The Bungaku Shoujo Movie: Miu, Touko, and Konoha

This post contains vague spoilers for the Bungaku Shoujo movie.

As lolikitsune and Ryan have said in their excellent posts about the Bungaku Shoujo movie, this is a film about Konoha Inoue. Despite being the lead, though, Konoha is not a character who drives events. It feels more as though things are happening around him, and he is merely reacting to them; while these events centre on him – they push him to both act and look inside himself – he does not force them to happen. (Perhaps this reflects his mostly passive personality.) Instead, the drivers of the film’s plot are Miu Asakura, and, more subtly, Touko Amano.

[ナツ]

The first of the two girls, Miu, is aggressive, possessive and divisive. She is content to lie to and manipulate others, and is also willing to risk extreme harm to herself to get what she wishes. With her comes a mess of emotions and drama and, of course, forward momentum for the film. She is behind almost all of the events that push the plot along, and her cryptic messages and strange behaviour are what force Konoha to go on something akin to a quest. In the middle of this all, she attempts to pull Konoha closer to her while simultaneously pushing others away from him. Miu is a bit of an enigmatic character in the sense that, despite the degree of calculation she employs, her reasons for doing the things that she does are largely immature. She’s clearly intelligent, but throughout the film she’s frequently presented as little more than a child.

Now we turn to Touko, the literature girl herself. Touko is often not aggressive in an explicit way, and yet she drives the plot almost as much as Miu does. Because of her, Konoha joined the Literature Club, and the story began. He wrote for her, and their relationship blossomed. She helps, supports and guides Konoha on his journey throughout the film, proving to be both a constant in his life and a true friend to him. And yet Touko is also at least partly responsible for the drastic actions Miu takes; seeing Konoha and Touko together stirred immense feeling in her, causing her to set some of her more drastic schemes in motion. It’s almost strange how someone as wonderful as Touko is able to (in part) provoke something so horrible in Miu. But, then again, it’s also Touko who is able to heal Miu so much. I think this is incredibly fitting; Touko has a phenomenal ability to soothe, through her presence and her words. She is otherworldly.

[ウルエ]

Touko is full of warmth, compassion and beauty, and she has an extraordinary capability to make things right. On the other hand, it could be argued that Miu represents the darkness people face. She displays jealousy, rage, sadness, greed. All of these emotions, too, are responses to Konoha (or, rather, to her feelings for him). One could say that Miu is dark and (sometimes) immoral, but also juvenile. She is very able to hurt people. Touko, meanwhile, is light and pure, and remarkably wise. She is able to heal people. Miu creates drama, Touko resolves it. Miu is human, while Touko is not.

I love that the two people who drive the plot are so very different, and also that they’re two people who mould Konoha into who he is and who he becomes. At the end of the movie, I felt as though I had seen Konoha grow, change, and find himself, largely because of Touko and Miu. I felt as though I had seen Miu come to a revelation and begin to heal because of Touko, and I felt as though I had seen Touko having a truly positive impact on Miu’s and Konoha’s lives, with Konoha also leaving a lasting impression on her. In my eyes, it was this – how the trio of Konoha, Touko and Miu affected each other – that made Bungaku Shoujo special.