Charles Baudelaire 
The Flowers of Evil 

The Flowers of Evil is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Shūzō Oshimi. It was serialized in Kodansha’s Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine between September 2009 and May 2014. A confession of hopes, dreams, failures, and sins, The Flowers of Evil attempts to extract beauty from the malignant. Unlike traditional poetry that relied on the serene beauty of the natural world to convey emotions, Baudelaire felt that modern poetry must evoke the artificial and paradoxical aspects of life. 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.