Shimura Blogging part 1: Sweet Blue Flowers/Aoi Hana

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I've been a fan of Takako Shimura's manga since reading the first chapters of Aoi Hana/Sweet Blue Flowers back in high school and have read a decent number of her professionally published works, mostly through scans. Shimura is a pretty consistent author in terms of her strengths, preferred narrative beats, and sensibilities. Her settings are usually contemporary, her narratives are often romances, and her character writing is unusually excellent, both within the genre and in the wider world of manga.

It was really exciting going through the last twenty years of Shimura's works. Her art and writing are great in the early days, and they get better as she continues iterating on similar themes and concerns over the years. The pacing of her works is pretty neat when you read them all at once… it's also pretty rewarding going back through someone's work and going, Oh, I get what you're doing here now!!! … I'm better at reading things… thank god I'm smarter than high school me…

The Sweet Blue Flowers review wound up being 2,000 words, so the Shimura blogging will continue at a later date. Please look forward to it!
 
Sweet Blue Flowers/Aoi Hana, 2004-2013 - Looking back on this series, I'm really impressed by how fucking dire Fumi's situation is at the start of the manga… oh, so you've moved back to Kamakura, you've been in a secret relationship with Chizu, your older female cousin, and you find out you've been dumped when your mom buys a cake wishing her a happy marriage?? In chapter one?? No wonder she's crying all the time.

Tall, reserved Fumi returns to Kanagawa after a decade away and reunites with her best friend from elementary school, Akira. The series covers the development of their relationship over three years of high school. Chapter one introduces two phrases: "Ah-chan, wake up!" and "Fumi-chan, you always cry so easily." (Give this girl a break, please!!) From these two phrases, we understand that Akira and Fumi's relationship has a pretty sharp contrast: Akira's aware of romance and queerness but has yet to feel it for herself, while Fumi has already experienced romance, sex, and heartbreak.  It's not a surprise that, when Fumi and Akira start dating, the asymmetry in their experience is a major issue. Fumi, after drinking some champagne, tries to explain the difference in their feelings by smearing some whipped cream on Akira's cheek and licking it off. "You love me in a way that makes you want to lick whipped cream off my face?!" Akira says. Sorry, Fumi!

Thinking about 2004 in terms of yuri manga, you can see the ways Sweet Blue Flower riffs on the standard yuri manga tropes, both visually and in the setting:  Akira is short, has pigtails, and is energetic and earnest, while Fumi is tall, dark haired, and quiet; Akira gets into a fancy private Catholic high school at the top of a hill, where the elementary school kids greet her with "onee-sama" and nuns walk about campus; Fumi dates a princely third year student—classic stuff there. You can practically hear the "Gokigenyou" looming over it all. (Shimura and her long-time editor were apparently big Maria-sama ga Miteru fans.) Shimura flirts with the tropes of the genre, but she's a more naturalistic writer with a strong bend towards interiority. No casual slapping here! You can see it in her paneling: lots of white space, switching between dialogue and monologue, present and flashback. Dialogue and monologue are the primary narrative drivers for this series.

I originally had this as a bullet point, but it got long… time to talk about child sexual abuse.

I forgot that Sweet Blue Flowers opens up with Akira's older brother sleeping in Akira's bed?! I reread parts of Happy Go Lucky Days, Shimura's collection of erotic one-shots, and was like, Yeah, this beat is really in line with that particular collection. No review for this collection, but it's pretty risque one that illustrates Shimura's interest in making the sexual element explicit in relationships that need to subsume or ignore it to function "normally."

Thinking about it, that moment in bed continues Shimura's interest in incest and establishes a parallel between Akira and Fumi's boundary-crossing older sibling figures. Akira's life generally serves as a lighthearted mirror for Fumi's: Big brother Shinobu is a nuisance and eventually starts dating one of Fumi's friends, mellows out, and backs away from Akira, while Chizu full on conducts a secret romantic and sexual relationship with Fumi, then, after dumping her, comes back to Fumi's house with her baby daughter, asks Fumi if she's dating anyone, and when Fumi says yes, she's dating a girl, goes, "Wow, you're still into that! Although I was the one that got you into it…" then: "My daughter looks like you… it really made me realize that we're related and that we're both women… there's no way I can be like that."

