is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Shūzō Oshimi. It was serialized in Kodansha's Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine between September 2009 and May 2014. The story follows a middle school student named Takao Kasuga who's forced into a "contract" by fellow student Sawa Nakamura, after being caught stealing the gym clothes of his crush Nanako Saeki, and the series of events afterwards that follow these three characters. The title of the manga comes from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.

An anime television series adaptation of the manga, produced by Zexcs, aired in Japan between April and June 2013. It was simulcast outside Japan by Crunchyroll. The anime was animated using rotoscoping techniques, causing some controversy among fans of the manga. A live-action film adaptation was released in September 2019.

In North America, the manga has been licensed for English language release by Vertical and the anime series has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks.

Plot

The story starts in a small town in Gunma Prefecture and follows Takao Kasuga, a middle school bookworm whose favorite book is Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. One day after school, he impulsively steals the gym clothes of Nanako Saeki, the classmate he idolizes. However, a girl named Sawa Nakamura sees him and blackmails Kasuga into a "contract". At the same time, Kasuga grows closer to Saeki and manages to become her boyfriend.

As Kasuga spends more time with both girls, he finds the guilt of his theft weighing down on him. He attempts to confess by vandalizing his classroom with Nakamura, but Saeki refuses to break up with him. When his mother finds out he was responsible for the vandalism, he runs from home and attempts to bike with Nakamura past the mountain adjacent to the town. Saeki catches up to the pair as they rest and tries to make Kasuga come back. Unable to choose between them, he estranges both girls and the police collect them.

A month later, Kasuga breaks up with Saeki and resolves to help Nakamura. He writes a composition to convey his feelings to her. When she runs from him, Kasuga goes to her house and reads in her diary about her disappointment in not being able to reach "the other side". He steals the panties of all the girls in his class except Saeki's and uses them to decorate a makeshift hideout, winning Nakamura's approval.

At the start of summer vacation, they create a plan to nail the panties to a piece of plywood to display at the upcoming festival. Saeki discovers the plan and lures Kasuga to the hideout, trying to seduce him and make him stay in their town. When he chooses Nakamura over her, she rapes him but Kasuga resists, causing her to burn the hideout down.

Saeki later turns herself in to the police for setting the fire, prompting her best friend Ai Kinoshita to tell their school about Kasuga's crimes. The school does not involve the police and his parents decide to move over the vacation. The day before the festival, Nakamura breaks into Kasuga's house, attacking his father, and the two escape. At the festival, they don disguises and climb to the top of a float while wielding a knife. They curse their town and pour kerosene on themselves, but before they can use a lighter, Nakamura pushes Kasuga over the float and she gets tackled by her father.

A few years later, Kasuga is going to high school in Ōmiya-ku, Saitama, and still cannot forget Nakamura. Kasuga finds his classmate Aya Tokiwa looking at Les Fleurs du mal in a used bookstore and she starts lending him novels, rekindling his love of literature.

Kasuga discovers that she is working on a novel and is brought to tears upon reading the manuscript because he can identify with the protagonist. Kasuga encounters Saeki and when they meet up for lunch, she accuses him of using Tokiwa as a replacement for Nakamura. Kasuga visits Tokiwa at her workplace and asks her out, saying that he will save her, and she accepts.

Kasuga visits his hometown for his dying grandfather and ends up meeting Kinoshita, who regrets being left behind by Saeki and tells Kasuga where Nakamura moved. Tokiwa finishes her novel, but Kasuga tells her about his past and his desire to meet Nakamura again. They take the train to Tokawa Station in Chōshi, Chiba and find her eatery, where her mother warns them that Nakamura is "peaceful now", but Tokiwa insists on speaking to her.

They talk at a nearby beach and Kasuga questions her, but does not get satisfactory answers. Kasuga and Nakamura attack each other, turning into a playfight between all three. Kasuga tells Nakamura that he is happy that she did not disappear, and she tells him never to come back. Later, Kasuga is in college and still dating Tokiwa, who is working on another novel. After falling asleep with Tokiwa, Kasuga dreams of the wilting flower of evil, its scar no longer present on his hand. In his dream he envisions the futures of the series' characters; he marries and has a child with Tokiwa, Saeki starts her own family and reunites with Kinoshita, and Nakamura finds contentment, eventually moving away to the city. At the end of the dream Nakamura looks up at her own wilting flower of evil. When he wakes up, Kasuga starts writing in his empty book just as he was in his dream, presumably about the manga's events.

The final chapter depicts Nakamura's perspective of her first meeting with Kasuga. Through her eyes she sees everyone and everything around her as monochrome and deformed, symbolizing her distaste for normality. When she sees Kasuga steal the gym suit, his features become clear to her. Later on, Nakamura feels herself reverting to the normalcy she despises. Before she does, Kasuga appears on his bike, fully defining her world in both detail and a deep crimson color.

