The first word I’d use to describe Bloom Into You’s manga, particularly in contrast with its animated adaptation, is sparse. Panel compositions are often defined by their vast, empty spaces, leaving plenty of room for the characters’ lingering, unspoken thoughts. This is a fine choice for a story like Bloom Into You, a story so preoccupied with the sense of deficiency or emptiness that haunts its two leads. Emptiness is what Touko sees when she considers what the future might bring – a wholly empty sky, the nothingness where her voice trails off, and the blueprint of behavior left by her sister ends.

Given this volume slightly overlaps with the final episodes of the anime, it’s easy to appreciate how distinct of an experience these crisp, unadorned lines provide. It’s certainly quite the contrast from the anime, which was always blooming in color; while the anime’s vivid oranges and pinks conveyed the strength of its characters’ feelings through overwhelming splendor, here they linger unspoken, captured in the electrified distance between them. These clean, sparse compositions match neatly with Nio Nakatani’s character designs; her linework is minimalist yet expertly chosen, and there is an inherent buoyancy to her depictions of hair. In contrast with the anime’s maximalist approach, elegance and simplicity reign here.

The benefits of manga paneling versus animated transition tools are apparent all throughout this overlapping material, clear even in simple tricks like Yuu’s explanation for why the play must change. While this was all one expository scene in the anime, the manga is able to pepper in fleeting snapshots of time spent with Touko, separating these reflections from the active drama through their position outside of the boundaries of the formal panels. The partitioning of action inside versus outside of panels in order to create distinction is one of Nakatani’s favorite tricks; for example, when Koyomi takes a breath to recenter herself, she is depicted as existing outside of the paneling, making her “taking a mental break from this situation” visually apparent.

And of course, there are more of Touko’s vast empty spaces. Later in this first chapter, her inability to conceive of a future beyond her sister’s death is again conveyed as a towering emptiness, with her head pressing up against the edge of a narrow panel while the sky looms overhead. This vertically oriented panel evokes both a great emptiness and also a sense of entrapment – the sky hangs accusing and empty, but there is still no room for Touko to move forward visually. This bleak composition is then swiftly contrasted when she receives a text from Yuu, the panels closing in to the point where Touko’s face actually overwhelms the panel. A clear visual language is thus established: thoughts of her sister make her feel isolated and distant, thoughts of Yuu make her feel vulnerable and grounded.

Both panels and characters cheer up significantly when our leads meet up, and head out for the aquarium expedition that served as the anime’s finale. Quick asides speak volumes; Touko’s self-conscious look in response to Yuu mentioning how she “wanted to invite everyone out” is our only indication of her turbulent mental state. Having recently undergone all these shifts in their relative comfort levels, and in who is truly guiding this relationship, Touko is still a little nervous about Yuu’s independence, a sentiment only articulated through when the manga chooses to linger over a reaction or stare. Nakatani is extremely careful about ensuring we always know whose perspective some panel represents (or if it represents a unified perspective, as when they visit the dolphins), ensuring the paneling will always provide its own commentary on their thoughts.

This power is at last used for good when we reach the spread of Yuu leading Touko down the aquarium’s undersea tunnel. Here, the vastness around them feels less lonely and isolating than inviting – it is full of mystery and wonder, new sights to see and new people to meet. Drawn forward by Yuu, this spread reinterprets the meaning of “empty space,” visually emphasizing that such space might actually provide opportunity, rather than oblivion. After chapters that have repeatedly seen Touko looking towards the future and seeing nothing worth pursuing, these pages serve as the visual counterpoint to that thinking, assuring her that as long as she is with Yuu, the wider world is full of opportunity and happiness.

The following chapter shifts us to Koyomi’s perspective for our first genuinely new material, charitably offering me something to talk about other than pacing in translation. We stop in with Koyomi during a moment of great providence, as she is gearing up to meet her favorite author Renma-san. When a fellow classmate notes that her writing for the play actually reminded him of Renma, Koyomi responds that “I try to avoid outright copying, but I can’t help but show it a little,” which is probably the right degree of embarrassment over this fact. All the best writers copy to some extent – really, the process of getting good at writing is consuming so much other writing, and being inspired by all of it, that the traces of different sources of inspiration alchemize into something new in your own work. But the trick, of course, is that you have to read broadly, and find your inspiration in great, challenging works in a variety of modes and genres.

