(Check out my profile for a link to my site containing more up-to-date reviews and bonus media!) Flower Guy is a horror one-shot by Yuka Yamada, published in 2016 when he was only 16 years old. If I made something like this at 16 I would be very proud of myself. Hell, I would be proud of myself if I made this now, and I'm in my 30s. At my age, I still found this to be a worthwhile read, which ought to say a lot. I didn't particularly seek this one out. I filtered for the horror genre on my favorite manga app and lookedat the newest additions, and this one had been recently translated at the time. Threw caution to the wind and checked it out. Overall, I'm glad I did.

In the grand scheme of things, however, I can't help but find this most similar to a middling story by Junji Ito. The premise of the story feels like it ought to be a body horror tale, but the perspective is entirely from a person not affected by the body horror. The greater difficulty in empathizing with the person experiencing the trauma lowers that sense of creeping dread you would hope to get from the genre. The narrative is generally ambiguous, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gets under the skin better and encourages retrospection. On the other hand, the uncertainty makes it questionable to what extent this work actually explores the psyche.

Nonetheless, there's an eerie, sterile coldness to this world that I think makes it an effective short story, so I would recommend taking the time to read it. It's only about 30 pages, and you ought to be able to easily find it from any search engine. I'm not sure if any of Yamada's other stories have been translated, but it appears he's being serialized to this day. If you choose to read Flower Guy, I would appreciate you reading my interpretation of the narrative below.

(MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD)

I think this story has too many holes to work on a literal level. Nobody notices the seed embedded in Yuri despite characters being within eyeshot of it in multiple panels. More obviously, nobody notices her being consumed by a giant flower growing out of her in the middle of class, evident by the fact nobody reacts while it happens and everyone being confused as to her whereabouts in the ending.

With this in mind, I have to assume that the narrator's (Hanao's) perspective is unreliable and doesn't match up with reality. There's no obvious hint anywhere that the dialogue in any part of the story is imagined, so I'd like to think text coming from anyone other than Hanao is true. This would mean his attack on Shinya Makoto was real, as it was described by the teacher. At the very least, someone attacked Shinya. Hanao could be taking credit for it in his mind as a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy. This would mess with the story's continuity, but technically the story confirms its partially non-linear with the flashbacks to Hanao and Lily's childhood, and there's no visual signifiers of when events are taking place like the typical black background pages in other manga.

I find the teacher's use of the word "assaulted" to be interesting here. He was perhaps speaking euphemistically, but wouldn't you still expect the teacher to tell the students the results of the assault? Shinya's attack might not have been fatal. If it was, what's the logic of this scene? If a teacher were to share this, the first thing a student would ask is, "are they okay?" The teacher could ignore those, but it implies the answer and makes one wonder why they would beg the question if they found the obvious follow-up uncomfortable. I wonder if there's room for interpretation on the translation here, because I think it's the weirdest part of the entire narrative and not in a positive way.

I choose to believe the dialogue was simply kept brief and we weren't meant to believe anything other than Shinya's actual death. Shinya dying by Hanao's hand is necessary corroboration for the rest of my theory. I believe Hanao murdered Yuri and that his narrative is him recontextualizing his actions into something he can accept. How he murdered Yuri isn't clear or particularly relevant. It could have been any kind of assault like what happened to Shinya, but I don't think any actual supernatural elements exist in the "reality" of these events. I believe Yuri's death took place sometime after her "transformation" and that we never witnessed it, and her corpse has yet to be discovered (it would be thematically appropriate for Hanao to bury her.) There is an entirely black panel following the transformation sequence suggesting the passage of time with which the murder could have been done.

So, why would Hanao intentionally kill Yuri? First of all, it's heavily implied that Yuri's life is of little concern to Hanao. Even if we're to consider her transformation to just be his own fantasy, he never reacts to her obvious distress or what appears to be the plant devouring her. His fantasy acknowledges her extreme suffering and apparent death, but in the final page he believes her to still be alive in the form of a flower. This contradiction could be explained by the need to cope with his own actions. Yuri died—not by his hand directly, mind—but she's still okay. No harm, no foul. If we consider that the idea of Yuri's pain and death doesn't bother Hanao in his fantasy (that he believes is real), it becomes plausible that he would be able to escalate into causing that pain and death himself. His empathy is shown to be extremely stunted in every interaction he has in the story—another possible sign of a sociopathic murderer.

