The Halting Problem

Why does Sweet Blue Flowers end where it does? To answer that, let’s look at a different question, or rather multiple questions: How long should a manga run? How long can it run? Will it ever end?

In western comics, this last question is unanswerable: corporate ownership of copyrights and trademarks means that a popular comic can exist in perpetuity, like a corporation itself. It’s impossible to predict which comics will ever halt publication and which will not.

On the other hand, there’s an expectation that manga will not survive the artist’s death—that one day we will see an end to long-running works. But that day may not be soon.¹

Even with other manga that are not so long-lived, commercial success can lead to extended runs as the story gets stretched out to satisfy readers’ desires for more entertainment and publishers’ desires for more profit. Other series are canceled well before the end of their natural life, with the story left hanging or rushed to a conclusion.

Where does Sweet Blue Flowers fit in this picture? It is relatively short by Japanese standards at only eight volumes (in the original Japanese edition). For example, Wandering Son went to fifteen volumes, and it’s not unusual for manga to go to thirty or forty.

I’ve seen occasional speculation that Sweet Blue Flowers was brought to a close prematurely. Indeed, the last chapters seem somewhat rushed. For example, in chapter 51, Shimura resorts to the shortcut of having an omniscient narrator herald Akira’s change of heart (SBF, 4:325), as opposed to showing this happening through more gradual plot developments and internal monologues.

On the other hand, a case can be made that Shimura ended the manga where she wanted to end it and that it had come to a natural stopping point.

First, why end it at fifty-two chapters? Shimura may have done this in homage to Nobuko Yoshiya’s Hana monogatari, which contained fifty-two stories. The title of the last chapter is “Sweet Blue Flowers” (“Aoi hana” in the Japanese edition), repeating the title of the manga itself, just as the title of the first chapter, “Flower Story” (“Hana monogatari”) namechecked the title of Yoshiya’s series.

Assuming that this is intentional, I see this as Shimura concluding the series by subtly highlighting its status as her response to Yoshiya, the ideals of S relationships, and the Class S literary genre.

Second, why end the manga at this point in the plot? Arguably, once Fumi and Akira graduated from high school, it was time to wrap things up. The manga as a whole, like many manga about the lives of Japanese schoolgirls, is structured around the rhythm of the school year, particularly the summer breaks and the Fujigaya theater festival.

Once that rhythm is absent, the framework underlying the plot is broken, and the manga moves toward its conclusion. It lasts only long enough to take the characters into adulthood, bring Kyoko’s story to a conclusion with her marriage to Ko, and see Fumi and Akira enter into a new phase of their relationship.

I think Shimura did rush things a bit to bring the story to an end at a possibly symbolic fifty-two chapters. However, plotwise, I believe she intended to end Sweet Blue Flowers exactly where she did, with the reader left to imagine the continuation of Fumi and Akira’s life together.