The paneling once again facilitates our understanding of character emotion, with one of Nakatani’s signature vertical panels accompanying Koyomi’s shocked realization that Renma is actually a woman. The long, empty space echoes Koyomi’s momentarily blank mind, as all the conversational scripts she was rehearsing are tossed in the garbage. Later on, as she reflects on what this means for her dream, we see an echo of that aquarium tunnel. Having realized her true dream is to meet Menma as a fellow novelist, negative space is again used to emphasize the inviting horizon – as such, the panel is not entirely blank in the Touko-mindspace sense, and is instead populated with clouds to conjure a beckoning sky.

With her creative energy fired up, Koyomi swiftly rewrites the play, shifting it towards an ending that embraces the person Touko has become. As expected, Touko prefers the old script; she still can’t see a life beyond pretending to be her sister, and thus can’t relate to the heroine pushing onward and abandoning her own safety net. But having witnessed Yuu’s persistent efforts to push Touko forward, someone else is willing to take a brave step. When Touko calls on Sayaka to be her reliable defense, Sayaka declines, at last contradicting Touko for the sake of her future.

Even having stepped aside for Yuu and sabotaged her initial position for Touko, Sayaka still manages to blame herself, cursing herself for her prior unwillingness to push Touko forward. Her role in this narrative is unbearably tragic, but at least the panel of her admitting her love is rendered in all the glory it deserves. After all this time denying her feelings in order to maintain a comfortable neutral, she is inspired by Yuu to take a step forward, and admit how she feels, even if it’s only to a secondary party. But what this means for Sayaka is clear in the contrast of paneling – from a distant shot with her face obscured, she turns, and both her hair and the window curtains billow around her. It’s like Yuu is seeing her for the first time, as this is the first time Sayaka has embraced being her full, emotionally rich self.

With both her closest confidants having rejected her wishes, Touko ultimately corners Yuu and demands to kiss her, reasoning that her love for Yuu is now the only true element of her personality. Touko can only think in binaries of perfection versus worthlessness, but as Yuu assured her earlier, it is perfectly fine to be contradictory. Touko is seeking a perfection of profile that could never actually exist in real life, and as she well knows, certainly didn’t exist in the form of her sister. We are all messy, we are all many things, and we are all uncertain of our own total identity. Touko is terrified of being nothing, but we don’t have to intellectually know the entirety of our nature in order to be a distinct person, someone worth valuing or loving. No one, certainly no one in high school, can aspire to the degree of distant perfection and self-awareness that she asks of herself.

Knowing this, Yuu immediately, earnestly denies Touko’s request. As she’s quick to clarify, she’s not against being loved or kissed by Touko, but she refuses to stand by while Touko devalues herself this much. The argument made in the play is precisely the one she believes is true for Touko as well. All the people who know and love Touko aren’t doing it because she imitates her sister, they’re doing it because they care about about the person Touko truly is, doubts and insecurities and all. Touko acts as if she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, for everyone to suddenly realize she’s a faker and abandon her. But everyone else knows well the insecurities she’s suffering from, can recognize what is the mask and what is reality, and cares about her regardless.

“The person who works so hard to be more like her sister is you, Senpai,” Yuu insists. Though Touko’s goal might have been to become an inauthentic copy, her performance in pursuit of that goal was undeniably herself – and in truth, all of our self-images are to some degree aspirational, if we’re the sort of person who wants to improve ourselves at all. We are always striving towards behavior that we can’t easily, naturally embody, and that striving for a better selfhood is what makes us grow as human beings. With her friends now refusing to accept her self-hatred, Touko might just learn to embrace that pursuit while still loving her current self, contradictions and all.

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