I'm not sure if I'd call Shimura's treatment of sexual abuse totally considered, but I can't help but think versions of this dynamic must play out in real life. Doing the math, Chizu would've been in college while she was conducting her relationship with Fumi, who would've been in middle school. The manga takes it a step further: there are implications that Chizu's attraction began when Fumi was in fifth grade. She greets Fumi with the line Akira and Yasuko use: "Oh! You're so tall—" to telegraph Chizu's interest. It does feel characteristic of Shimura's work that Chizu only indirectly apologies for a terrible violation, and that for Fumi, the most difficult part of Chizu's rejection is the "we're both girls" part.

I called Sweet Blue Flowers a childhood friend romance, but I think it'd be more accurate to call it a manga about first love and first fuck ups. Yasuko and her doomed crush on her sister's boyfriend is one example. Yasuko is obviously themed off the girl prince figure common in yuri: she's a third year, short-haired, and captain of the basketball team, but she's also the baby sister of the family, doted on and pushed around by her older sisters in turn. Her crush on her sister's boyfriend is a total non-starter, but her frustration leads her to refuse Kyouko harshly and jerk Fumi around, even when she and Fumi have a mutual attraction to one another. Shimura sends Yasuko to fuck off in London for the rest of the series, offering one very funny solution to realizing your first love is never going to work out: Just Leave The Country! 

A lot's been written up on Yamashina, a teacher, and Orie, Haru's older sister, and the way they offer a picture of a lasting lesbian relationship that started in high school, but I think the real Fumi and Akira relationship foil is Kyouko and Kou, another pair of childhood friends who start the series engaged to be married. It's actually really fun to see how Shimura constructs the parallels. Fumi and Akira's whole deal is that Fumi is a sensitive crybaby, right, and Akira instinctively takes care of her, but while Fumi's honest and forward with her feelings, Akira doesn't yet know what to do with hers. Kyouko's relationship with her mother and her home life is a difficult one; she loves Kou, but the love is complicated because marriage to Kou means getting to leave home. Kou, for his part, loves being at Kyouko's beck and call and swooping in to save her when she's lost or in distress. Their relationship collapses after they have sex when Kyouko's in middle school; Kyouko's disgusted with herself for how pitiable and needy she was in the moment and rebounds onto Yasuko, who immediately and persistently rejects her. Kyouko, in the mood for some punishment, doesn't let go. (The Kyouko and Yasuko flirtatious relationship continues in the later volumes, and it's pretty funny. "Are you turning me down?" Yasuko says on one of her trips back from London. "Huh? You're the one who rejected me!" "Oh yeah…")

Kyouko, unlike Fumi, can't help but run away from her feelings; it's only when she's honest about how much she and her mother need Kou that she can reunite with him. Their happy marriage at the end of the series represents the triumph of accepting the vulnerability of marriage and love instead of trying to run or avoid it and provides the backdrop for Fumi and Akira's own happy reunion.

If there's one thing I wish Sweet Blue Flowers had done, it'd be to give Akira's awakening more page time. I can't really blame Shimura for speeding through it after working on the same series for almost a decade… you can really see her going, "I cannot do another six chapters to fill a new volume… I better wrap this up here." It ends on the right note and images, I think.

Really a superb series. I loved rereading this and getting to see it with adult eyes. I like it more than I did when I was twenty. Shimura hits the right notes for me, the art is consistently beautiful and expressive, and I love her paneling. I'll be picking up copies of the English version for my little library over the next few months.

The anime came out in 2009 and covers the first three volumes. I remember downloading fansubs of Aoi Hana when it came out in 2009 and finding Fumi's voice acting offputting… I'm not sure if they redubbed some lines for the DVD or if I was in a different state of mind this time, but I thought Fumi's voice acting was quite nice. Transition right now to appreciate anime better!

It's a very faithful and skillful adaptation. Watercolor backgrounds, piano score, and some really nice art direction. I was really impressed by how well the anime understood the manga, subliminated sexual yearning and all. I think one of the great challenges of managing adaptations of Shimura's works is that she has lol so little interest in telegraphing wheres and hows in her paneling. Like, yes, here we are on these stairs… okay, now we're on a bench. I'm also watching the liveaction adaptation of Even Though We're Adults and lol… at least with anime, conventions let you do a jump cut when Shimura's hopping forward to a new location. Here, real people have to walk to a bus stop.

