Falling in love with Torachin did not cure of him of being a good-looking sleazeball. He and Torachin haven't had sex yet, and he wanted their first time to be good...so he asked Yoshida “Is it okay if I screw you once?” (142) Thankfully, Yoshida gave that proposal the response it deserved.

It sort of helps that both Yoshida and Torachin are aware that the guys they're going out with kind of suck...and yet it doesn't. I want better for both of them.

Oh, one thing I should mention: throughout the series so far, almost all the female characters have been boring rabid boy-chasers. Tsuyako, who made a brief appearance in the first volume and who was basically a female Sato, was one of the few exceptions. Happily, this volume provided readers with another. Inoue was one of the few girls who wasn't afraid of Torachin. She acted as a middleman, asking Torachin for help on behalf of a female classmate, but she also made it clear that he was basically being used and that she wouldn't blame him if he decided to refuse. I liked her attitude and her pragmatism, and I hope she becomes a recurring character.

Extras:

This time around, the entire volume is devoted to His Favorite. There's a 4-page one-shot in which Nishida and Sato publicly fight over Yoshida (their classmates think they're practicing some kind of comedy skit). There's also a short postscript and one full-color illustration.

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)