EDIT (January 2021): As I see that this is getting a lot of views, I want to say that if any of you is interested, I have uploaded a YouTube video in my native language which is Spanish in order to offer this analysis in another media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRjE8jrJqYU&t=30s&ab_channel=sneezeexe
INTRODUCTION
Aku no Hana is a manga, anime and live-action originally created by Shuzo Oshimi whose publication begins in 2009 and ends in 2014. The manga received very good reviews from the beginning, but the publication of the anime received very critical reviews. harsh due to their animation style. The anime uses a technique called rotoscopy, which consists of tracing a frame with real people as a reference. That is why it was first shot with people of flesh and blood to later in the studio draw on those images shot what anime is as such. This technique did not like the public at all, so many stopped being interested in anime solely because of its drawing style.
But Aku no Hana is much more than an anime with a drawing style that many may find unattractive. What is truly important about Aku no Hana is the story, the impeccable evolution of its characters, and their psychological background. We begin with the psychological analysis of … Las flores del Mal / Flowers of Evil / Les fleurs du Mal / Aku no Hana … by Kothora.
The following text contains clear spoilers for the manga. If you have not yet read it in its entirety, we recommend that you close this tab.
ARGUMENT
Aku no Hana is a manga that we can define both psychological and coming-of-age. This second term refers to those stories in which throughout its plot we are going to see a very evident evolution of the character, usually passing from the beginning of his adolescent stage, until the end of it. Contemplating an evolution and maturity in it.
For this reason, in this manga, the importance that the author gives to his characters prevails, whose plot will turn mainly between Takao, Sawa and Saeki.
Takao Kasuga has the main role in this story. He steals the gym clothes from the girl he likes, and his classmate, Sawa Nakamura, sees him. From there, she threatens to tell everyone what she has done, specifically Nanako Saeki, the owner of the gym clothes.
Later, the story goes wild. What at first seemed like a simple child’s game, gradually turns into a much bigger problem.
Nakamura ends up taking Takao to the extreme. First, start with minor things; like for example, wearing Saeki’s clothes under her clothes during the first date. Until he manages to create a strong emotional dependency in him. We can see how Takao gradually believes what Nakamura tells him he is: a pervert. At the beginning of the story, he denied it, but as time passes, it is he who calls himself a pervert. We can even say that he also infects his pessimistic view of the world.
EXISTENTIALISM AND THE OTHER SIDE
They both start to believe in the idea of ‘The other side’. This is a very interesting idea that the author raises us. Both Takao and Nakamura are tired of the town they live in, and they want to cross the other side of the mountain because they are unhappy where they reside. We can check here how existentialism is used. Both pose over and over again how their lives could become in a different city and with other possibilities. They are not happy where they currently live, they feel that they do not fit in with the rest, they feel insignificant. They consider their concrete existence in the world.
Takao and Nakamura, make it a habit to have a meeting every day at the same time after class to spend the whole afternoon together. Over time, this becomes a habit that creates a very strong bond between them, becoming great friends. But this relationship has a very dark background, and that is that Takao depends more and more on Sawa, reaching almost no opinion of his own, doing everything she tells him, and even coming to have the same thought that she has. Takao is an easily manipulable person, which is why Nakamura manages to boss him around to levels as extreme as those we have been able to verify.
Speaking of people who act in the same way as a sponge, absorbing everything that others do, we can also name Nanako. From the outside, she is a very busy girl, a great student, with great hobbies, the perfect daughter … but on the inside, she is a very unhappy person. From the moment she meets Takao, she falls madly in love with him. The two of them, they even get formalized as a couple from the first date! It is from that moment when Nanako wants to continue knowing him more and more, but the moment comes when she finds out about everything he did with his clothes. To everyone’s surprise, Nanako doesn’t care about any of that.
She is so in love that she ignores all those details, in fact, she even finds it romantic that Takao stole her clothes.
CHARACTER EVOLUTION
The way of dealing with the evolution of the characters is brutal in Aku no hana. In this story, the three characters that make up this love triangle infect each other. While Kasuga likes the fact that Nakamura offers her the possibility of traveling ‘to the other side’, Kasuga offers Nanako the possibility to get out of the ordinary, to get out of that boring rhythm of life that she leads. Everything forms a closed circle that evolves over time.
