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Rating: My Empire of Dirt
"Whoever arranges a flower must first know that flower well. Women are a flower, but they are also a vase."
The grotesque and perverse empire of Rannosuke Hanayagi, the seventeenth head of the Ikebana Kurokami school, heir to a tradition of flowers, depravity, sex, atrocities, and political collusions spanning four hundred years. A State within a State, an Empire of Evil.
This is what is portrayed in The Flowers of Evil, a manga masterpiece by Kazuo Kamimura and Hideo Okazaki. Spanning over seven hundred (!) pages, it unfolds a tour de force of aberrations, pure evil, eroticism, and sadomasochism, invoking Baudelaire, De Sade, Mishima, and Tanizaki (author of The Key, a novel explicitly mentioned and adapted onscreen by Tinto Brass) through a visionary style where horror and beauty go hand in hand, almost as if one were the consequence of the other. Yet, the depiction of such atrocities and perfidies is never brutal or pornographic, but always filtered through allegory, symbolism, and aesthetic wonder. Indeed, one can truly say that in this manga resides one of the most high and artistic representations of Evil ever seen. Although this does not detract from the complexity of an exhausting and still extreme experience.
"Every person has the desire to become someone else. This is the result of the fact that everyone, deep in their heart, loves and hates themselves at the same time."
An incredibly ambitious work that, almost fifty years ago (the manga is from 1975) spoke of fluid sexuality, the relativity of genders that can continuously blend and reverse, as
"The genealogical line of the Hanayagi family is like a maze where men and women continuously mix and mingle.
We have always tried to understand the essence of flowers in the joy and pain experienced when a man becomes a woman and vice versa."
"The joy of whipping and being whipped. The hedonism that arises from having experienced everything."
The Flowers of Evil is a parable about perdition and dissolution, about lust, abomination, and possession. A work that depicts an Empire destined for decline, just as flowers wither and flesh ages. Better then to fall at the moment of the peak, at the height of splendor. In a world anyway close to flames, probably ready to be reborn cyclically in other forms and in other realms. In other empires of the senses, of passion, and of terror.
Besides, it is a strong reflection on the role of the ruling classes, on what the commodification of the body can produce, the draining of all feeling through the deprivation of dignity, systematic humiliation. The reduction to a mere object of pleasure, for the use and consumption of a financial and powerful elite.
A work not for everyone, but an unforgettable experience.
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