By Yuki Yoshihara. Released in Japan as “Chou Yo Hana Yo” by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Petit Comic. Released in North America by Viz.

I actually found this volume of Butterflies, Flowers to be a little better than the first. It has some slapstick abuse of the heroine by the hero in it, but there’s less of that creeping horror you got at the start of Volume 1, mostly as you know who Masayuki actually is now and are aware of his conflicting feelings for Choko. (The slapstick is also *really* slapstick – I laughed hard seeing Choko’s eyeballs flying out of her skull.) More importantly, with their feelings resolved you lose the ‘get on with it!’ sense that comes from reading so many other shoujo manga.

Masayuki is probably the character who gets the most attention here, and we come to like him better. He makes it quite clear how much he remains a servant at heart, willing to destroy lives and even his own career just for Choko’s sake. Luckily, she immediately notes how wrong this is and forces him to realize that he doesn’t have to go that far to win her heart. He can be the standard ‘Cool and teasing’ boyfriend guy, but we do see him lose it several times, showing how much of it is merely a facade and how tightly wound he is. (The best example of this was his smashing his head through the door after seeing Choko naked.)

Choko is not quite as strong as the first volume, but that might just be because, with one exception, her moments are softer ones. Confronting the rich bitch niece of the president, for example, ends up going horribly wrong – but her low-key plea to be “the place he can return to” is fantastic, as is her flustered response once she finds that he’s trying to throw the ‘best rookie’ competition so that she can win it. The exception is in the final chapter, when an utterly exhausted Masayuki tries to brush her off and go back out to their convention, telling her to shut up and not order him around. Mistress/Servant mode goes on full blast there, and she wonders who the hell he thinks he’s talking to.

There’s a lot of humor throughout the volume, ranging from little one-panel parodies at the end of each chapter to the aforementioned cartoon violence (which I have a feeling may go too far for some). Choko turns superdeformed in moments of weakness, in many ways the opposite of Sunako from The Wallflower, who’s only seen ‘normally’ in her kickass periods. Oh, and the best joke of the entire volume I won’t spoil, except to say it involves Gundam.

Everything I’ve said about this review so far could apply to a normal shoujo romance manga. Especially one from Shogakukan, whose shoujo comics tend to be racier than its rivals. But this ISN’T a shoujo title, it’s josei. It’s wrapped in plastic, and marked as being for mature readers. And nowhere is that more apparent than the final chapter. Choko decides that the best way to get Masayuki to stay in bed and stop exhausting himself is to tie him to the bedpost and seduce him. Given that almost all the seduction to date has been on his end, seeing her take the initiative is welcome. He responds, they get hot and heavy, and then she pulls down his pants… and then the second best gag in the volume happens, and no, they don’t finally get it on. I rewrote this so as not to ruin the moment. :) (The author even apologizes at the end of the volume for her couple being “really slow” and not having had sex yet.) It’s realistic, funny, and yes, sexy. Great chapter.

This is a fun series, as well as an admirable attempt to do a mildly explicit manga in the Shojo Beat line. (The title that occurred to me as I read this, Sensual Phrase, came out long before this line came into being.) More to the point, the heroine is shy and embarrassed but not a drip or a doormat. And the hero is cool and likes to tease, but isn’t a jerk and is clearly thrown off by Choko at every turn. If you’re an older reader (this is so not for kids), I really recommend this as a great romance.