Speaking Up

As I wrote in a previous chapter, despite her tendency to break out in tears, “there’s a steel core to Fumi’s personality.” That steel core is shown most clearly in the aftermath of Kazusa’s wedding when Yasuko tries to escape her feelings about Mr. Kagami by tagging along with Akira and her brother to meet Fumi in Enoshima (SBF, 2:100–101).

Despite her past involvement with Yasuko and her meeting Kazusa at the Sugimoto home, Fumi did not attend Kazusa’s wedding for various reasons, including not being a Fujigaya student and breaking up with Yasuko. Akira seems not to have even told Fumi about the wedding (“Oh, but I guess you couldn’t,” observes Kyoko), and Fumi appears to have forgotten all about it until reminded of it by Akira’s mother when trying to call Akira at home (SBF, 2:92, 2:76–77).

Fumi decides to go to Enoshima on the spur of the moment. Her initial motivation seems to be to have some time to herself (SBF, 2:90–91). Although she initially protests, Fumi appears happy to have Akira come to meet her. However, when Yasuko invites herself as well, things come to a head, especially after Yasuko inserts herself into a dispute between Akira and her brother over his wanting to stay with the group (2:100, 2:106).

The overall sequence of events seems to be driven by the senpai-kōhai dynamic characteristic of Japanese school life (and indeed Japanese life in general). Students in lower grades defer to those in upper grades, and as students advance in grade they will be in turn deferred to by those coming up behind them.

Many manga and anime set in high schools (including Sweet Blue Flowers) are structured around this progression. New first-year students arrive, former first-years advance to their second year and have the new first-years to be senpai to, former second-years enter their third and final year and reach the top of the school hierarchy, and third-year students leave to face a world in which they will have new senpai to defer to. It’s common for establishing shots of school classrooms to show the external signs marking the class year of the students within so that the viewer can keep track of the students’ place in the hierarchy.

At this point in the story, Yasuko is a third-year student, and Akira and Fumi are only first-years, so the status gap between them is as large as it is possible to be within a high school. Yasuko exploits her senpai status, first in inviting herself to go with Akira and her brother to Enoshima, then in taking Akira’s brother’s side in his argument with Akira over his staying (“Why is she taking the lead?!” Akira fumes), and finally in proposing they “all hang out together” as a group (SBF, 2:100, 2:106–7).

Akira is clearly unhappy with the turn of events but remains silent. Instead, it is Fumi who actually verbalizes her opposition, with a single word: “No.” She goes on to tell Yasuko, “I don’t want to walk with you,” and commands her to “stop bothering Akira” (SBF, 2:108).

Akira is shocked, and I think rightly so. Fumi’s words seem to be a significant breach of the standard senpai-kōhai protocol. Fumi goes on to compound it later in the trip by rejecting Yasuko’s attempt to make up (“I wanted to see you, Fumi.” “Well, I didn’t want to see you.”) and then uttering a final and crowning insult: “Grow up” (SBF, 2:121–23).

Fumi later has second thoughts about the exchange (“I’m pretty selfish … aren’t I?” she asks Akira) (SBF, 2:128). But her prior words to Yasuko can’t be unsaid, and I believe that in Shimura’s framing Fumi was absolutely right to say them. First, Yasuko was, in fact, abusing her position as senpai in her attempt to get back together with Fumi, inserting herself into a private outing she had no inherent right to participate in.

Second, and I think more important, these scenes are consistent with Shimura’s framing of other relationships in the manga thus far, including Fumi’s with Chizu and Kyoko’s with Yasuko. To quote myself again: “Sweet Blue Flowers seems to valorize relationships between equals and implicitly criticize unequal relationships based on age or other hierarchies.”

The difference here is between criticizing bad actions within a hierarchical system seen as otherwise promoting harmony within society versus criticizing the very idea of hierarchy itself. I believe that Shimura is doing the latter: she is implicitly criticizing the dominance hierarchies characteristic of traditional Class S and yuri works (hierarchies which are themselves embedded in larger hierarchies), and proposing a new model of yuri based on individualism and equality.

Fumi is the primary embodiment of this model within the world of Sweet Blue Flowers. But, as we shall see, she is not the only one, or even the first one.