Joshikousei to Seishokusha-san (aka
JK x Teacher) builds on a familiar foundation. It's an ecchi-fortified romantic comedy about a straightlaced teacher and three eccentric JKs: class president Amajiki Reika, tough gal Kokonoe Rina, and gravure idol Tsutsugou Sumire. The bulk of the narrative takes place during the trio's first year of high school
Early chapters strike a tone of playful comic absurdity while establishing characters and relationships. Each of the three girls soon becomes in her own way sexually fixated on their 44-year-old homeroom teacher, a great hulking zaddy-slab identified only as "Sensei-san". The ensuing contest of wills pits his stone-faced professional decorum against their triforce barrage of lewd provocations.
Foregrounding Sensei-san's insistent rectitude generates a curious side effect: it focuses the reader's attention on the story's moral dimension. One can't help but notice, for instance, that Sensei-san fails to maintain appropriate boundaries with the girls, each of whom is secretly wounded and lonely. As a result, each girl is eventually seduced by his gentle encouragement during moments of intimacy he should never have allowed in the first place. Sensei-san is a groomer, if an unwitting one.
More broadly, we might wonder what such a high-minded character would make of the story in which he appears, with its sexed-up renderings of underage JKs...
Mangaka Zaisei Roro unpacks the implications of Sensei-san's choices and principles with elegant precision. She constructs for
JK x Teacher an overarching narrative that functions rhetorically, framing and exploring a complex question. While it resists encapsulation, we can sketch this question's outlines by approaching it from different angles:
- In what circumstances might strict propriety allow Sensei-san to have sex with his students?
- If love is of the heart and thus invisible, what must the strictly proper man sacrifice in its honor?
- Are the sacrifices required by strict propriety compatible with the needs of the heart?
As the story progresses, Zaisei maps out an answer, guiding the reader from cheerful comedy into darker and more emotionally resonant terrain. The bittersweet conclusion, when it finally arrives, clicks so perfectly into place as to seem inevitable, like a fate etched in stone. (Those so inclined might also perceive in it an ironic critique of both moral absolutes and the much-discussed "male gaze".)
In the end,
JK x Teacher succeeds not because it carries an interesting thematic payload, but because it's smart, funny and heartfelt, a genuine pleasure to read. Though it remains a wish-fulfillment fantasy about a middle-aged man's "harem" of lovely young girls,
JK x Teacher transcends the genre's stale tropes with uncommon wit and maturity.
Recommended to people who like good things.