Character · Horimiya
Izumi Miyamura
At school he is a gloomy boy with hair in his eyes. Outside it he has nine piercings and ink across his back.
In Otakana the clue reads: Quiet boy with hidden piercings and tattoos
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Horimiya
- Letters
- 8 · Hard
Izumi Miyamura is the classmate nobody talks to, and that reading of him is entirely wrong. The hair and the glasses cover the piercings, the sleeves cover the tattoos, and he looks miserable in class because he spent years being ignored and stopped expecting anything else. Hori runs into him out of uniform, fails to recognise him, and the whole story starts from that mistake.
What follows is a school romance with almost no obstacles in it, which is rarer than it sounds. Hori and Miyamura work out early that they like each other, then spend the series managing homework, a younger brother, friends, and a house where the parents are usually away. Horimiya is popular because it skips the misunderstanding plot the genre runs on and writes the part that comes afterwards.
The origin is unusual. A creator publishing as HERO put a web manga called Hori-san to Miyamura-kun online in 2007 and it built an audience for years on its own. Daisuke Hagiwara redrew it as Horimiya for Monthly G Fantasy in 2011, running until 2021, and CloverWorks animated it in 2021. The title is the two family names shoved together, nothing more.
Spelling MIYAMURA
Eight letters, MIYAMURA, and this is the family name; the given name Izumi is shorter and not the answer. It breaks into two ordinary Japanese words, miya for shrine and mura for village, which is the easiest way to hold it: MIYA plus MURA. Two A's, each closing its half, and a Y sitting exactly where an English speaker expects a vowel.