Progressive Complications: "Sweet Blue Flowers" by Takako Shimura (Part 2)

Part Two: Chapter 2 - “Stand By Me”

Today I will continue the story breakdown (with a focus on progressive complications) of Sweet Blue Flowers by Takako Shimura. If you have not read the first part, you can find it here. 

From last time:

At the end of Chapter 1 we are left with the following complications unresolved:

• Complication #1: Why is Fumi prone to crying? 

• Complication #2: Will they join the same club? Will Fumi manage to avoid being in a club forever?

• Complication #3: What’s up with this weird intimacy with Fumi and her cousin?

And, of course, the series Crisis question: Will Fumi and Akira end up together!?

In Chapter Two, we return again to Fumi and Akira - two childhood friends who were separated and went to different schools until! they both ended up at Matsuoka Girl's High School in year 1. Reunited, we join Akira and Fumi at a cafe after school. Akira insists, now that they have a connection again, they meet before and after school to travel together. Fumi’s mom invites Akira over for dinner and asks Fumi what her friend likes, which serves as a small aside for a childhood memory: Akira eats the food Fumi doesn’t want to. At school, it’s time for the Club push again and Fumi somehow manages to sidestep the drama club for the second time. Realizing she will eventually have to submit to joining, she notices a sign for Literature Club and realizes that might be the best escape. But as she opens the door, a tall and handsome Third Year student is on the other side! She compliments Fumi on her height and asks, “Do you want to join my club?” Swooned by this mysterious older student, and in a haze of attraction, Fumi immediately agrees (which both closes the loop on Complication #2, and begins Complication #4 and #5 in a brilliant meet-cute shift).

Later, at Fumi’s house for dinner, Fumi’s cousin and new fiance suddenly arrive. Fumi’s mom is surprised they made it, but happy to see them. But Fumi’s tone shifts from casually chatting about her chance encounter and joining Literature Club, to all the attention being showered on her cousin. This pushes Fumi to tears again saying: “Chizu (Fumi’s cousin)’s so mean!”

After dinner, Akira and Fumi are getting ready for bed. Fumi asks if Akira can sleep in the bigger bed with her and continue to comfort her after the emotional dinner (which we didn’t see). This is not played romantically, but as a friend needing someone close. But as Akira climbs into bed with Fumi, Fumi has a memory of a shadowed figure (implied to be Chizu, her cousin) asking “Is this alright?” and “Are you scared?” as she puts naked Fumi’s fingers in her mouth. “Fumi, you’re so cute,” the shadowed figure says. In current time again, Fumi begins to cry. This feeds into Complication #1 (why does Fumi cry?), but that may not be the whole answer yet. It also answers part of Complication #3 (What’s up with the intimacy between Fumi and her cousin?). Akira teases Fumi for crying in a way that makes her laugh and the scene ends with a voiceover from Fumi that says: “Night is for sleeping. But I won’t sleep tonight because I have so much to talk about,” which implies she will tell Akira about her cousin’s advances (but this is not clear by the end of Volume 1, from what I could tell).

Back at school the next day, Fumi goes to the Literature Club for the first time, but discovers the girl she is looking for isn’t there! What gives? Well, as it turns out, the girl is the leader of the Basketball Club, which Fumi is now a member of! (ending Complication #4 - she joined the wrong club! - and seeding Complication #5 - will she follow through to meet the girl?).

This ends Chapter 2, “Stand By Me.”

Let’s run through the story elements:

Chapter 1:

• Inciting incident: Fumi and Akira reunite, but Akira doesn’t remember their childhood connection.

• Complication #1: Fumi is prone to crying

• Complication #2: Fumi is avoiding joining a club, but has to at some point

• Complication #3: There’s something weird happening with Fumi and her Cousin

• Turning Point Complication / Crisis: Will Akira remember Fumi, and when she does, will their connection be reignited?

• Climax: Yes, she does remember her (with some help from her mom)

• Resolution: The connection is back! Instant friends. Akira shows consideration for Fumi.

Chapter 2:

• Inciting incident: Fumi gives in and joins the literature club! Akira visits Fumi at home.

• Complication #4: Fumi joins the basketball club by mistake

• Complication #5: Fumi meets a dashing Third Year lady while joining the club, who she is swooned by immediately, which she admits to Akira at dinner and askes “is it okay to admire a girl like that?” and Akira responds: “Why not! Girls are the only ones here.”

• Complication #6: Is Akira open to a lesbian relationship at all?

• Turning Point Complication / Crisis: While Akira is over for a dinner/sleep-over at Fumi’s house, Chizu (Fumi’s cousin) shows up with her new fiance and Fumi breaks down. Why is Fumi crying (Complication #1) and why now?

• Climax: Fumi tells the audience (and maybe Akira) that she was taken advantage of by her cousin Chizu (implied not explicit) when she was younger - which was also possibly her first lesbian experience and has a lot of baggage.

• Resolution: Akira and Fumi become closer.

The complications in this story feel earned and progressive. At every turn there is an escalation of emotional and character development that feels exactly right for the characters you are slowly getting inside the heads of. Takako manages to slowly seed these moments in chapters throughout Volume 1 by pushing characters together in natural, realistic encounters that feel pulled from the everyday experience of young friendships and romances. Hidden feelings and histories drive the characters towards each other and away again in the waves of casual life. Reading through Chapter One and Two a second time brought out more subtle shifts in character depiction. During my third reading, I found myself focused on the scenic panels without dialogue or characters and how they set the mood and break up actions.

Volume 1 of Sweet Blue Flowers is the first seven chapters (165 pages), and a really solid read. This set of articles was specifically about the story beats and the progressive complications and not a review of the wonderful style and emotional depiction of the characters. It was a real pleasure to read Takako’s work this week and I am eager to start volume 2 next week. Even Though We’re Adults Volume 2 will be out in June.