Some miscellaneous items in bullet points:

• Shimura's really, really, really interested in piss, huh.
• Years later, I'm still amazed that Yasuko invites Fumi to her house to meet her mom and three sisters, announces to her family that she and Fumi are dating, and then dumps Fumi. Yasuko's sisters drive Fumi back home after the break up, too…. Just lol so so so bad.
• I have such clear memories of reading chapters as they came out and thinking, "Who ARE these people?!" when new characters were introduced, but reading it in a single go, the cast stays pretty tight and concentrated throughout the years. But very funny moment to me when she has Fumi's trio of friends from the drama club reintroduce themselves to the audience in like, chapter 35.
• Really interesting to read this after reading her later works and thinking, "Hmm, she really got a lot better at setting up her parallels and foils…" There's hope for me yet.
• The "Ah-chan, wake up!" motif as a stand-in for Akira's romantic and sexual awakening is used to good effect and plays out mostly how you'd expect, but there's one particular stand out moment that made me go, "Ohhh, that's good!" A few weeks into their relationship, Akira, thinking sex will help clarify how she feels about Fumi, asks Fumi to do something to her. Fumi protests that she only wants to do what Akira wants. "What I want to do?" Akira thinks. We skip to the next chapter, where the two of them are going about their day worried about their relationship. The details are revealed in a slow drip over the course of the day, culminating in a flashback to the immediate aftermath, with the two of them in Akira's bed and hiding under the covers:
  Akira: Fumi-chan. Fumi-chan. What am I going to do tomorrow?
  Akira: I don't know how I'm going to face you in the morning.
  Fumi: What should we do? Do you want me to get up and leave before you?
  Akira: No, I couldn't make you do that.
  Fumi: But if you're going to be uncomfortable…
  Akira: What am I going to do?
  Akira: It's already getting light enough that I can sort of see you…
  Fumi: Ah-chan… It looks like morning's already here…
  Really great.
• Shimura, gazing at nine years of technological progress whipping by: It's fine. I love drawing flip phones.
• In another callback to classic yuri manga tropes, the drama club and its performances play a big role in the series as a way of creating conflict and commenting on relationships. I think Yasuko's not a bad Heathcliff figure if you look at the set of lines quoted in the text, although the character psychology between the two is sfdklgh quite different... but I feel the production of Rokumeikan in the second year feels pretty apt for poor Kyouko's dread and fear of marriage. 
• The title is a Novalis reference. There's basically no overlap with the Fitzgerald novel, which shares the same name. It also doubles as a reference to Nobuko Yoshiya's Hana Monotagari, a work Shimura tips her hat to in the number of chapters, setting, and genre. 
• Looking at the Viz edition, the "blue flowers" represent the fragility and, as the manga goes on, the delicacy of first love. The Little Prince, featured in the first year Fujigaya play, shares a similar motif with the Prince's rose: think of the Prince's lament and how he didn't know how to love the Rose. This, I think, explains the final image of the manga: a young Fumi and Akira sitting in a field of (presumably) small blue wildflowers, suggesting that the flowers can grow back even after they've been crushed once. Maybe the appeal of first love in Shimura's work comes from this feeling of being returned to that feeling of discovering love as a child without the social expectations that come later? The quality of feeling matters more than the exact target, I think. It'd also explain her thing for teachers, too. 
• Skimming through reviews of Sweet Blue Flowers, I do feel this sense of possessive "no one understands this but me!" lol. Soft romance?? Representation…? A lover of egalitarian romance????? Hmm… I'm not sure about that.
• I do think it'd be pretty frustrating to read Shimura's works in hopes of a standard yuri manga. I've seen some reads of Shimura as "critiquing the conventions," but to be honest, I don't think Sweet Blue Flowers reads like that in its entirety. It's more like, hmm. She pays obvious homages to the history of the genre in the title and in particularly the setting and tropes, but her writerly impulse is ultimately to realist depictions of characters and relationships. The setting of Sweet Blue Flowers stands out to me in the context of her other works for how heightened and specific to the genre it is. To me, she treats the tropes as part of the setting, and from there, she slowly pulls the trope to a more realistic frame. Hmm, I feel like Battan's Run Away with Me, Girl is an example of someone who's clearly influenced by Shimura but has a more conventional treatment of characters and plot—not in a bad way, but if you read their works back-to-back, you can really see the distinctiveness of Shimura's sensibility. 
• People often accuse Shimura's work of not having a lot going on, but if you list it out, it really makes you go, "Wow, a ton happens?!" Usually in a way that makes me go, "Sorry, Fumi…"
• Some repeated motifs in Shimura's work: piss, getting ambushed by your ex-girlfriend's marriage announcements, disastrous in-law encounters, first love, sexy teachers, complicated relationship webs, incest, and trying relationships out more than once. At one point, Fumi asks, "Is it all right to build your happiness on someone else's sadness?" Fumi, you're fine… you're in high school. You don't have a clue what convoluted set ups Shimura's setting up in her new series!!

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