Another point of evidence is Hanao's extreme reaction to Yuri and Shinya's conversation. Not his attack, but his actual discovery of them. He sees such a brief exchange, and Yamada draws particular attention to his eyes with a vacant stare. If we interpret this as a kind of silent shock and/or anger, it aligns with other possible motives. Yuri and Shinya barely interact. We have no idea if they're dating or were even friends. Yuri comes across as smitten with Shinya's desire to stand up for her, and Shinya doing so may imply interest on his part, but for Hanao to find it worthy of murder would only make sense if his personal obsession with Yuri caused him to read too much into her talking with Shinya. If Yuri just being friends with Shinya is enough for murder, then why doesn't Hanao murder Yuri's female friends? The implication is that there is something special about Shinya, and the only special trait he has is being of the opposite sex and showing a smidgen of romantic interest.

Additionally, Hanao doesn't seek out Shinya when killing him. Shinya has to come to Hanao in what could be interpreted as a provocation. Shinya might have triggered Hanao's intense negative emotions while seeing him talk to Yuri, and this may have resulted in a sudden crime of passion. The excuse of "killing pests" is just a post-hoc justification to rationalize Hanao's behavior. He's dehumanizing Shinya by comparing him to a bug, and he does the same to Yuri, seeing her as a flower. It may also be worth noting that flowers are a common literary symbol of virginity, and Hanao's insecurities over Shinya potentially having a sexual interest in Yuri may overlap with his own language. He remarks that the black lily (Yuri) is infested with bugs during summer and used as a source of nutrients. The "nutrients" would be the sexual pleasure provided by Yuri, the "bug" is obviously Shinya, and "summer" is yet another literary symbol for romance.

Lastly, there's the flower itself. This one's the easiest to justify, I think. There's obvious romantic tension between Hanao and Yuri as children. The flashback emphasizing the black lily being a symbol for love, as well as Yuri's friends having believed the two were romantically involved as children more or less confirms for me that you're meant to interpret some kind of love between them here. I don't know whether or not it's one-sided, or if it wasn't as children and is in the present, but I don't think that particularly matters. It's Hanao's motives that are dubious in the story. Everything Yuri does makes sense on its face, and any interpretation of her intents doesn't affect the outcome of the story (as far as I can tell.)

Of course, we also learn the black lily can mean "curse." I think it's significant that the "seed" is planted in Yuri right after she rebuffs Hanao. It's the beginning of his resentment towards her. Not able to understand the hurt Yuri has caused him, he subconsciously begins his revenge on her by planting a "curse", which ultimately provides the justification he needs to murder her. From Yuri's perspective, we can also see her as being "cursed" by "love" simply with Hanao's obsession with her. An obsessive, unrequited love would likely be characterized as a "curse" by many people. I also think it's extremely important that child Yuri says that she'll "do her best to support [Hanao]" in his goal of creating the most beautiful flower. This further provides another excuse for Hanao's actions. He interprets this as a kind of consent as he goes on to literally and figuratively violate Yuri's body.

The final major turning point with Yuri is her full transformation into a flower. This happens the moment after the teacher reveals Shinya had been assaulted. I believe this happens because Hanao is having to grapple with the consequences of his fantasy intersecting with reality. What he convinced himself was a moral good to protect a beautiful flower from an insect was truly just a murder. When others characterize it as how it truly is, Hanao further retreats into his fantasy. His subconscious realizes there's no turning back for him, and he fully commits to the idea of killing Yuri as he visualizes her being consumed by the black lily. Upon killing her, he is able to fully replace Yuri with an object that he can impress only his own desires on. He replaced something he couldn't understand with something he could.

Basically, Hanao is in love with Yuri and can't find a way to comprehend his own feelings other than through his knowledge of flowers. He can't process his jealousy, so he murders Shinya. He can't process the pain from Yuri's rejection, so he murders her. Lastly, he can't process his own crimes, so he escapes into a fantasy. I think this interpretation ties everything together nicely and doesn't contradict itself anywhere, whereas a literal interpretation of the story does.