The Flowers of Evil #1
This ultra-pedantic excruciatingly detailed autistic review was commissioned by @Synaptic Star.
This 2009 shonen manga by Shuzo Oshimi is one I've never heard of before. And, since @Synaptic Star paid for a live react, this will be an old school blind Let's Read like the kind I started with. In keeping with the spirit of that, I won't be doing any more research about this work until I've finished the post to keep myself unspoiled.
Let's go!
We start in a sleepy Japanese town, under an overcast sky, with a teacher handing back tests to a classroom full of teenagers. Our apparent protagonist, a boy named Takao Kasuga, hasn't done very well on it.
He's clearly an enthusiastic reader, as evidenced by him having a copy of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal on hand despite it having nothing to do with his coursework. However, the fact that he has this personal reading material out and visible in the middle of class is likly giving us a hint as to why his test scores haven't been reflective of his intellect.
Also, his friends give him shit for being an annoying smartypants nerd who still can't even get good grades.
A difficult life, some of us live. I had pretty much the exact same problem with regards to focus in my teens (my ADHD was undiagnosed until just a year or so ago), so I can relate.
We learn also that Kasuga has a crush on his classmate Saeki Nanako, who's as booksmart as him but also much better able to leverage it toward academics. And also like, confident and pretty and stuff. You know the type.
Kasuga is too nervous to approach her, let alone form a friendship, let alone let that friendship become more than a friendship. You know the type.
The next character who our attention is called to is Nakamura, the girl with the only test score in the class even lower than Kasuga's. I'm not sure if it's really fair to compare them though, because while Kasuga made an actual effort, Nakamura just left her entire test sheet blank. She looks surly, perhaps even indignant, when called up to take her graded test back, as if she's furious at the teacher for even acknowledging her presence in the room. Then, when he scolds her for her perfect zero, she does this:
The teacher loses his shit. For a moment, he actually raises his hand as if to strike her, before catching himself with a frightened expression and lowering his arm again before issuing her detention. It looks for all the world like she was deliberately baiting him into doing something that would get him fired, and he came within centimetres of biting.
Neither Nakamura nor the teacher come out of this exchange looking great. Nakamura at least comes out of it looking like she has giant balls though, so that puts her slightly ahead of him in both the readers' and her classmates' estimations.
After school, Kasuga and his friends exit the building, gossiping among themselves about what a scary bitch that Nakamura is. It turns out that Kasuga's social group all give each other shit about stuff, so they're not just picking on him. That's good. Less good is when the conversation turns to the subject of other girls in their class, and one guy with a really creepy face starts acting really creepy about good girl Saeki.
Sleep paralysis clown face up there is soon named as Kojima, which is lol. I'll bet he thinks Saeki breathes through her pubes.
Granted, for all that Kasuga gets indignant on Saeki's behalf and gets even more shit from the others on account of it, his own thoughts about her are...well...honestly worse.
Granted, these boys are like 14 or whatever, I wouldn't expect them to not be creepy about girls at all. But within the spectrum of teenaged boy weirdness, I feel that "I'll bet she has great pubes" is significantly less toxic than "this girl who I've never talked to is my muse and goddess." More obnoxious when expressed aloud, but less toxic.
Nice Guyism is an insidious mind trap for boys. Well, hopefully he'll get better.
It's likely that he will, because - refreshingly - the author of this comic is aware that Kasuga's attitude toward women isn't any better than Kojima's. When Kasuga realizes he forgot his Baudelaire book in the classroom and runs back to grab it, he happens to notice Saeki's gymbag left forgotten as well. This would be a great opportunity to make conversation with her, if he sought her out and told her she forgot her bag. However, instead of doing that, Kasuga steals her gym clothes out of the bag and hurries home with them to rub his face all over her sweaty underwear.
There's so much tension and nervousness around Kasuga's transgression, with him frantically looking around every five seconds as he leaves the building to see if anyone has seen him, jumping whenever he hears a door close or a voice speak from around a corner, etc, that at first I thought he was reacting to literal poltergeist activity. Like, his fearful reactions to all the sounds and shadows, the artist's exaggerations of those sounds and motion to convey his hyperfocus on them, it really looks like a horror manga for a few panels there. Nothing supernatural after all, though, just a protagonist's guilty conscience.
