Our story starts with Mizumori Mio, a
perfectly typical
Japanese schoolgirl (as long as you don't
talk about the way the water in her fishtank seems to react to her moods).
One evening, after an ordinary day, the apartment building she lives in suddenly blows up in a freak accident, killing her beloved parents. She's the only survivor of the entire block.
After that, while she's still in shock,
she goes to live with her only living relatives, her distant cousin Sijoh
Tadaomi and his father, and transfers to his school.
On her first day, after the end of school, she is trapped on the roof of the school by a gang of toughs and menaced by them. (I think they're Sijoh's gang - he's not at all surprised to see them, and offers her no protection.) She runs and they corner her on a rooftop, underneath a water tank. (This is one of the reasons why I think this is Sijoh's idea - if she uses her power to protect herself, she'll become aware of it, and if she kills someone with it, she's more likely to be sympathetic to him.)
It might've worked - except that, out of the night sky -
...comes a hang-glider which just scoops
her up and away!
The mysterious glider doesn't identify
himself, depositing Mio on the roof of the Sijoh home, leaving her afire
with curiosity. She's determined to find out who her rescuer was.
It
turns out her rescuer is Narumiya Rei, the school's golden girl. Unbenownst
to anyone at the school (but beknownst to us), Rei is really a boy.
His real name is So. He doesn't really
want to dress as a girl,
but for reasons revealed later in the story, his family realized that if
he'd grown up as a boy his life would have been in constant danger, so
they told everyone that he was their daughter, Rei.
Mio finds out how dangerous Sijoh really is when she follows him when he rides off on a motorcycle, to see him drinking and partying in a park with gang members - the same ones who terrorised her. This alienates her from him, especially as he had sympathized with her when she'd described her ordeal at the gang's hands.
She's drawn to Rei, who had rescued her,
and finds herself falling in love with him - especially as Sijoh admits
his responsibility for her parents' deaths. (We can't say 'guilt' because
he doesn't feel guilty. At all.)
Sijoh, in the meantime, is finding himself more and more attracted to Mio, as she moves further and further away from him. He's decided that Rei is an obstacle that has to be removed...
... Even as Mio finds that Rei is becoming the most important thing in her life.
Sijoh employs the old tried-and-true method of blowing up the Narumiya house in the middle of the night, even if Rei did survive the first time he did it - it took care of the Mizumoris, after all. Again, it misses its target - Rei wasn't home. (Hang-gliding to all hours is easy if you can just summon a wind whenever you feel like it.) Instead, he manages to kill Rei's father.
Rei is understandably pissed, and decides to take care of Sijoh once and for all, even if he'll have to reveal his secret identity to pull it off.
He's underestimated Sijoh's power, and it backfires. Badly. It's only Mio's interference that saves his life.
Given
that there's no point in continuing to pretend to be a girl, Rei cuts off
his long hair and resumes his original identity of Narumiya So.
Much to Mio's initial dismay, So is a walking, talking girl magnet - after all, as Rei he was the head of the school, in both sports and work, and as a boy he's every bit as gorgeous as Rei was cute.
It's therefore a great relief to find that he's still very much her guy.
Beyond this, my knowledge of the series is fragmentary - I have the sixth tankoubon as well as the first three, so I do have an idea of the sort of thing that happens next.
Basically, Sijoh doesn't give up. He wants Mio as his adoring girlfriend/puppet and So dead. He's still using his usual dirty dealings, causing mayhem, major property damage and random death to bystanders.
In the sixth tankoubon, he proves that he's not above using innocent pawns in his game, by convincing a girl who's interested in So to befriend Mio and deliver her into his hands. When this results in tragedy, he manages to twist it so that the girl blames Mio, not Sijoh.
As for the end - well, Sijoh's tough, but Mio and So are hanging together. So until I manage to find the rest of the series, it looks like it could go either way.
The reincarnation angle? All through the series, the characters keep seeing each other overlaid with other images - Mio sees Sijoh overlaid with a samurai overlord with bloodstained hands, and So as a plainly-clad samurai knight. So sees her overlaid with a white sorceress' image, while Sijoh sees a mediaeval princess, riding away with a young knight. So the impression I get is that this triangle is a bit older than anybody involved thinks at first.
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Text © Raye Johnsen, September 2001. Images © Michiyo Akaishi 1987.