When I think about it more, the flower on Hikari's head symbolizes a brain illness. She kept her feelings to herself just so she wouldn't burden her sensei because it was worsening. She was bedridden and couldn't go to school. Sensei visited her and couldn't help but to confess anyway, and witnessed Hikari's last breath.
Those plants growing underneath those bandages Sensei was wearing were probably due to self-harm. She wanted to join Hikari so badly but waited until graduation. It was quite fishy because she knew when she would die after one of the students said she was retiring that year because Hikari didn't, which means she planned it all out. She ended her own life just to be with Hikari.
And now, they're together.
I actually didn't stop to think that everything could be a metaphor and not just fairy tale fantasy tragedy
This really opened my eyes
Murasakino always makes such thought provoking works
I got the impression the feelings Sensei felt were akin to guilt. She never really fell in love, yet Hikari loved her so much she wished herself into becoming flowers, just so Sensei would love her back. Sensei felt a strong need to join Hikari, and fulfill the girl's final desire.
But Sensei went to visit her even before finding out about her wish, didn't she?
To me her feelings read as love; or perhaps it was something between love and guilt. The way I saw it, she couldn't tell it was love, because she had been told that if she ever fell in love, she would immediately know, which wasn't the case for her.
In the end Sensei calls Hikari an idiot, presumably because she went and became a flower wishing that would earn Sensei's love. And she calls herself an idiot for following her. Hikari made that wish out of love, and the way this scene played out makes me feel that Sensei also followed her out of love.
Either way, I do believe that there was more to this story than the surface, just like You Are My Angela. What it made me think was how a person may wish to change in order to win another's love, without realising that the change is actually harmful to themselves. The interpretation of her having a fatal illness is definitely very on point, but somehow I want to tie it back to how this was her own wish and can't seem to quite grasp it. Maybe she had thought that she'd be able to get her attention if she were sick...?
Then again, perhaps there were more than one ideas put into this.
Anyway, very interesting story, and I'll definitely come back to it at some point.
last edited at Sep 25, 2021 7:59PM