If you want to know why I previewed Hana wa Saku, Shura no Gotoku, it’s because there frankly weren’t a whole lot of prospects this season. If you want to know why I had a healthy skepticism about it, well – as I said in that preview, “This has more than a whiff of “healing” and CGDCT to it”. In the final analysis, like Kono Kaisha ni Suki na Hito ga Imasu this hit pretty much exactly as I expected. The issue is that my expectations were a good deal lower with Hana wa Saku.
Flower and Asura is the tale of the titular flower – a girl named Haruyama Hana – and the titular poem. That would be “Haru to Shura” (“Spring and Asura”) by Miyazawa Kenji. The fact that the protagonist is a huge fan of Miyazawa (best known in the West as the author of A Night on the Galactic Railroad) and this poem scores some brownie points with me. Hana lives on a small island called Tonakishima, where she loves to read storybooks to the island’s younger children. She’s about to start high school on the mainland, and a 2nd-year from her school named Usurai Mizuki shows up recruiting for the broadcasting club, and gets her hooks in Hana straight away.
If you think things couldn’t sound any more wholesome, you’re pretty much on the money. This is the sort of world where a ferry (more of a water taxi really) captain will happily delay his final run from 5:00 PM to 7:00 so the cute girl can join the broadcasting club. You can pretty much tell it’s one of those series where high school girl idolatry rules all, which is frankly just as tiresome as it was a couple of years ago when it was even more omnipresent (and it’s not like it’s rare now). The church of the divine joshikousei is a bore and slightly creepy – slightly in shows like this where it’s muted, sometimes you can leave that word out.
Still, I like poetry and you can never make a call on club anime until everyone in the room gets a chance to stand out (if indeed they ever do). All the warning flags I saw going in are flapping in the sea breeze at full mast now, but at least one more week is probably in order as we’ve really only met the two leads. They don’t make much of an impression – Hana seems as bland a template heroine as you could ask (even with the Asura thing), and Mizuki plays as a pushy plot device. But there are other people we haven’t really met yet, and maybe the broadcasting thing will prove interesting (who knew about the NHK Cup?). It’s that sort of season – if I don’t hate it I’m at least going to give a new series a little bit of play on the lead.
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