Two Women Together

two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple

Adrienne Rich¹

After the excitement of Kyoko’s wedding and the shock of Akira’s confession to Fumi, we now come to the final pages of Sweet Blue Flowers. Akira’s “rude awakening” from sleep at the beginning of chapter 1 of the manga is replaced by morning greetings between Akira and Fumi, after a night in which they reenact as adults the conversation-filled sleepovers they enjoyed as children and teenagers.

If Sweet Blue Flowers were a Class S story of spiritual love between two girls, it would have ended in a tearful parting once they graduated high school. If it were like many yuri stories, the confession would have been followed with a kiss, and the “Story A” formula would have been fulfilled: two girls like each other, the end. If it were like other modern schoolgirl yuri stories, it might have ended with lovemaking, as do, for example, Milk Morinaga’s Girl Friends² and Hana & Hina After School.³

But in Sweet Blue Flowers Akira and Fumi do not part.⁴ Instead, Fumi’s interior monologue strongly implies that their lives will be intertwined for the next ten or twenty years (SBF, 4:360–61). Though the manga echoes the “Story A” structure and concludes with Akira’s confession, previous chapters already showed their first kiss. There is but the hint of one here. Finally, they’ve already spent a night together experiencing physical intimacy (4:141–46), but here they wake up in separate beds. If they’ve made love to each other, it was through their words, not their bodies.

Why does Sweet Blue Flowers end this way? If, as I’ve hypothesized, a primary theme of the manga is the valorization of equality in relationships, the final scene shows how that might play out in practice. Akira has acknowledged that she is romantically attracted to Fumi and has traveled a fair distance in bridging the gap between their separate conceptions of what their relationship is and should be.

As for Fumi, the manga leaves ambiguous when or even whether she will have the physical relationship with Akira that she so clearly craves. Just as Akira came around to Fumi’s view of their relationship as a romance and not simply friendship, Fumi may have to accept that Akira’s nature means that the romantic aspect of their relationship may always far outweigh the sexual.

But what matters is that they can (re)start their relationship on equal grounds, negotiating the contours of that relationship as partners, and as partners facing the outside world together—including coming out to the rest of their friends, to their families, and perhaps also to their future co-workers and other associates.

To echo Adrienne Rich, nothing in contemporary Japan will make their life together simple. They live in a country where social attitudes toward LGBTQ people are slowly evolving, but where such evolution is impeded by a conservative government thus far unwilling to reform the patriarchal character of Japanese laws relating to marriage and the family.

Though such social and political concerns form the background to the lives of the women of Sweet Blue Flowers, at its heart is the story of two people struggling to discover whom they love and how they can mutually express that love in their lives with each other. Adrienne Rich also wrote, “two people together is a work / heroic in its ordinariness.”⁵ The last page of Sweet Blue Flowers takes a final look back at Fumi and Akira’s friendship as children, but the chapter as a whole looks forward to the “work” that will be Fumi and Akira’s relationship in the years to come.