HANAMONOGATARI: Flower Tale

Our sorry hero, his reformed girlfriend, and the amnesiac class president have all graduated from their high school out in the boondocks, and self-described Sapphist and ex-basketball ace Kanbaru, retired by reason of an “injury,” is starting her senior year and the narrator of this volume—her voice far more introspectivethan the smutty jock’s we thought we knew.

Bereft of the company of her beloved mentors, the only other person around her with any working knowledge of aberrations the juni...