Getting home doesn't calm him down. He was the same reaction to his mother showing up to scold him about his messy room that he did to the sounds in the school building.
Straight up Calvin & Hobbes gags, heh.
I haven't read Baudelaire since undergrad myself, and unfortunately I don't remember his work well enough to understand the literary reference Kasuga makes as he starts fondling Saeki's shorts while imagining her ass is inside of them and we fade to black.
I know that "The Flowers of Evil" is the one collection of Baudelaire poetry that he published during his lifetime, but I don't recall what significance the name itself has. So, not sure what he means, aside from a very straightforward "enjoying the sensual pleasures born of misbehavior" thing.
The next day, Kasuga is alarmed when Saeki isn't at her desk, and her gym bag isn't where he left it. And then even more alarmed when the teacher addresses the class with an accusatory, interrogative air, and Saeki enters the room late looking like she's been crying.
Kasuga's own friends, including the ones who had disgusted him the day before, all muse aloud about what a fucked up pervert they must have in their class. Saeki, who Kasuga has been putting on a pedestal, feels way, way more hurt and violated than he ever would have expected her to be if she found out about the theft (and ideally, she'd never have even known).
Kasuga is silent, shrinking into his chair, stewing in his own emotions. There's an amazing panel transition as we jump ahead to that afternoon.
The vortex of his guilt and misery literally piping him into the cloudy sky that awaits him after school. Showing how he's been totally overwhelmed by his feelings and blinded to all else for his entire schoolday.
He does not hang out with his friends after school this time. And his mood in general does not improve.
Dramatic as all hell, but like...it's realistic drama? This is about right for the mind of a fourteen year old boy who's just fucked up his own self-image and also reads a lot of modernist poetry.
...
I assume that the eyeball-flower levitating above his head in the above panel is another allusion to something in said modernist poetry, heh.
...
He rides around town all broodingly, cursing himself, his decisions, the town itself, God, etc. Making very Baudelaire-esque observations about the rusting metal, the small minds, how terrible his life is, etc. I do remember Baudelaire enough to recognize the general aura at least, heh. Suddenly, his melodramatic self-hating reverie is interrupted by Nakamura the scary girl. She was just randomly sitting against a roadside fence as he rode his bicycle past, and she calls out to him sharply, almost angrily. I get the impression that that's the only way she knows how to talk, heh.
He gets the sense that she's been waiting for him. The next few pages suggest that he was probably right about this.
After disinterestedly interrogating him about where he was going (and disinterestedly interrogating him about his choice of reading material when he says "the library"), she suddenly seats herself on the back of his bike and starts making outrageous demands.
He demands to know what the fuck. In response, she reminds him that she sits behind him in class and sees everything he reads over his shoulder. And then wraps her arms in a creepily possessive ways around his waist. And then takes off her glasses to reveal an even more deranged-looking gaze than Kojima's as she says the thing that the reader will have probably predicted by this point.
The seeds of evil, planted, have grown and flowered. And now he's got to smell them. Dunno if this girl has a messed up stalker crush on him (like a wilfully malicious version of his own feelings for Saeki. Just like her being a bad student is a warped exaggeration of his own academic woes), or if she's just doing the waist-squeeze to make him uncomfortable as part of a general opportunistic meanness. The fact that she sits behind him - and that she's just made a point of reminding us that she sits behind him - suggests the former.
The chapter closes with an author's note explaining a bit about his choice of poets, and - amusingly - about the eyeball-flower imagery I was wondering about before.
So that's cool.
I'm tempted to keep reading this comic for its own sake. Not for enjoyment, but for instruction. I've been writing short stories for an elementary-to-middle-school English curriculum, and this kind of plot is exactly the subject matter they usually want me to write about. Realistic fiction, child protagonists, moral lessons. "The Flowers of Evil" manages to make these elements feel dramatic and meaningful in a way that I've been struggling to manage. It also strikes a really good balance of featuring exceptional - if still mundanely realistic - circumstances, with actions that could have very serious consequences for the characters at least in the short to medium term, while still avoiding anything too heavy.
It's also very well drawn, which I appreciate.
