My curios­ity got the bet­ter of me as soon as I saw the tags on its Manga-Updates page: “Cross­dress­ing” “Or is it?”

This may very well be the best gen­der­ben­der manga writ­ten yet. The rea­son? Because it does the one thing that most gen­der­ben­der man­gas failed to do: keep on gen­der­bend­ing in both direc­tions by stay­ing ambigu­ous. Because in the end, our dear hero­ine is both boy and girl yet nei­ther at the same time, and far more than Kinoshita Hideoyoshi will ever be. Hence why this series is not just amus­ing but also intrigu­ing, because when the awk­ward humor passes, you’re left won­der­ing whether she really is a “boy” or a “girl”, left keenly aware of just how mixed up gen­der iden­tity really becomes at times…

Well? What would it be?

Prunus Girl is a very recent series, first pub­lished in 2009 by Mat­sumoto Tomoki, who doesn’t have any other notable works yet accord­ing to Manga-Updates or MAL. The premise is a sim­ple one: the main char­ac­ter Maki-kun (who is actu­ally a smart, ath­letic, and popular-with-girls guy for once!!!) goes to check out his high school entrance exam results and meets the bishoujo Aikawa Kizuna in a fate­ful encounter. Well, at until the first day of class when s/he intro­duces him/herself.

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Episode 2 con­firmed my ini­tial thoughts. At the rate they’re going, Baka to Test to Shokanju is going to out­right win for me as the best anime of Win­ter 2009; even with how much I’m look­ing for­ward to Nodame Cantabile.

I mean seri­ously, it’s got just about every­thing, and it does it with high qual­ity style:

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