Aku no Hana – 06

The next day at school the class is abuzz with the news Saeki and Kasuga are dating, and Saeki comes right out and confirms it. Kasuga walks home with Saeki, eats lunch with Saeki, and they promise to take their time building a relationship. While having lunch with Saeki, Yamada and Nakamura, Nakamura passes him a note to meet her in the library after school. She tells him Saeki wants to have sex with him, just as Saeki walks by outside. The next day Saeki is absent, and Kinoshita gives Kasuga the day’s handouts to deliver to Saeki and warns him about hurting her. Kasuga hesitates to ring the bell to Saeki’s house, but Nakamura jumps him, wishes him good luck, and rings it for him.

I’ll be reborn as a decent human being and spend eternity bound in noble and sublime love with Saeki.

If Kasuga truly believes this is how things are going to down based on what’s happened so far, he’s even more devastatingly naive than we could have imagined. Of course, only part of him wants to believe this ideal scenario. The fact is, his life isn’t a book, and there’s more to him than that naive side. There’s the darker side within him, which he’s struggling with; the side with a voice we hear for the first time, telling him he doesn’t deserve an Angel. Building a relationship with Saeki with the gym uniform thing looming is not only untenable, but hypocritical to his claims. He cannot be reborn when things still tie him to the old, weak him who sinned. This week Kasuga reaps the rewards of becoming Saeki’s boyfriend, baffling and impressing their class and spending time with Saeki. Everything that’s good is out in the open.

Saeki also does her damnedest to play precisely the part Kasuga wants her to play: the innocent, pure Virgin Mary. She wants to take things nice and slow, and wants to learn more about Kasuga. But then Nakamura befriends her, and this is where we are on the same side of the narrative wall as Kasuga: did Saeki confess to Nakamura that she wanted to sleep with Kasuga? It’s pretty true to Nakamura’s character to lie about it, but perhaps Saeki really did tell her that, and Nakamura then decided to use that info as ammo in her Kasuga Project. Saeki has shown to be very much into Kasuga, so until proven otherwise, we’re going to assume Saeki does want Kasuga in that way, going against Kasuga’s idealized version of her. Just as she doesn’t yet know the whole Kasuga, Kasuga – and we – don’t know the whole Saeki. That will change soon.

Rating: 9 (Superior)

Stray Observations:

• Throughout this episode, even during Kasuga’s moments of joy, Nakamura is always at the end of a shot, in the back corner of the frame, just out of focus or partially hidden. Nakamura started out merely sitting behind him, now she’s virtually his shadow.
• We’ll see next week if Saeki actually heard what Nakamura said to Kasuga, or if she mistook the scene as something else.
• In hindsight Nakamura’s strategy of allowing Kasuga+Saeki relationship to go ahead looks like it’ll pay much greater dividends to a deviant such as herself than prematurely ruining it by dropping the bomb (her knowledge of the uniform theft). 
• As long as Kasuga believes the uniform will destroy him, Nakamura will have power over him. It would be intriguing to see how he might theoretically go about turning the tables on her. Then again, she has nothing to lose.
• There’s a quote that  accompanies an animated version of series.creator Oshimi Shuuzou at the end of every episode. This week he says “The next one’s gonna be even better.” We have no reason not to believe him!