What’s it about? Second-year Chidori High School student Rintaro is known for his hard face but gentle heart, working his family’s patisserie with a kind touch completely unexpected from a guy like him—doubly so as a member of a third-tier high school. But that perception all changes when he hits it off with a girl named Kaoruko, who just so happens to be one of the elite: a girl from the famous Kikyo Academy…
High schooler Rinato Tsumugi attends your bog standard all boys school—if you consider Chidori Public High School, a school known for delinquent boys, to be standard. Still, he attempts to live a pretty normal life as a Chidori student, even if the shadow cast by the elite girl’s school, Kikyo Private Academy Girl’s High School, looms ever present, even when he’s not at school.
Life is routine until he encounters Kaoruko Waguri, a regular who loves the sweet creations at his family’s patisserie. Awkward, fumbling, and incredibly teen boyish in his greeting, Rintaro thinks that’s all there is until he suddenly finds Kaoruko being harassed not too far from the shop. What ensues is a push and pull that could be reduced to a simple riff on a Romeo and Juliet dynamic but is ultimately so much more, questioning society’s expectations of delinquent boys and high-class girls and examining what it could be if students were simply the teenagers they were.
Throughout the series, there’s this very realistic tension between the girls of Kikyo Girls’, an all-girls academy, and the “rough and tumble” boys of Chidori High that gets revisited primarily through Kaoruko and Rintaro; but as the scope of the series broadens, through the lens of respective students who uphold a dynamic of elevated girls versus vulgar boys. This framing is the device, and the foundation, of the exploration of what initially is an acquaintanceship, then a friendship, then the tender spring blooms of a relationship.
That realism grounds this series in its exploration of what it means to put down the labels of socioeconomic difference and see one another for the truth: Rintaro as a genuinely good guy who has a punkish aesthetic but readily helps at his family’s business and Kaoruko as a scholarship student who’s ultimately just really sweet. Because of this dynamic, and because of the expectations and socialization around them, the bumps in the road to a love confession feel incredibly realistic. Friends interlope because Kikyo girls are claimed to be snotty and shallow, while Chidori boys are brash and loud and dangerous vessels of teenage machismo.
Yet instead of giving into the expectations of what it means to attend their respective institutions, Rintaro and Kaoruko routinely deconstruct why they present themselves the way they do by being themselves and uniting their shared social groups through kindness and openness. And in a landscape filled with rom-coms, this truly stands as a cut above the rest because the natural, gentle arc of opening up and sharing who you are is true to life. Love doesn’t happen overnight: it takes tending to the field of your heart, inclusive of all types of love we can experience. Rintaro and Kaoruko might be teens, but they understand this notion, and it allows for the deconstruction of the world around them to happen while they grow close to one another.
It’s also really heartening to see so many women on the production staff, a lot of them reuniting after working together on Akebi’s Sailor Uniform or Spy x Family—including Miyuki Kuroki as director, Rino Yamazaki as series composer, Honoka Kato on scripts, and Asuka Koki as art director. That’s not even getting into all the talented women animators, or director of photography Yukiko Nagase (Doukyusei)!
My only qualm? I’m a sucker for seeing more of a relationship develop than ending a series at the start of said something more. Thankfully, the manga is currently at twenty-two volumes and while it’s hard to find through my usual routes, I’m a bookseller: I’ve got that sweet, sweet direct connection to special order it in. And order it I will because Rintaro and Kaoruko might just be my newest rom-com obsession. They’re well worth spending my hard earned funds on.
Overall, The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity is all about assumptions: about the socioeconomic assumptions we make based on the tailoring of a school uniform belonging to a top-tier academy, about the assumptions of eyes that are perceived as angry versus kind, about two people—and eventually the people around them–—facing those down on the precipice of adulthood and deciding to dismantle what it means to be a Kikyou Girl or a Chidori Boy and deciding to, in the end, just be oneself without the pretentions or social stigmas of the labels we’re taught to automatically apply to ourselves and others.
On the end, love proves itself to be one of the most powerful forces for dismantling stereotypes and forging friendship, bonds, and the start of a romantic relationship. And while, as of now, we only see those tender petals start to blossom, there’s a definite sense that Rintaro and Kaoroku are creating a foundation that feels like a natural evolution from episode one to the finale. Like I said, because of the scope of the series, we only see the start, something I lament knowing that there’s more volumes that push their romance further. But I simultaneously couldn’t help but find this series utterly engaging, enough that I wanted to be the one here at AniFem to write the series review.
Life is full of boxes: why do we need to slot into them? Even in a society as stratified as Japan, we can always examine who we are, how we treat others, and decide to say to hell with and embrace friendship, and eventually…love. That’s why The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity is well-worth watching and definitely worth following the ongoing manga as well.
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