The Flowers of Evil vol. 2

I’m almost convinced that this would make for a better hentai manga, or even a seinen manga, than the “corrupt” shonen romance it aims to portray.  Except in one instance, “The Flowers of Evil” just doesn’t go far enough to escape its blandness and adherence to genre cliches.  There was one clever twist about halfway through when blackmailing outcast Nakamura uses the blossoming relationship between her patsy Kasuga and class star Saeki to give herself a leg up in social standing.  That’s quickly balanced out by a scene where Saeki asks Nakamura whether or not he’s hiding anything from her, and he responds to her in a way that makes it clear to ANYONE who’s looking at him that the boy is lying to her face.  Right around that point I considered chucking the two volumes of this series into my “to sell” pile.

And yet… the volume climaxes in a scene that would probably have been less filthy if there had been actual sex in it.  Pushed to the limit by Nakamura, Kasuga flips out and starts scrawling his guilt all over their classroom during a clandestine meeting between the two at night.  It starts with chalk, then ink, brushes, paint, mops… the entire room winds up utterly vandalized as the two lay on their backs, exhausted as the sun comes up.  There is a kind of “Was it good for you?” at the end, which completes its metaphor of the wild sexual abandon the reader was just witness to.  If the book had more scenes like this, then I’d be singing its praises to everyone.  If it had none, then I could at least drop it in good conscience that I wouldn’t be missing anything.  Right now it’s on the cusp of either, and I’ll probably keep reading until it gives me a solid reason for doing one or the other.