Flowers of Evil, Volume 8

Flowers of Evil tells the tangled tale of Takao Kasuga, a shy middle-school boy who falls in love with one girl and ends up being blackmailed by another in rural central Japan. Throughout a series of catastrophic adventures, Takao remains absorbed by French poet Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), which becomes the key to this engaging, wide-ranging narrative of romance and revelation. Readers have been charmed and captivated by this all-too-credible, yet often outrageous, story of awkward, young love. Flowers of Evil creator Shuzo Oshimi was recognized as one of the most gifted of the younger generation of manga artists, and in 2001 received the Tetsuya Chiba Award.

About the Author

At only 30 years of age, Shuzo Oshimi is already considered a seasoned veteran of the Japanese comics community. Winner of the most important comics awards for newcomers, the Tetsuya Chiba Award in 2001, Oshimi has been penning quirky slice-of-life dramas now for a decade for major manga publishers such as Kodansha and Futabasha.Raised in the slow laid back hills of Gunma, in mid-eastern Japan, Oshimi wished to someday escape his community for bigger pastures. Living solely off of comics and books, he is a man of words and that shows in his very humanist stories. While he has drawn nine series in the past decade, Oshimi's star began to climb just recently in 2008 with the release of his first hit Drifting Net Cafe. This horror-themed homage to the legendary Kazuo Umezzu work, Drifting Classroom, was adapted into a live action series and propelled Oshimi onto an international stage. He would soon reach new heights in 2009 with his most recent series Flowers of Evil. In 2010 and 2011, the property quietly landed on numerous must read lists and has helped revitalize the shonen genre.

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