After a slow start, what better way to kick things up than with a school festival? Here we have arrived at one of the more exciting parts of Hana-Kimi's early phases. It approximates itself towards a tournament arc with the way it opens up; what better way to show off than by having the head of the school's karate club come out looking a bit like Ryu from Street Fighter, and then have him threaten utter defeat to Minami, on top of a background lit up by cobwebbed sparks to intensify the hyperbolic sense of energy? It's got a dash of chuuni to it, and I love it for that.

And it is a very fun arc. It's got stakes! It's got romance! It's got cheesily one-dimensional bad guys from competing dorms! It has a beauty pageant where the guys dress up like girls! And best of all, it's got a rosy sense of art, style, and wit. The pageant itself takes up a good bulk of the school festival, cranking the gain up on Hana-Kimi's usual gender-bending escapades: Nakatsu's feminine garb gives off annoyed tsundere vibes, while another crossdresser has them calling themselves Oscar (you can decide whether or not that's a Rose of Versailles reference). Girls visiting the school have them drooling over the crossdressing, which has Mizuki belt out a very ironic, humorous line: “Why do girls like to see guys dressed up as girls?!”

The heightened femininity of this portion of Hana-Kimi creates panels that revel in flamboyancy. Often, they're adorned with flowers, especially in a panel where Sano's crossdressing reveals him to be the prettiest, most feminine girl who is literally none of these things. He even out-feminizes our girl-who's-actually-a-girl Mizuki, who here is clad in the dress of Alice in Wonderland. The guys of Hana-Kimi have always donned the look of quasi-feminine pretty boys, although Nakatsu's male physicality still seeps through the seams of his tsundere crossdress. Mizuki, as Caroll's Alice, is the most feminine she's looked thus far, which begs the question of how she's still able to fool the boys into thinking she's one of them, but hey, suspension of disbelief.

This section of Hana-Kimi scarcely has any moments of physical intensity, although you can still feel the gravity of the festival's competitiveness. The manga's inner Slam Dunk shines through in a brief basketball tournament, while a few fists are thrown into the mix in a kibasen match. Since the act of showing sports hasn't been made too much of a focus, the manga decides to up the ante in the beauty pageant instead. It gets so dramatic to the point where some jerks from competing dorms go as far as to kidnap Mizuki. It's a ridiculous plot thread that ends in Sano and Natsuki having to team up to save her, and much to the manga's credit, Mizuki does kick the one guy's ass. It ends up being a two-edged sword; in exchange for this drama and conflict, we get an archetypal thread of the men having to save the damsel (even if they don't know she's actually a damsel).

The school festival doesn't get in the way of letting the manga continue its intimate romance between Sano and Mizuki. Or for the other characters, for that matter. Minami is revealed to be more than just a dumb flirt when his ex wanders back into his life on a whim. Her presence has Minami nostalgically yet wistfully reminiscing about the days gone by, remembering that he once loved her, and still might. A flashback later on reveals that he even sent her flowers and a card as she was about to marry another man. This subplot feels a bit fragmented, considering how it comes out of nowhere, broken up between other events, and Minami's character thus far hasn't been built up enough to let this romantic subplot have too much of an impact. Still, my inner romantic finds this charming. The lesson that Minami learns from his ex's marriage is the classic “you are what you love, not what loves you.” It's profound by this manga's standards. Another flashback reveals Mizuki's American life before she left it, and while I found it a teeny bit less interesting, it's a necessity in establishing Mizuki's background a bit more. It works.

What I've covered thus far is about more than half, maybe two-thirds of the omnibus. The other remaining part is less interesting, since it's just there to establish the Hokkaido school trip arc that happens a volume or so later. Nakatsu's case of the “not gay”s that were established earlier rises to a full crescendo here, since he can't initially bring himself to like Mizuki, especially now that another girl who has a crush on him enters the fold. It's drama that could benefit from a deeper psychological analysis of the situation, but then it just...resolves itself by having Nakatsu go with his gut and confess his crush on Mikitsu. Good for him, I guess, but I wish things were done in a more meaningful way. A reporter named Kinuko Karasuma enters the fray, too, and she's the stereotypically in-your-face, nosy reporter who wants to get to the bottom of Sano and Mizuki's relationship. Some tension between Sano, Mizuki, and Kinuko ensues, encroaching on a few moments where Kinuko accidentally discovers Mizuki's identity in a way we've seen the manga already do a few times before.

The majority of this manga omnibus provided an entertaining read filled with levity. That the story continues to drag towards the end of this omnibus is more or less the same issue that plagued Hana-Kimi from its start. Still, if nothing else, volumes 4 and 5 have provided some of the best that Hana-Kimi has to offer.