Characters

Played by: Kentaro Ito An introverted middle school student with a strong interest in literature. He feels alienation as well as suffocation from the world around him. His view of other people is dim – he considers them to be ignorant as well as incapable of understanding the abstract themes present in the books he reads, namely Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire. He idolizes his classmate Saeki from afar as the pinnacle of beauty and virtue, calling her his muse and an angel. Although he considers his worship of Saeki to be purely platonic, he cannot help experiencing feelings of sexual attraction to her. Kasuga is deeply disturbed by these feelings because he thinks they devalue his worship of Saeki and are a sin against her purity. While initially viewing Nakamura with fear and apprehension, Kasuga gradually develops a bond with her. The feelings he develops for Nakamura are not romantic in the traditional sense, but rather are a combination of deep fascination, sympathy and servitude. He rejects Saeki to pursue a vision of the future with Nakamura in which the two of them try to make it to "the other side".

Played by: Tina Tamashiro A classmate of Kasuga who shows utter disinterest in the world around her as well as contempt for anyone she comes in contact with. Her existence is ignored by her classmates, who view her as disturbed. She maintains a flat affect for most of her interactions, which she keeps very brief. Nakamura views the world as a "sea of shit-bugs" only interested in sex. She is deeply tortured by the inescapability of her own sexual nature and also disgusted by the world's facade of respectability. Nakamura views Kasuga as a person with a nature similar to hers although his is still buried beneath the layers of respectability engendered by society. She decides to make a contract with him in which she plans to gradually remove the "layers of skin" he is hiding behind. Nakamura's feelings toward Kasuga start out somewhat impersonal, with her treating him like a test subject or play-thing. However as time goes on, she develops a deeply personal investment in his progress.

Played by: Shiori Akita Another girl from Kasuga's class, on whom he has a crush, Saeki is deemed to be the top student of their class, and is considered to be a popular and beautiful girl. After he defends Nakamura from the rest of their class and supports her, Saeki begins to take an interest in Kasuga, especially his passion for Les Fleurs du mal, though she struggles to understand the content. Viewing herself as stifled by her parents, she particularly connects with how he is able to show his true self without having to hide his personality, desires or interests. The two start dating and Saeki reveals how she longs for a life in which she does not have to fake herself with being well-mannered, composed and focused on study. Indeed, her relationship with Kasuga reflects his with Nakamura, her self hatred and idolization of him drives her to commit acts of arson and rape. She later lives in Utsunomiya, and has gotten a new boyfriend who, according to Tokiwa, "looks a lot" like Kasuga.

Played by: Marie Iitoyo A character first introduced in the second part of the story, she is portrayed as a tall, red-haired beauty of Kasuga's year, revered by his friends, but known to date an older guy from another school. Kasuga notices her holding a copy of Les Fleurs du mal in a bookstore and discovers her passion for books. She helps him regain his interest in literature once more, and becomes close to him, to the point of inciting her boyfriend Koji's suspicion towards Kasuga. Kasuga supports her in writing her novel.

Portrayed by: Tsugumi Nakamura

Saeki's best friend. Outspoken and hotheaded, she cares deeply for Saeki and begins to resent Kasuga for the pain he's caused her. She later gets the truth from Saeki when she realises her friend has been spying on Kasuga and Nakamura. She feels the urgency to tell the police the deeds of the couple, only to be scolded by Saeki, who believes she'll be able to pull Kasuga out of his mess. As events develops and she realises Saeki's corruption as well, she is unable to hold out and becomes responsible for exposing Kasuga and Nakamura, but in the process also affects her best friend.

Portrayed by: Katsutoshi Matsuzaki

A friend of Kasuga. He's a chubby guy, a blabbermouth mocker and does not understand Kasuga's fascination with Les Fleurs du mal.

Portrayed by: Ryōsuke Tani

Another friend of Kasuga's.

Production Manga

Oshimi first read Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal in middle school and found the book to feel "suspicious, indecent, yet nastily noble". He based the eye-flower in the series on an illustration for the book by Odilon Redon, his favorite artist. Oshimi also makes references to other artists such as with the cover of the tenth chapter parodying Francisco Goya's The Clothed Maja.

One influence for the manga that Oshimi cited was Song of Cherry Blossoms, where he could relate to the feelings of the protagonist and described the manga as "depicting murky self-consciousness and the dark side of youth with astounding intensity..." Other manga that influenced him were Moonlight Whispers and Haruko Kashiwagi's Dog, which he felt had in common that they were coming-of-age stories about "discovering 'a value system of one's own which he hoped his own manga could do. After the publication of the second volume of the manga, Oshimi learned of the French film Don't Deliver Us from Evil and in retrospect he felt he could relate to the themes of the film where "the girls worship Baudelaire and Lautrémont, create a kingdom of evil all for themselves, and fall into ruin..."Oshimi, The Flowers of Evil Vol. 3, p. 34