The Flowers of Evil vol. 10

This volume is a 191-page exercise in waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It was a given that Kasuga’s trip back to his hometown would force some kind of confrontation with his past.  The question mangaka Shuzo Oshimi poses to the reader is when this will actually happen.  Will it be when he’s attending to his dying grandfather in the hospital with family?  At the funeral afterwards?  Or when he meets up with Kinoshita at the family restaurant in town?  Maybe it won’t be any of these and the reckoning will finally come when he gets back into the city to have a nice long chat with his current girlfriend Tokiwa.  Oshimi does a great job of keeping the tension high through subtle means — unkind expressions, whispered suspicions — and even when it becomes clear that the drama isn’t going to become explosive, we’re still left with evidence of how Kasuga has grown as a character.

You can see it most clearly in his encounter with Tokiwa when she lets him know that her novel is done and he says that he’s got some “things” to tell her.  I’ve seen plenty of romances in anime and manga where the scene that plays out next has the male character being a complete idiot and failing to realize what the right thing to do in this situation is.  Kasuga, to his credit and my surprise, actually manages to “man up” for one of the few times in this series and does something that, if not quite heroic, is eminently respectable.  As a result, he gets some company for the next  leg of the story.  It remains to be seen whether or not this will be a good thing as it looks like the long-promised confrontation/reunion/reckoning after the events of vol. 7 is finally upon us.  After this expert buildup of tension, I’m not expecting to be disappointed at all by what I’ll be reading in vol. 11.