The Flowers of Evil

Takao is a bookish middle-schooler who likes Baudelaire and has a crush on the prettiest girl in class. On impulse he steals her gym uniform, and Nakamura, a strange and friendless classmate, catches him. Instead of telling, she makes a contract with him, and what follows is a slow descent into a relationship built on a shared secret and mutual contempt. Oshimi is writing about the lie of small-town teenage life: the boredom, the performance of being normal, the wish to blow it all up. Nakamura is one of the great unsettling characters in manga, a girl who calls everyone around her a fake and dares Takao to prove he is not.