I finally finished all 13 episodes of the Sentai Filmworks Blu-Ray release of The Flowers of Evil (惡の華 Aku no Hana?). This was no easy task. I also managed to acquire Volume 1 of the manga via Interlibrary loan and finish it as well, the contents of which cover the first several episodes of the anime adaptation.
The emotion that best describes the experience of watching this anime is one of pure dread, of not knowing where things will go next. It is the sensation of feeling your own stomach twist in knots at trying to gauge just how screwed the main protagonist actually is at any given point.
It captures the claustrophobia of boring, small town life as a teenager experiences it...a constant bipolar switching between ennui and existential angst.
Disaffected, alienated teen boy Takao Kasuga (春日 高男 Kasuga Takao?) reads highbrow foreign literature and despises his philistine classmates. From afar, he admires seemingly untouchable Nanako Saeki (佐伯 奈々子 Saeki Nanako?), who would surely never give a scumbag like himself the time of day. Saeki is his muse, his guiding light, more a work of art and a divine presence than a flesh and blood teenage girl.
But Kasuga-kun is a normal heterosexual teen boy with certain lusts and desires. On a crazy whim, he finds and steals Saeki's gym clothes, but is spotted by Sawa Nakamura (仲村 佐和 Nakamura Sawa?), the resident "bad girl" of their class. She's intrigued by Kasuga's brazen act and decides to blackmail him for her own amusement. This sets up the central conflict of the show.
One day, after the class is already reeling from the scandal of Saeki's stolen gym clothes, another student reports her lunch money has been stolen. Suspicion falls upon unpopular misanthrope weirdo Nakamura-san. Nakamura intimidates everyone, even the faculty. She's always sullen, angry, solitary. She makes the perfect scapegoat for the busy-body class rep, who levels the acusation that of course Nakamura must've stolen the money. Takao definantly stands up for Nakamura and the class backs down. This act of social bravery actually catches the attention of Saeki, who finds Kasuga more attractive now for being willing to take a stand on behalf of Nakamura. Kasuga can't believe his luck and impulsively asks Saeki on a date, to join him at the local bookstore. To his great surprise, she accepts. Unfortunately, Nakamura is just coming up the stairs and overhears everything.
While I guess looking back at the series, you could technically classify Nakamura as a "Tsundere", her personality and character are so much larger than this prefabricated Anime trope. As we later learn, she's the child of divorce, growing up with a single parent (her befuddled dad) and a kindly grandmother. While Saeki is definitely drop dead beautiful, rough-around-the-edges Nakamura is not without her charms. She wears glasses and cuts her hair short, but there's a raw sexual energy and passion that exudes from Nakamura. She actually has a pretty face and a nice body.
Saeki represents for Kasuga a Platonic Ideal. He's quite unprepared to deal with Saeki as a flesh and blood ordinary girl. He's wracked by inexplicable disappointment in what should be his greatest triumph. Saeki could not be more loving or forgiving of all of Kasuga's flaws and trangressions....but one senses that Kasuga can't deny that Nakamura, despite her constant verbal and physical abuse, actually understands him better than naive Saeki ever could. There's a certain magnetism that Nakamura exudes that draws Kasuga to her like a moth to a flame. Nakamura is dangerous, uncontrollable female sexual desire personified. She's wild, untameable. She makes Kasuga feel more alive than he ever has in life. Nakamura is flesh and blood femininity...and when Saeki offers to be the same for Kasuga, it tarnishes his ideal he once held for Saeki. He can't reconcile his idea of Saeki with the actual frail girl before him. But he also lacks the courage to push the boundaries past all limits with Nakamura. He fails to be able to decide between the two girls and in the process (seemingly) loses them both.
This anime is very good, but it is hard to watch except in limited bursts, because it's just so emotionally intense and fills one with so much dread.
I'm a little surprised Nakamura didn't give Kasuga-kun a well deserved knee in the groin in the later episodes. The last episode finishes on a dramatic climax, but then rolls what I can only assume are possible future scenes from a second season that is unlikely to ever be produced. All that we will have to continue the story is the original manga, translated into English. The scenes flash by so quickly it's hard to tell what's going on, but it seems Nakamura will probably wind up being Kasuga's first sexual partner. But there's a disturbing scene also where Nakamura embraces a distraught Saeki who is apparently bleeding vaginally onto her own legs while wearing a school uniform skirt. It's unclear if she miscarried or was raped and attempted to give herself an abortion or what. There seems to be much violence and madness ahead, but alas, only manga readers will actually get to see how it plays out, most likely, since the original DVD/Blu-Ray was a commercial disaster in Japan. I hope it does decently for Sentai Filmworks in North America, but that would not be enough to get a 2nd season continuation green lit back in Japan.
The manga's dialogue is a bit more explicit, and confirms Nakamura's intensely sexual yearnings and barely contained desires that the rotoscoped performances also convey vividly but much more wordlessly than the manga. It's more inferred than explicitly stated in the anime adaptation. Nakamura is bubbling over with sensuality and lust in ways that naive Saeki couldn't possibly compete with, and even attempting to compete on that level with Nakamura destroys her idealized pefect state that Kasuga always held her in his mind as embodying.
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudillaire is all about unrequited longing, an indictment of modern French bourgeois society around him, and a longing after a perfect, therefore unrealizable artistic ideal. Kasuga relates to this book of poems and feels similarly trapped and confined by village life in this small Japanese provincial town. But even he professes not to fully understand Baudillaire's work. Nakamura isn't as much interested in reading Baudillaire as living out his rebellious ideals and reveling in the condemnation of "normal" society.
When Kasuga speaks of being an "empty person", I also had a passing thought comparing Kasuga to the titlar protagonist of Robert Musil's great unfinished novel, Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften ("The Man without Qualities"), to whom Kasuga bears at least a superficial resemblance.
Anway, this anime series is a complex work of art that I will probably revisit again someday, and I look forward to continuing the many volumes of this manga in future as well.