Nakategawa, Iwata, and Nishidera are students at a low-level university, who set up a hiking club in order to meet girls. Their first catches comprise Harue and Yoko, who are studying to be nurses, and the plain Ayako who attends an elite women's college. Nakategawa also gets to know a club hostess Natsue, who is living with the misanthropic Honda, a Tokyo University graduate who runs a computer business from home. As a coda to Japan's many educational dramas, Fuzoroi no Ringotachi features a new perspective on the importance attached to academic honors. Its characters chiefly lack any self-confidence and vision for the future but still make it through, regardless of their apparent failure to do well in the examination culture that so often defines "success". ***  *** Part 1 of 4.