[SPOILER ALERT]
This is an analysis of one of the themes that "Aku no Hana" explores: escaping from ordinary life.
No matter what you do, no matter where you go, your life will always be ordinary. In his movies, the great Yasujiro Ozu showed his characters eating or hanging out the laundry as a sign of their inherent ordinary nature. Hiroshi Nagahama, the director of this anime, tries something similar by repeting the same sequences over and over again. In the first episode, Kasuga takes the exact same route twice to go to school. He steps on the same soil, he crosses the same bridge, he goes past the same posters on the walls, he walks with the same people. This repetitive routine is emphasized by Nagahama's use of the same frames. He doesn't film the same scene twice with slight changes, as many would probably do; he literally copies and pastes the same frames at the beginning and at the end of the episode, as if he were opening and closing a circle. The inescapable circle of daily banality.
Over time, Kasuga gets sick of that boredom, he feels oppressed and can't accept the fact that life is "just that". In that perspective, the hill near his town becomes the symbol of his longing for something extra-ordinary. Maybe, deep down in his soul, Kasuga knows that what he is looking for doesn't exist, but we all know that what keeps humans going is hope. And so, that hill turns into the lighthouse that brings brighness into his grey existance, the candle that gives warmth to his cold mornings, the sun that shines through the curtains of his shabby room. For a moment he can almost perceive that hill as alive: it empathizes with him, it understands him and caresses him with its big, illusory hands. Illusory, because Kasuga soon realizes that those hopes and dreams were all in his imagination, that life is really "just that" and that he forms an integral part of that ordinary reality he is trying to escape. "I figured I was different", he says. "I figured I was different from all those boring people. But am I? I pretended not to know what I was really like. I pretended I wasn't ordinary". I think that the fact that he has to face reality while he is right ON the hill is really significant. The same object that used to feed his fantasies is now violently deconstructing them. The fact that Kasuga fails to reach the opposite side of the hill is also symbolic. He can't go beyond the hill because there's nothing beyond it, or at least nothing that will satisfy him. He can't reach it, because he can't overcome his own ordinary nature. He could go anywhere, but his problems would follow him. Because the real problem here is not the town or the people who live there, it's the nature of life itself.
All this reminds me of "Three Sisters", a play by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. It talks about three sisters whose life revolves around their childhood memories, when they all lived happily in Moscow. Moscow, like the hill in "Aku no Hana", becomes a ray of hope for the sisters. They idealize it and dream of going back there one day. What they don't realize -- or willingly ignore -- is that their view of the city is highly influenced by their desires and will never coincide with reality. In other words, if they were to really go there, their fantasies would be painfully shattered. At the end they can't reach Moscow, not because they are incapacitated but probably because the Moscow in their hearts doesn't exist -- just like the "other side" in "Aku no Hana".
In conclusion, ordinary life can't be escaped. The only viable options are either to accept life as it is or to die. The anime doesn't have a second season, so it doesn't explore those possibilities, but the manga shows both of them: Kasuga and Nakamura try to commit suicide first and then try to adapt to their condition in their own ways.
I hope you enjoyed my analysis. I will come back if I feel like writing about other themes. |
