A Manga by Any Other Name

Why is Sweet Blue Flowers named “Sweet Blue Flowers”? We can try to answer this by starting at the end of the title and working backward.

As mentioned previously, Sweet Blue Flowers was originally published in Japanese as Aoi hana. “Hana” means “flower”—or “flowers,” Japanese not having plural forms as English and other languages do. Shimura’s name-checking of Nobuko Yoshiya and her titling her first chapter “Flower Story” indicates that “hana” in the title references Hana monogatari or Flower Tales, the short story collection previously discussed.

Next, “aoi.” This means “blue,” so we have “blue flower” or “blue flowers.” Is there a significance to the color blue in this context? Unfortunately, I can’t find a list in English of the titles of the stories in Hana monogatari, so I don’t know if this is a reference to a specific story of Yoshiya’s.

Is the reference to something else? The most well-known reference to a blue flower in Western literature is from the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen by the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), translated into English as Henry of Ofterdingen and—more germane to this question—translated into Japanese as Aoi hana, the same name as Shimura’s manga. It begins with young Henry lying in bed, beguiled by an image from a tale told by a stranger: “I long to behold the blue flower. It is constantly in my mind, and I can think and compose of nothing else.”¹

The blue flower (blaue Blume) of Novalis has connotations both sacred and profane. On the one hand, as Wikipedia puts it, it “stands for desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable. It symbolizes hope and the beauty of things.” It later became a symbol for the entire German Romantic movement.

But the blue flower also has a worldly incarnation in the person of the young girl Matilda, the fictional counterpart of Sophie von Kühn. Novalis met Sophie when she was twelve and he twenty-two, and secretly became engaged to her just before her thirteenth birthday. The marriage never took place: Sophie died of illness just over two years later, shortly after her fifteenth birthday.

In the manga, Fumi compares her budding romance with Akira to “a small flower. A very small flower. … And you might not know what to do with a flower like that” (SBF, 1:187). Shimura appears to have an affinity for German novelists and poets (see the appendix on the titles of the manga chapters), so it’s quite likely that she was thinking of the “blaue Blume” of the German Romantics, and of Novalis’s novel in particular, when she titled her manga Aoi hana. However, to my mind the age and status differences found in the relationship between Henry and Matilda (and between Novalis and Sophie) are rejected in Sweet Blue Flowers.

What about the word “Sweet”? When Aoi hana was translated into French and Spanish, its title was straightforwardly translated as Fleurs bleues² and Flores azules³ respectively. So why is the English title “Sweet Blue Flowers,” and not just “Blue Flowers”?

I don’t know for sure, but I can say that “Sweet Blue Flowers” was used as an alternate English title on the Japanese edition of Aoi hana when the manga was published as eight collected volumes. (I believe this alternate title was also used when the manga began serialization in Manga Erotics F, but I have not found any confirmation of this.) This title was then carried over when Aoi hana was first published in a (partial) English translation and used again for the VIZ Media edition.

Finally, what kind of blue flowers might the title refer to? Blue flowers are somewhat uncommon in nature, one of the reasons for their symbolic resonance. (For example, there are no naturally occurring blue roses, and attempts to create them via genetic engineering have been only partially successful.)

Shimura may have intended to leave the identity of the blue flowers to our imaginations: in the color pages of the manga there are only two instances I could find of blue flowers, a seven-petal blue blossom in the character profile at the beginning of volume 1, and a four-petal blossom on the back cover of volume 1 of the Japanese edition.

Therefore we’re free to amuse ourselves by identifying a type of flower to go with the title. A lily would be an obvious choice since “yuri” is the Japanese word for “lily,” and lilies are associated with the Class S genre. However, there are no true lilies (of genus Lilium) that are blue. This is perhaps a tell on Shimura’s part: that Sweet Blue Flowers pays homage to but ultimately breaks from the traditional narratives of Class S and yuri.

Another possible choice of flower is wisteria, which has purple blossoms that often appear bluish in color. The kanji for “wisteria” appears in both “Fujigaya” and “Fujisaki,” the city next to Kamakura where Fujigaya appears to be located. “Wisteria” is also the name of Akira’s class in her first year at Fujigaya (SBF, 1:26). But Sweet Blue Flowers is Fumi’s story just as much as it is Akira’s, and Fumi attends a different school.

In the end, the identity of the blue flower remains mysterious, at least to readers in English. Though I have chosen an illustration of blue flowers to adorn the cover of this book, I’m uncertain which species it’s intended to depict. I prefer to think of those flowers, and Sweet Blue Flowers, as being uniquely themselves.