Love Hina, literally translated into Japanese, means Love Doll. And that should give you some kind of idea as to what this story is about. A Shonen Manga, Love Hina is targeted at young male audiences and apparently Ken Akamatsu's picture of young boys is that they are complete perverts, and his thoughts on young girls aren't much better, either.
Love Hina is the story of Keitaro Urashima and his quest for love. As a young boy, Keitaro had made a promise to the girl next door- his first love. Though she was moving away, he promised her that they would meet up as adults when they both enrolled in the famous Tokyo University. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but Tokyo University is a very hard school to get into and Keitaro hadn't counted on the fact that he would be a complete dolt! Now on his third year studying for the college entrance exams, Keitaro has angrily left home in search of the hotel that his grandmother owned, hoping to stay there. Much to his surprise, his grandmother has gone off on a trip around the world and has converted the failing hotel into a boarding house for school-girls (a la Maison Ikkoku). After making a bad, and very perverted, impression on the girls of the dorm, they try to toss him out. With nowhere else to go, Keitaro tells them that he is already a student at Tokyo University, a lie that impresses them enough for them to let him stay on as the dorm caretaker. Even when they do discover his secret, Keitaro manages to hold on to his place as the caretaker of the dorm, but not without the girls constantly trying to oust him. Meanwhile, Keitaro soon discovers that Naru Narusegawa, the girl who has been leading the charge against him from the beginning is actually the top student currently studying for the Tokyo University entrance exams. Will she help him? And why does she look strangely like the girl next door? If Keitaro can keep himself out of the perverted situations that the girls of the Hinata Lodge keep catching him in, perhaps he will find out.
This manga annoyed me. Like a slapstick movie, which I'm not particularly inclined to like either, Keitaro gets himself into bad situation after bad situation. Situations that Keitaro, if given any brain-power at all, would've been able to avoid. Why would you walk into the bathroom of a girl's dorm without knocking if the girls there already think your perverted? And why, would you climb out of your window, in your underwear, just to hear what those same girls were saying about you while they took a bath in the outdoor tub? Keitaro is ridiculously stupid. Only serving to make matters worse are the girls of the Hinata Lodge-the only girls I've ever seen that touch each other to see if their breasts have grown! Do men really believe that girls act like this? Because, well, for lack of a better word, DUH! No they don't act like this! And aren't there locks on the doors in this place? Just because it was previously just for girls naturally means that there were no need for locks? Or privacy?
Thankfully, Naru's character was hilarious! This almost made up for the bad moments in the story. Naru is funny, intelligent, and caring, but she can't stand some of the things Keitaro is prone to do, and when she catches him, she is very willing to rough him up! The other girls in the dorm are bland, not really holding on to much character aside from being mischievous and having crushes on Keitaro. And Keitaro is so mind numbingly stupid, that it is hard to develop any form of affection towards him. The art is similar in this way. The characters don't seem to have much definition. It comes to a point where it is hard to tell the characters apart just by looking at them. Only Naru and Motoko Aoyama (who is always carrying a samurai sword) have any distinctive traits and it is even easy to get Keitaro confused with some of the short-haired girls. I have definitely seen much better in the way of Manga art than what I've seen here.
At the end of the day, there are much better Manga out there than Love Hina. An overtly sexist view of the world, this story does not seem to aspire to anything but being a low-end soap opera for boys. Unless there are changes in theme in Volume 2, I can almost say for certain that this story isn't worth much to either sex.
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