Higehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway.

Series Overview

Higehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway. (Hige wo Soru. Soshite Joshikousei wo Hirou. / ひげを剃る。そして女子高生を拾う。) is obviously a light novel adaptation because the (Japanese) title is literally two sentences long.

Higehiro is the story of a salaryman who finds a high school girl sitting on the side of the road in the middle of the night while he’s walking home drunk. He invites the girl to stay in his apartment overnight, and then, naturally, becomes a father figure for her.

Despite what you might have expected, Higehiro is not an ecchi or harem series. It’s simply a romantic drama. But, the fact that this is a romance anime has caused some people to look at it in a negative light. After all, it’s romance between an adult and a minor.

Personally, I don’t really care about that since it’s just a work of fiction. But, there are some other relationships within the series that I do have issues with. Most notably, there’s a literal child rapist who’s depicted as being “not that bad of a guy because at least he keeps his word.”

If you’re going to cancel Higehiro for anything, at least make it that.

With all that said, there are some good aspects of the series as well. For example, there are quite a few cute female characters. You have the jailbait main heroine, her gyaru best friend, the mature boss, and the younger coworker.

But, as I already mentioned, this isn’t a harem series. Everyone other than the main girl is there simply because their presence adds drama or because they just happen to be a female supporting character.

Main Characters

Yoshida is the protagonist of the series. I’m not exactly sure how old he’s supposed to be, but I’d guess that he’s in his mid to late 20s. I don’t really see him as being any older than that. He’s a random salaryman, and there’s nothing else special about him other than that he gets rejected by his boss at the start of the series.

Sayu Ogiwara is the high school runaway Yoshida finds on his walk back home from the bar. She’s traveled all across Japan since leaving home, sleeping with random guys in exchange for being allowed to stay at their places overnight.

Now, as much as I like Sayu, which is a lot, I have to admit that Airi Gotou is actually the best girl of the series. Gotou is Yoshida’s boss, though I don’t believe she runs the whole company. There’s a lot to like about her, such as that she’s professional and mature, yet cute at the same time.

Yuzuha Mishima is Yoshida’s kouhai at work. She has a crush on Yoshida because he’s a dependable senpai. While Mishima is cute, I think she’s my least favorite of the three girls mentioned so far. I still like her, but she’s a bit too pressuring when it comes to romance.

The final character who matters is Asami Yuuki. Asami is Sayu’s best friend who she meets when she gets a job at a convenience store. She’s the only girl mentioned here who isn’t interested in Yoshida because she’s not about to steal her best friend’s man.

Now, despite this not being a real harem show, the main appeal is the same. Yoshida and the other non-female characters are pretty bland and boring. The only good reason for watching Higehiro is to see the girls.

Good in Theory, Average in Practice

When I first heard about the Higehiro anime, I thought it sounded pretty good. It seemed like a nice, wholesome premise. A guy takes in a runaway high school girl and then helps her turn her life around while giving her a safe environment in which to grow.

In fact, that’s basically what the show is actually all about. So it’s not as if it falsely advertised itself or anything. I think I just underestimated how much it was going to lean into the drama side of things. And, I don’t have an issue with drama anime.

The problem is that it’s right on the border between wholesome and drama. I rarely want to watch something that’s wholesome and something that’s a drama at the same time. It’s not like Fruits Basket, which generally separates the two based on the episode. Every episode of Higehiro goes both ways.

This merging of wholesomeness and less-than-wholesome drama led to a situation in which I was simply never in the mood to watch a new episode. On top of that, I don’t think the wholesome or drama content was especially good.

Something else a bit odd about this series was that it actually had a conclusion. I know a lot of people like it when anime have conclusions, but I think it’s kind of weird for a series like this. Higehiro is very much a slice of life series.

There’s not really a plot. And yet, from early on in the anime, it was clear that there was going to be an ending — whenever Sayu goes home. Sayu’s eventual leaving was never framed as something so distant we wouldn’t see it. But I feel like maybe it should have been.

The knowledge that Sayu would leave hung over the series. It made it harder to get invested.

Conclusion

Higehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway. is a 6/10 from me. It was slightly above average, primarily because the girls in it are cute. I’m not going to deny that the reason I liked it was shallow. If you want deep characters or a deep story, this isn’t the anime for you.

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