For more information about Story Grid, check out their official website.

Progressive Complications: "Sweet Blue Flowers" by Takako Shimura (Part 1)

Manga seems to be the only thing I can read these days. Being extremely new to manga, I found it a little difficult to dive into long, complicated series, which tend to hinge on large metaphorical (often fantastical) environments and characters to deliver emotional and gut wrenching blows. Having been spoiled by Neon Genesis Evangelian, like seemingly everyone else in the last few years, I had big, deeply cruel sad-boy expectations for what I wanted to read. Elfen Lied, written and illustrated by Lynn Okamoto, filled the immediate cavern of sad shit that tends to be my MO, but was missing the realism and honesty I was seeking from manga. While I think a lot of the emotional core in Elfen Lied is based around abandonment and familial damage, the perverse, for-shock nature and violence distracted me from the swooning attention I later found in things like Boy’s Abyss by Ryō Minenami. (As a side note: the second omnibus volume of Elfen Lied has hooked me and I’m back in now.) 

What I was really looking for was the sad romanticism of Takako Shimura’s yuri manga. Yuri manga, if you are not familiar, are lesbian romance and relationship stories. Even Though We’re Adults, which is the first work of Takako I read, is a story about two women in their 30s who meet at a bar one night and discover they have a strong romantic connection, despite one of them forgetting to mention they have a husband. Unlike most manga I’d read up to that point (again, I am very new to the medium), Even Though We’re Adults was steeped in realism and seemed to cut to the core of adult emotion in a way that was subtle and didn’t require the shoved-into-bushes nature of younger protagonists. 

Manga reads fast. With a few notable exceptions, there often isn’t a lot of dialogue on the page and, even when there is, it tends to be casual - even when depicting interior monologues filled with backstory. But this speed and format can sometimes be a way to slip the emotional hooks of the story under the pages as you flip them, much like the conversations in popular American comics about what is said between the panels. Even Though We’re Adults does this well, but not quite as well (yet) as Takako’s earlier work Sweet Blue Flowers. 

Featuring high school protagonists, Sweet Blue Flowers is another yuri manga from Takako that I read through a few times this week. Serialized between 2004 and 2013, Sweet Blue Flowers is a masterclass in setting up progressive complications in the many stages of a long romance story, while still maintaining that realist charm of later works like Even Though We’re Adults. Takako seeds in dramatic moments in stages throughout the chapters, which utilizes the serialized form to effectively provide both cliffhangers between episodes, and long, compelling arcs between characters.

In Story Grid, there are five essential elements to a story: The Inciting Incident, Progressive Complications, Crisis, Climax, and Resolution. The Progressive Complications are the wrenches in the system that push the story forward, ultimately to the Turning Point Complication (a subset of progressive complications), then to Crisis. It’s the small things in a story that turn characters back and forth through the gauntlet of human experience and challenge them in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways. One element I find complicated, and am probably going to get wrong here to be honest, is the difference between the inciting incident (the thing that sets the story in motion) in a scene versus a sequence, versus an act, which I believe can also be a progressive complications… But I’ll try to be as clear as I can. 

For this example, I will be breaking down the story beats (and spoiling fully) for Chapter One, “Flower Story,” and Chapter Two, “Stand By Me,” of Sweet Blue Flowers by Takako Shimura, which are collected in Volume 1.

Part One: Chapter One - “Flower Story”

Sweet Blue Flowers is the story of Fumi Manjōme and Akira Okudaira, who are first year students at Matsuoka Girl's High School. When Fumi returns to her hometown to start at Matsuoka, she runs into an old childhood friend, Akira, on the train, who is also headed to school. But Akira doesn’t recognize her (this is the Inciting Incident). Akira, who is afraid of being groped on the train, stands close to Fumi and starts to talk to her. By the end of the train ride, she notices that Fumi is quietly crying into her book (Complication #1), but thinks that, like herself, Fumi is just stressed about taking the train for the first time to high school. At school, the students are pressured into joining a club, because everyone’s in a club in high school. Fumi manages to sidestep the clubs, but Akira is swept into Drama Club (Complication #2). After returning home from school, Fumi calls Akira’s home and her mom answers the phone. Akira’s mom recognizes Fumi immediately, setting off Akira’s own memory of her childhood friend (which acts as the chapter’s Crisis - will they return to our childhood connection?).

Akira visits Fumi for tea, reconnecting over childhood pictures with her mom before awkwardly staring at Fumi. When she asks, Akira says she’s surprised by how huge (meaning tall) she is but how “teeny” her boobs are. This cuts to Fumi recounting the comment to her cousin, who teases her about it and then, after a rather intimate hand touch, reveals that she is engaged to be married to a man (complication #3), which Fumi is shocked by.

The next day on the train, Akira asks Fumi if she got groped (because she looks sad), and Fumi admits that her cousin is getting married. Akira gives her a handkerchief and says, “because you always cry,” which for Fumi bridges the gap between the ten years they’ve been apart. The thoughtful gesture, the attention, and the connection between them is a door suddenly opened again (which then resolves the chapter’s story arc - yes, Akira and Fumi are reunited again.). 

At the end of Chapter 1 we are left with the following complications unresolved:

• Complication #1: Why is Fumi prone to crying? 

• Complication #2: Will they join the same club? Or will Fumi manage to avoid being in a club forever?

• Complication #3: What’s up with this weird intimacy with Fumi and her cousin?

And, of course, the series crisis question: Will Fumi and Akira end up together!?

Next week I’ll continue on with Part Two of this article, which will dive into Chapter Two “Stand By Me.” If you want to read along, please check out Sweet Blue Flowers by Takako Shimura, which was published in English by Viz Media. 

For more information about Story Grid, check out their official website.