Books: The Flowers of Evil, Vol. 2 (Shuzo Oshimi)

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2012-07-06 10:00:00-04:00 No comments

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The second volume of this mix of antisocial-kid thriller and outsider-kid romance ratchets tension further as bookworm Kasuga is pulled all the more violently between the innocent girl he's had a crush on (Saeki) and the sociopath girl who's yanking his puppet strings (Nakamura). Against all odds, Kasuga manages to take Saeki out on something resembling a normal date ... even while the whole time the poor kid's wearing Saeki's gym clothes under his own, as part of his contract with Nakamura. In the end he collapses all the more definitively on the side of the devils, although how he does this or to what end I won't ruin here — seeing how it unfolds is a major part of the book's substance. Further proof that psychological torment is far more effective (and affecting) than the physical kind, although one wonders if in the end Oshimi's going to be best known for introducing a new subgenre of manga for American readers: mental-torture-porn. But his yarn-spinning is tight and deft enough to make concerns like that secondary.