Limit vol. 3 & The Flowers of Evil vol. 4, Briefly

The third volume of mangaka Keiko Suenobu’s “Limit” puts its best foot forward yet in trying to convince me that it was clearly a mistake on my part to start reading this title.  Early on we find out that the mysterious figure seen at the end of the previous volume was Hinata, one of Mizuki’s male classmates.  His “in the nick of time” heroic appearance and 10k-watt smile is clearly meant to present him as a knight in shining armor to these girls, but he’s given no personality beyond those details.  As such, every time I see him on the page grinning that idiot grin, I find myself wishing that he’d perished in the same bus accident that kicked this series off.

Unfortunately, Suenobu’s attempts at adding further depth to the rest of her cast don’t fare much better.  We get a lot of talk between Mizuki and Kamiya about friendship while Ichinose continues to look on the bright side of life as well.  Morishige gets plenty of scenes to flush out her troubled home life in an attempt to get us to understand her disturbed mindset.  Unfortunately, most of these come off as generic, stock situations that we’ve all seen before and those involving the latter student  feel like they exist only to turn her into a proper antagonist for this story.  I can imagine that the book’s target audience of tween girls would be more forgiving of these flaws, but it’s so squarely targeted at them that people outside that demographic aren’t really going to find much to interest them.

While it doesn’t have those particular issues, “The Flowers of Evil” has had a hard time sustaining my interest as it hasn’t gone far enough to embrace its focus on “perversion” and its male protagonist has been too milquetoast for my tastes.  This fourth volume, however, takes some steps towards rectifying those issues.  After the three-way confrontation between Kasuga, the milquetoast in question, Nakamura, our antisocial heroine, and class idol Saeki in the previous volume ultimately went nowhere, all three have returned to school life to deal with the depressing situation in their own way.  Kasuga, in particular, rationalizes that Nakamura is the most in need of saving due to her mindset and takes it upon himself to do something about that.

I didn’t feel that mangaka Shuzo Oshimi’s attempts to show Nakamura’s home life and her diary resulted in any real illumination of her character.  The blurb on the back of the book tells about how she just feels “the emptiness of life with particular acuity” and that feels just as valid as anything we get inside this volume.  What does impress me are the lengths to which Kasuga goes to try and get through to her, which positions him as a more interesting and assertive character than he has been previously.  Things end with some foreshadowing that all of his deeds may be brought to light and I have to admit that I’m interested in seeing how he’ll respond to this turn of events.  The Kasuga of the past three volumes would have been crushed by such a revelation, but now I’m not so sure.