The Flowers of Evil vol. 7

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the soft reset.

When we last left the disturbed, doomed romantic pair of Kasuga and Nakmura, they had made their way onto a float during the town’s Summer Festival.  With a knife.  Also calling out the entire town as, “Shitbugs.”  That was a great cliffhanger and mangaka Shuzo Oshimi doesn’t chicken out and jump to a later point in time to generate dramatic tension as we wonder what the teenagers’ plan was.  We get to see their plan in all of its suspenseful and ultimately frustrated glory.

It’s a well-executed culmination of their story up to this point.  Being the over-dramatic teens that they are, I was not surprised to see that their bond functions in such a way as to not just bring them closer but to alienate themselves from everyone around them.  The end result being a desire to re-create one of the signature images of the Vietnam conflict (or a “Rage Against the Machine” album cover, if you will).  Oshimi’s style is perhaps too clean to pull off the hallucinogenic “fever dream” atmosphere she was shooting for, yet their defiant stance and the one major twist in their plans makes for a very compelling read.

Then the narrative jumps forward to Kasuga in high school.

Now, this could be seen as a cop-out by Oshimi as it spares her having to follow-up on the dramatic fallout of that opening chapter.  It didn’t bother me, though.  Filling in the blanks of what happened afterwards is pretty easy once we see that Kasuga has become a model student with some friends at a new high school in the city.  While it’s clear that he’s going through the motions and mimicking the appearance of an outwardly normal highschooler, the narrative makes it abundantly clear that he hasn’t forgotten about his experiences with Nakamura.

Of course, that whole “normal” appearance is perhaps pushed a bit too far as we see that Kasuga has his own circle of friends to hang out with.  Given how he acts in this volume, I honestly can’t see how he managed to become friends with anyone since he comes off as incredibly morose and gloomy.  Some indication that he actually has some common interests with his “friends” would’ve been nice.  It may have been a more depressing route to put Kasuga in the role of “bullied outcast,” but after witnessing his character arc for the past six volumes I can’t imagine him in any other role.

What makes more sense is his budding relationship with school idol Tokiwa.  Possessed of a great singing voice, long slender legs and model-like good looks, Kasuga’s friends all but drool over her very presence.  Our protagonist is still burdened with memories of his previous relationship to give her much notice, until a chance encounter at a bookstore has him witnessing her picking up a copy of… Well, it should be pretty easy to guess.

Though he makes a fittingly creepy impression at the bookstore, it’s soon revealed that she has a great interest in reading which transcends Kasuga’s social awkwardness.  In fact, his love of books is rekindled through the ones lent to him by Tokiwa.  The (so far) platonic friendship that forms between them actually feels credible with the potential to lead in some dramatically interesting directions.  We get a glimpse of it when we’re told of Tokiwa’s boyfriend, and you just know that Nakamura will be coming back into the picture at some point.  In fact, the only way I won’t be surprised by her return is if she doesn’t show up right after Kasuga professes his love to Tokiwa and finally summons the strength of will to move past his relationship with Nakamura.  Then again, this could be leading to something much darker as the visual image we get when he flips that first book open is an ominously familiar one.

Oshimi could’ve wrapped things up here in a fiery, morbid fashion and that likely would’ve been a fitting conclusion to this title.  Instead, we get a de-escalation of tension with Kasuga struggling unsuccessfully to move past his time with Nakamura but still bearing the psychological scars from that relationship.  It’s a “soft reset,” and one that works because it acknowledges that what has happened in the past still defines our protagonist and that no matter how he tries to pretend otherwise he’s never going to make a clean break from it.  So this new direction is working so far, with the likelihood that the drama will be ramping up in due order being even more of an incentive to keep reading.