Appendix 2: Character Relationships

In addition to serving as a guide to the characters who appear in Sweet Blue Flowers, the character index also provides data helpful in analyzing other aspects of the manga. Examples of such analyses include determining how prominently a given character is featured in the manga, how that character relates to other characters, and how prominently such relationships are featured. The character index included in Appendix 1 is abridged for readability, but I’ve used a complete and unabridged character index to do an initial analysis of these questions.¹

The first question that might come to mind is: how prominently is each character featured in Sweet Blue Flowers? For example, does Fumi appear more often than Akira, or vice versa? And what about Kyoko? How frequently does she appear relative to Fumi and Akira? We can answer these questions by counting the number of pages on which each character appears and then seeing which are featured on the most pages.²

Such an analysis shows that Fumi and Akira are almost equally prominent in the manga, with Fumi having a slight edge. Each of the two girls appears on around half of the manga’s pages. Kyoko is the next most prominent character, appearing on about a quarter of all pages, half as many as Fumi or Akira. Yasuko appears on about one sixth of all pages. All other characters appear on no more than one in ten pages. (A few characters appear only on one or two pages.)³

We can also use the character index to analyze relationships between characters. In particular, if two characters appear on the same page, I consider them to have a connection to each other.

This criterion is not foolproof—for example, a given page may have one or two panels with one group of characters and then transition to other panels with other characters. However, if those instances are relatively few (and I believe they are), then the “relationships” discovered using this method will map relatively closely to the actual relationships in the manga.

There are eighty-two “characters” in the character index. (Some entries correspond to groups of people, such as Fujigaya elementary-school students.) If each character appeared on at least one page with every other character, there would be over three thousand “relationships” depicted in the manga. In actuality, most characters in the manga appear together on a page with only a few other characters. There are less than four hundred unique instances of pairs of characters appearing together on one or more pages, so only about one in ten of the possible relationships is depicted.⁴

In addition to knowing which characters have a relationship with others, I would also like to know how prominently those relationships are featured in the manga. I use the number of pages on which two characters appear together as a proxy measure of the prominence of their relationship.

As one would expect, the relationship between Fumi and Akira is the most prominent one. They appear together on almost a third of the manga’s pages. No other relationship is featured on more than a tenth of the manga’s pages, with the relationships between Akira and Kyoko and Fumi and Yasuko being the next most prominent.⁵

Finally, the relationships between characters in Sweet Blue Flowers can be represented graphically, again using joint appearances on a page as a proxy for characters having some connection to each other. There are many possible ways of constructing such a graph. The graph above shows one such way.⁶

The complete “social graph” of Sweet Blue Flowers is too cluttered to be readable, even without all possible relationships being represented in the manga. Therefore, the graph above shows only the relationships between the top sixteen characters ranked by their prominence in the manga (i.e., the number of pages on which they appear). The size of the label for each character is related to each character’s prominence, with Akira and Fumi appearing most prominently, as expected.⁷

The links between each pair of characters reflect the prominence of their relationship, with character pairs with more prominently-featured relationships positioned more closely together. Since Fumi and Akira’s relationship is featured most prominently, they are shown close together on the graph.

Solid lines between characters represent the top twenty percent of relationships ranked by prominence, dashed lines the other eighty percent. Lines corresponding to more prominently-featured relationships are also thicker.

In addition to Akira and Fumi, there are also clusters of other people whose relationships with each other are more prominently featured. These clusters include Akira and her mother and brother; Fumi and her mother; Kyoko and Ko; Mogi, Pon, and Yassan; and Yasuko, Kyoko, Fumi, and Akira. There’s also a less prominently-featured set of relationships among Yasuko, Kazusa, and Mr. Kagami.

These clusters could be intuited by anyone reading the manga, but it’s helpful to have them confirmed by a more formal analysis. Such an analysis could also uncover other clusters of characters not necessarily apparent at first glance and discover other things relating to Sweet Blue Flowers—for example, the chains of relationships connecting characters not directly connected. However, I leave further analyses to others who can reuse or adapt the code I used to do this one.