Hiramaru, Kazuya
Summary
Kazuya Hiramaru is a twenty-six-year-old salaryman from Kanagawa-ken, Japan, who despises the concept of employment. His life takes a sharp turn when he overhears Takagi and Mashiro discussing manga creation on a subway train and discovers a discarded copy of Jack. Believing that becoming a mangaka would require significantly less effort than his corporate job, he quits to pursue his new career. Unlike Eiji, whose genius is refined, Hiramaru’s talent is raw and spontaneous, emerging from a spur-of-the-moment decision to write manga after teaching himself the art in a remarkably short period. This immediate proficiency leads to the serialization of his series, Otters 11, with Koji Yoshida championing his work despite Yoshida’s prediction that Hiramaru’s lack of motivation would cause him to quit upon facing failure. Hiramaru’s defining trait is his extreme laziness, which quickly turns his new career into a regretful burden. He struggles to maintain the pace of a weekly series, often lamenting the necessity of labor and expressing a simple desire to sleep when tired and eat when hungry. To keep him productive, his editor Koji Yoshida frequently employs manipulative schemes, as Hiramaru constantly attempts to escape his editor to avoid work—a recurring gag throughout the series. Additionally, Hiramaru is a chronic hypochondriac who fabricates severe illnesses to shirk his duties. Although doctors consistently prove him to be in perfect health, these fabricated ailments are generally understood to stem from his anxieties and serve as convenient excuses to avoid the demands of his job. His only genuine drive comes from his intense infatuation with Aoki Yuriko. Yoshida leverages this by bribing Hiramaru with weekly updates on Aoki and by dramatizing scenarios in which Hiramaru loses her due to his laziness or inability to submit story names. Terrified of losing Aoki, Hiramaru is spurred into frantic productivity by a mix of his own anxiety and Yoshida’s end-game scenarios, working tirelessly in the desperate hope that his success will win her heart.
