There's no plot. It's a mild and slightly surreal slice-of-life comedy, in which our schoolgirl protagonist (Hanako) always wears a Noh mask. It's not even one of the exotic ones. It's an ordinary human mask of an aristocratic woman with those creepy high painted eyebrows (hikimayu) and a permanent faint smile. That's all. It's a simple, straightforward manga. No superpowers, no magic... just the daily life of a mask-wearing girl.

Imagine sitting next to that in class, though. Hanako's classmates think she's scary, as do the schoolteachers. This is overdone, but it's the manga's funniest joke and it works fairly well. (Mind you, the manga does occasionally make Hanako look creepy, e.g. when appearing out of nowhere and surprising you with a big close-up of that Auton-like face.)

A girl called Eguchi befriends Hanako by accident. They were stuck outside the classroom on their first day. Things sort of continue from there and after a while you'd almost think Eguchi had stopped noticing the mask. That duo becomes a trio late in the volume with Ai, a tall, rude, short-tempered girl who's also the abrasive voice of sanity. She's the tsukkomi, basically, and she improves the comedy. Hanako will also get two love interests to ignore and/or misunderstand. 1. Ken is a jovial, slightly dim long-standing friend from Hanako's last school who's always fancied her. 2. Matsuda Saburou, a teenage Noh acting prodigy with lots of female fans. He's not interested in ordinary girls, but he'll turn into a dashing prince for Hanako.

All this is quite fun. It's also throwaway silliness, mind you, and I'd advise against marathoning it. Dip in from time to time. The core concept works, because the art's good enough to draw a clear distinction between human faces and a Noh mask, while also often making the latter look weird, uncanny or off-putting. What's more, Hanako herself is surprisingly expressive. She uses her hands a lot, which I'm sure reflects the gestures used in real Noh theatre. She's bonkers, obviously, but she made me laugh sometimes.

You could explore all sorts of themes and ideas with this concept, which might theoretically appear in later volumes but probably won't. Since COVID-19, for instance, some Japanese people have got addicted to face masks, to the point of calling them "face knickers". I wondered if this manga might be a satire on that, but the dates don't line up. It predates COVID. I'd also be surprised if a real Japanese school let a student wear a Noh mask. They're famous for heavy-handed rules, e.g. banning blonde hair even if you're a foreigner and that's your natural hair colour. This in turn might lead us towards burka discussions, which would be a whole other world. You take this material in all kinds of directions... but don't expect any of that here. This isn't a manga that's trying to matter or to say anything. It's a laugh. That's all, but it's reasonably good at that.