Aku no Hana Chapter 57 Discussion

Yoostis said:
Synopsis anyone?

JuneauX said:
Chapter 57 can be considered chapter 0.
You learn how Nakamura thinks, how she reacts, and how she sees the world.
It's a chapter so you can answer that 'Why is she doing that?' question that everyone had at least one time during this series.
It's a chapter that you understand that, way before the original storyline, she already had a problem. It's not something that she developed and after the time skip someone noticed that.
You discover some sort of schizophrenia from her, and you get that she thinks Kasuga is some sort of a link between her and the real world, mostly because she thinks he is the same, like 'ok, i don't give a fuck here and there, i just don't think i fit here, because everything is out of control and i can't handle it alone' (you get it from the first colour page, you see that she is drowning on her own disease and kasuga appears, and she is brought back to the real world).
And that's the starting point of all.

Now talking about Chapter 56.
It has a deep meaning, its not some weird ass dream, that he wakes up and start writing about it.
I think that he realizes now is the time for him to move on, and 'write down' his own future. It's something like 'i'm leaving the past where it is, so i can write a future, that i don't know what will be like, but i'm willing to give it a try'.
I loved that. You see him growing up, and we get to a point where he really grown up, and that's something completely beautiful. You see how he felt, all his problems. And all his problems are real, like a first love problem, a rebel age problem, family problems, moving on, leaving the past, finding a new way to live, being socially accepted, finding the love of her life, getting courage to make it and etc. Ok, not everybody climbs a hill in a bike during a storm, and got to get two girls see you naked and stuff like that, but well, you got my point.
This chapter isn't about the flower leading him and all the meaning of that. Its a chapter of him moving on and following his mind, not the flowers. And that's how he ends the series.

Rachmaninow said:
Personally I didn't like it too much. And this is not about me missing the subtle hints yadda yadda, it just felt out of place. Yes, getting a glimpse of what's going on in Nakamura's mind was nice and in a sense needed. It made us understand her a bit better and what finding someone similar to her really meant to Nakamura. But then why not build on it? Why not expand the chapter a little and give us another 30 pages worth of Nakamura? Why not jump through the major events of the story and give us her view, ultimately ending with the scene at the beach and what she's up to now. Has she really come to terms with the world, or rather, the society? Is there still something left in her? A feeling of desire? One of regret perhaps?
Seeing how this manga basically revolved around a pair of protagonists, we sure didn't get to see much of the other in the latter half of the story. And that, fellow readers, is a real shame.

Mod Edit: Removed citing of manga reading site.

ravagestorm said:
Chapter 55 is the real ending. chapter 56 and 57 are just epilogues for Kasuga and Nakamura.

Anyway it is a shame the anime sucked so bad. If it was handled by a decent and NOT SELFISH director then the show could have been a cult classic. I bet we will be seeing Nakamura figmas if they only used the original art style from the manga. *sigh...So much potential and it's wasted by a selfish director.

davyjones635 said:
I thought this was a good last chapter.
Of course it is not the real last chapter, chapter 56 is.
This should therefore not be considered a follow-up.
This chapter was just to make us understand why Nakamura pushed him off, and what was actually happening in her life.
Like the other guy said, pervert is a very special word in this manga.
I think it means something like showing your true self.
Every person in the world has something weird about them. Pretty much everyone however does not dare to show this, because then they become an outcast.
So much even, that they won't even indulge in such behavior secretly, because society tells them that it's bad and weird.
When Nakamura saw Kasuga sniffing those panties, she saw another potential pervert.
She then tried to get him to break his own walls, and become a full-fledged pervert like her.
But this did not work out, because the reason for Kasuga's public acts of perversion (with perversion I mean showing yourself) were most likely not really him.
He clearly did it because he loved Nakamura, and she did not think that that was an acceptable drive for doing those things.
There shouldn't be a drive to do those things.
Your feelings of shame and your need to be accepted should just not exist, which was what Nakamura had.
Shamelessness also linking back to perversion.
She then pushed him off because he was not a pervert, and he wouldn't ever be.

This final chapter gave me a lot of insight on Nakamura and the reasoning behind her actions.
This was a very fitting final chapter in my opinion, because it reveals the reasoning behind all of Nakamura's actions, and ties up all loose ends.
Of course, it is a bit of speculation, but many stories push you into a certain direction of speculation, because they want you to think about the story.
Aku no Hana is the same in this regard.

Keai said:


Exactly this.

I thought 56, and the second half of ANH did nakamura an injustice. The dream in 56, whilst maybe symbolic, is nothing but a dream. She may be kasuga's jean duvalle, his inspiration to write, but that consigns her to the same league as saeki at the beginning of the story... I.e. rather than a rounded whole person he loved her as a symbol of what she represented... His femme fatale... His muse. He hasn't moved on at all! Even at the end he can't understand why she does the things she does. She's closed to him.. Out of reach.

So in dreaming this reality where nakamura is reunited with her father, and then goes off to the big city, he absolves himself of any connection with nakamura. He's giving himself permission to write. Permission to not feel guilty, or responsible, for nakamura s predicament. He even absolves himself of any responsibility for saeki's "downfall" by imagining her happy, with her surrogate Kasuga, reuniting with her long lost school friend. It's a fantasy ending.

This is why I think it seems that part 2 is inconsistent with part 1. Part 1 seems to be about subverting the idea of the idealised woman, represented by saeki, and to which nakamura tries to break him out of his delusion... she says hey, saeki is a woman... and shes a sexual being. And part 2 seems to be about him rebuilding himself, and part of that is to put saeki inverted up onto her pedestal.

Shuzouu talks about how the mountains represent the mother... I wondered whether there wasn't a lesbian subtext.. That what nakamura really wanted, was to be reunited with her mother.

Nakamura, for all her talk, seemed mainly happy to watch Kasuga deviate and experience deviancy through him. There was no hint, until she finally snapped (in part because of kasugas actions, and those of the townspeople) when she was forced into action, so I thought her actions deserved to be explored more fully.

MegaUltraTom said:


copying and pasting some info from http://archive.foolz.us/a/thread/106827773/#106858554

Interview with the author, only available in Chinese.
http://tieba.baidu.com/p/2388666476

>"If Kasuga really is a genius or pervert, the best ending for him would be suicide, but that wouldn't be what I wanted to write." "If the protagonist didn't perform his ability in his life, what would he become? That's what I wanted to write." Basically the author thought that the first part of AnK was already well expressed in so many literature. The second part of AnK was what he actually wanted to write.