Kenji Harima

Harima Kenji (播磨 拳児) is the male protagonist in the anime/manga series School Rumble.

An ex-delinquent who loves Tenma. Although he does not practice any specific martial arts style, few people are able to match him in hand-to-hand combat. He has the ability to communicate with animals, and possesses a wide variety of strange and exotic pets which he named after European monarchs. He has a little brother, Shuuji, who likes Yakumo.

Apparently he is loosely based on Shizuma Kusanagi from the anime Samurai Girl: Real Bout High School (the motorcycle, being a ruffian and 'wild man'), and his appearance greatly resembles that of the mangaka of School Rumble, Kobayashi Jin.

Harima normally wears sunglasses and a goatee. He originally adopted this look to avoid being recognized as the boy who saved Tenma from a thug the previous year, but was subsequently accused by her of being a pervert. (Tenma apparently no longer remembers that incident.) During the series he undergoes several changes in appearance.

He is most definitely a 'bad boy' at heart, one who is too stupid to go beyond the honorifics and complexities of love which he is quite frequently faced with.

Harima struggles often to confess to Tenma, though he knows she has absolutely no feelings for him and may even dislike him. Every time Harima finds the courage to tell Tenma his true feelings, something happens which prevents him from succeeding. He gets extremely jealous seeing Karasuma and Tenma together, but his attempts to put a stop to that usually end up bringing them closer. To date, Tenma has yet to hear his confession properly.

Harima's dream is to become a famous mangaka (adopting the pen name Harima Hario, probably a reference to Fujiko F. Fujio, creator of Doraemon). He started drawing doujinshi to avoid dwelling on his failure to win Tenma's heart. In his works, Harima is the hero, Tenma is the heroine in love with him and Karasuma is the arch-villain /love rival who ultimately loses to Harima. He initially idolises the mangaka Nijo jo and imitated his drawing style, but after a brief depression after knowing that the person is none other than Karasuma, he adopts an original style and thanks to Goto Tengai and Tsukamoto Yakumo's motivation, he pursues his dream not for the sake of self-gratification or escaping from reality.

Whenever he has problems with his work, he secretly consults with Tenma's sister, Yakumo. Because of this, people often see Harima and Yakumo together and those who know them believe that they are actually dating. He constantly tries to explain the situation that he and Yakumo are not in love with each other, which only ended up in further misunderstanding to the slow and dense Tenma. It was however may only be partly true, since Yakumo in fact is hinted to secretly love him.

Harima also must deal with situations involving his classmate Eri, unaware of the fact she has a crush on him. While Eri wanted to be closer to him, he avoids and detests her for being snobby and making him feel inferior due to her immense wealth.

Besides the two, Harima often stumbles into accidental romantic situations with several other female characters including Mikoto, Sasakura, Anegasaki and even his own cousin Itoko, and thus people around him assume he is as horny as a monkey during mating season. He is always thought to be flirting with as many women as possible at once and even attempting sexual intercourse whenever he had the chance, such as when he grappled Eri while naked to stop her from screaming, he removed his own shirt and told Tenma to remove hers to avoid her from catching a cold, and when she finds Sasakura and Itoko tired and sleepy on bed in his (Itoko's) apartment.

While Karasuma is Harima's romantic rival, his actual chief rival is Hanai, the class representative of 2-C. This is shown visually by the colours of their glasses: Hanai's glasses are depicted as white (due to light reflection) while Harima's glasses are black.A juvenile delinquent and all around troublemaker, Harima is almost the complete opposite of his love interest, Tenma Tsukamoto.

Note: Sawachika calls Harima by an alternative nickname: "Hige (鬚)" ("Moustache"/"Beard") while Anegasaki calls him Hario.