Aku no Hana

"In order to dominate a flower, you first have to beat it all over without sparing any parts. You shall not concede it a single fragment of a soul. You have to violate it, to abuse it, to humiliate it all the way, you have to make it hit the bottom while carefully switching between pain and pleasure. If any bits of "soul" remains, swiftly nip it in the bud. Make it understand in its deepest core that it is but a mere flesh vessel. It is only then that an absolute and passionate control over the flower will be achieved." Controlling the most influentpersons of the political and economical sphere and having become rich thanks to its wide cultivation of drugs and narcotics, the Kurokami house, expert in the art of flower arrangement, has insidiously become one of the most terrifying faction that ever existed, secretly controlling the country in the shadows to hide what happens inside its mansion… This mansion is controlled by Rannosuke Hanayagi who has, since his 16th birthday, started kidnapping, sequestrating and killing young women amongst his followers from which he preserves the vaginas in jars as the sole memento of their past lives. Aku no Hana starts right of the bat with his trial, proofs having finally been found against him after 20 years of misdeeds and the death of over 800 women. Hanayagi will not even try to hide his acts, worse than that, he brags about it in front of the entire audience. That's because he knows he doesn't risk anything and has complete immunity over any kind of punishment: his prosecutor dies mysteriously in a car crash the same day and a bomb is dropped on a foreign country so nobody will bother focusing on his crimes. Back to his private mansion, the Master of the Kurokami house will soon enough be presented to Sayuri Kawabata, a girl barely 19 years of who has just graduated from university that has recently decided to attend an Ikebana class. Immediately entranced by her beauty and her virtuous looks, he decides that he will train her to make her his new wife and to become the centerpiece to his new "expositions" that he holds regularly. The pristine appearance of Sayuri might however hide another side of her personality that could lead the entire clan to its demise… “The one who makes the flowers live must first learn to know them. Women are flowers but they are also their vase.” Published in Manga Erotopia which was, with Gekiga Hustler, one of the pioneer adult magazines to deal mainly with sex and violence, its authors created a new boom in erotic gekigas (already initiated by Miyaya in the late 60s); Aku no Hana was one of the pillars of the magazine in its early days with the Raping Monk by Kai Taizawa, both series often featuring on the covers while they were running. Despite what its name might suggest, especially due to the great popularity of the manga of the same name written by Shuzou Oshimi, this Aku no Hana has almost nothing to do with Baudelaire, if anything, it is more similar to the works created by the infamous Marquis de Sade than to the brilliant French poet, and one could draw many parallels between this and the 120 Days of Sodom. Although it doesn't go as far as Sade (obviously), the comparison should not be undermined if you want to pick this up because it's still fairly transgressive and the work is seeping with bad taste, from the forced cross-dressing and homosexual intercourse, the incestuous relationships or the human skin leather tanning inspired directly by some of the Nazi practices in concentration camps. As much as I am fascinated by the grotesque and the deviant, it's par for the course not everyone will enjoy it but if you're still willing to give it a go, Kazuo Kamimura's artworks are still as bewitching as ever, every drop of blood swirling around his brush to create as many scarlet flowers, bodies melting under each other's embrace, writhing in agony until reaching the perfect and absolute orgasmic grace. His composition and the different aesthetics metaphors shine all the way through. Hideo Okazaki's writing is not to be left out either because aside from its eroticism, it also manages to become an engrossing thriller by brilliantly crafting every kind of side characters, each having a different motivation to kill Rannosuke Hanayagi and trying to achieve their ways in many different fashions. Aku no Hana, despite its relative inaccessibility by the theme it deals with, proves once again the talent and expert craftsmanship of Kazuo Kamimura who never ceases to impress.