If at first Nanako and Sawa do not have any relationship between them since Sawa is the ‘freak’ of the class, later they even become friends, but jealousy gradually eats away at Nanako. The good girl we knew gets out of control in such a way that she even sexually abuses Saeki to try to provoke some kind of anger or lack of control in Nakamura. We can say that Nakamura ends up driving everyone insane.
SYMBOLISMS
This story is loaded with symbolism. There is one in particular that shows how all the characters are gradually driven into paranoia. We can see how the so-called FLOWER OF EVIL appears on the pages of the manga every time a character is being driven by anger, pride or madness. This is a detail of Shuzo Oshimi that I find incredible. Also the strokes vary from one situation to another, the black lines are superimposed on top of each other, and the flowers of evil abound throughout the pages.
This flower of evil is also the one that appears on the cover of Charles Baudelaire’s book: The Flowers of Evil. A book that has great importance throughout history. It is evident that Kasuga’s thinking has changed in a remarkable way due to his reading, so much so that he carries it with himself at all times and which he wants to teach everyone to whom he appreciates.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TOKIWA
In the second part of the story, Takao’s life has changed considerably: he has moved to another city, studies in high school, has put aside his passion for reading and moves within another circle of people.
Within this new circle, we meet Tokiwa, a character who is also very important during this second part of the story, because he manages to connect Kasuga with his past: he revives his taste for reading, he makes him reconnect with his hometown and is even present during the reunion between him and Nakamura near the end of the play.
In this reunion, they got into a friendly fight on the seashore. It help them to remember their past relationship and to establish that Takao has already change so much that he is no longer a pervert.
But Tokiwa is also directly influenced by Kasuga, since he even gets to read Las Flores del Mal and catches that melancholy so typical of our protagonist. They both create a habit between them in which she lends him one or two daily books which he reads during the day so that he can return them the next day. Both get to establish such a relationship between them that she even invites him to her room, where apart from discovering her collection of books, Takao discovers that Tokiwa is in the process of writing a story. When she lets him read the little script she has prepared, he realizes that the character in her story has a life very similar to his, which prompts Kasuga to encourage her new friend to continue the story at hand.
This event is key when it comes to reliving in Takao those memories that he himself had locked away, since he feels that his past and the character created by Tokiwa have very clear similarities between them.
It is also important to highlight that meeting that Nanako and Takao have after all that time without seeing each other. Both of them have rebuilt their lives and now share them with different people (despite the fact that Nanako’s boyfriend bears an obvious resemblance to Kasuga). They have matured, and that has helped Kasuga to confront his past.
SCHIZOPHRENIA AND SAWA NAKAMURA
To finish, we are going to talk about what is for many the best character in history: Sawa Nakamura.
At her young age, Sawa Nakamura has to go through a lot of events throughout her life that are what make her become who she is: she lives in an unstructured family environment, and surely suffers from some type of mental illness such as schizophrenia.
This is a very important theory that we have to talk about, because despite not having anything official, many of the readers of this manga have ended up reaching it. It is specifically in the last chapter of volume 11, where we can see what Sawa Nakamura’s perception of the world is like. We can see the world first through his eyes, just in moments as important as the one in which he calls his teacher ‘Piece of shit’, the one in which he finds Kasuga stealing Saeki’s clothes, or when that same day she comes home and writes everything she has just seen in class in her room notebook. We can also analyze how people look through Nakamura’s eyes: everything looks black, people are like a cloud of some kind of black powder, all looking smudged, and this changes the moment Takao steals the His partner’s clothes and that is when Sawa begins to see in himself a complete pervert.
This chapter seems like a brilliant way to end the play. It is also a tribute to Nakamura. She is one, if not the best character, in the entire manga. Without her, the story would have no meaning. Having had the pleasure, even for just one chapter, of getting to know this side of him is very accommodating.
This is where Aku no Hana’s psychological analysis would have come. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did
Until next time, perverts!
