Hanahaki Disease

Blood-soaked petals. Thorns in your throat. A violent, hacking cough. These are the symptoms of Hanahaki disease, a fan fiction trope in which characters cough up flowers that have taken root in their body due to unrequited love.¹ Originating in manga, the trope’s name is a portmanteau of the Japanese words 花 hana (flower) and 吐きます hakimasu (to throw up).² Naoko Matsuda’s 2009 shojo manga 花吐き乙女 Hanahaki otome (The Girl Who Spit Flowers) popularized Hanahaki disease, although today Hanahaki is most prominent in fan fictions featuring male homoerotic relationships in East Asian media.³ As of September 18, 2023, over 70 percent of the fan fictions tagged “Hanahaki Disease” on the online fan fiction repository Archive of Our Own feature gay relationships.

In most stories, the illness is fatal unless the patient’s affections are returned or the patient undergoes surgery to extract the flowers from their lungs, which would also remove their feelings for their crush.⁴ Hanahaki fan fictions typically end with the patient’s beloved returning their romantic feelings and thus curing the disease. In some stories the flowers disappear, while in others they remain as a testament to the newly established homosexual couple. Hanahaki is a vital trope for theorizing queer ecologies in East Asian popular culture. To illustrate elements of the trope, we turn to excerpts from Hanahaki fan fictions featuring male-male relationships from the Chinese xianxia television series 陈情令 (The Untamed) and the Japanese anime ユーリ!!! on ICE (Yuri!!! on Ice).⁵

In direct opposition to the derogatory characterizations of homosexuality as “deviant” or “unnatural,” Hanahaki fan fictions delight in the feral, eerie, and peculiar parts of animal and vegetal life. Hanahaki features “queer” ecologies in two senses of the term: deconstructing normative environmental discourses (nature behaves strangely) and claiming LGBTQIA+ identities (nature affirms non-heteronormative sexualities). The flowers in Hanahaki bloom in bizarre ways and viscerally manifest homosexual love. The gory bouquets on which victims gag express their (presumed) one-sided same-sex desire, with characters forced to confront their desires through the earthy spectacle of flowers bursting out of one’s mouth. Following Nicole Seymour’s work on queer ecologies, a critical analysis of Hanahaki reveals how the “uniquely empathetic imaginations” of queer fictions “foment urgent environmentalist agendas.”⁶ For example, in “Blue Petals, Silver Thorns” by Grassepi, the afflicted spits out blue roses, which even within the story are a nonexistent species. The Hanahaki patient states that the blue roses are “a symbol of impossible dreams and loves,” impossible not only because blue roses do not occur in nature but also because same-sex romance is inconceivable.⁷ In other words, Hanahaki turns the impossible into the possible. This has implications for environmental humanities because, by disrupting conventional environmental imagery, Hanahaki highlights the artificial construction of nature (both environment and sexual orientation) as well as the ability to reimagine more ethical worlds, even if they appear bizarre.

Strange natures in Hanahaki are abundant.⁸ As a fan fiction trope, Hanahaki is rooted in plant horror, a motif portraying vegetation as lively and monstrous in the larger category of ecohorror fiction and film. Whereas ecohorror broadly represents fears of any nonhuman aspect of the natural world, Dawn Keetley summarizes the specific motif of plant horror as encapsulating “humans’ dread of the ‘wildness’ of vegetal nature—its untameability, its pointless excess, its uncontrollable growth.”⁹ This dread, Gary Farnell notes, derives from the inscrutability of trees, flowers, and bushes; foliage is menacing because the biological processes of plants seem totally alien to humans.¹⁰ In Hanahaki, the “uncontrollable growth” of the flowers symbolizes ardent homosexual desires. Hanahaki fan fictions teem with agential, unruly plants that proliferate wherever they wish. For example, in one The Untamed fan fiction, gentians grow in “fields that no flowers should be able to grow in . . . bloom[ing] in dark caves . . . in marshes, on mountainsides, anywhere and everywhere they please.”¹¹ The wilderness refuses to stay put in the background, with roses choking rib cages and leaves falling from lips, just as homosexuality cannot be stamped out. The flower’s germination becomes body horror: “It feels like his ribcage is going to collapse within his chest and take his lungs with them. Whatever is trying to escape him slithers up his throat. Disgusting. Finally, it comes out: an entire gentian. Bloom, stem, leaves and all.”¹² Hanahaki’s queer ecologies foreground the painful closeness between the nonhuman and queer.

The trope emerges from a longer tradition of ecohorror in post-1945 Japanese media. Japanese ecohorror is arguably influenced by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in an increased attention in Japanese media to the relationship between environmental disaster and human sicknesses, thus potentially contributing to a cultural context in which a grotesque disease—such as Hanahaki—could take root in the collective imagination. Japanese ecohorror is also arguably entangled with notions of queerness. For instance, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) features the character Tetsuo’s metastasizing body morphing between sexes, thereby symbolizing the bomb and challenging heteronormative constructs.¹³ Ecohorror and queerness are evident in the genetically modified rose-human-monster amalgamation of Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989), which blurs the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. Both the diseased body challenging heteronormativity and a horrific plant-human symbiosis are evident in Hanahaki.

The flower is the most enduring symbol of Hanahaki’s queerness, as it is associated with non-heteronormativities in Japanese. For example, the flowers 百合向 yuri (lily) and 薔薇 bara (rose) refer to lesbian and gay manga, respectively.¹⁴Bara is now used as a broad term to signify nuanced representations of gay subjectivities.¹⁵ It is noteworthy that both Hanahaki and bara use flowers to represent homosexuality. The difference is that whereas bara uses roses metaphorically, the flowers in Hanahaki become an integral part of the queer character. Hanahaki flowers thus move beyond representing queerness to explore what Seymour calls “deeply ambivalent” queer ecologies, which are neither positive nor negative but ways to “[grapple] with our messy reality, in which environmental destruction is already here and, in many cases, irreversible.”¹⁶

Hanahaki is a vital trope that potently visualizes queer ecologies in the era of global warming. Emerging from Japanese manga and transnational East Asian fan cultures, Hanahaki powerfully captures the scary intimacies of the human/nonhuman. The uncanny flowers of Hanahaki force us to reckon with our affective attachments to nature, however freakish and dark. Hanahaki prompts the question: how do we care for one another and for the earth under dire conditions? Ecohorror, Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles contend, “may be the dominant mode in which we talk to ourselves about the global climate crisis and the real-life ecological horrors of our current Anthropocenic moment.”¹⁷ Yet Hanahaki’s ambivalent queer ecologies imagine new futurities of love amid such ecological horrors, as shown by the conclusion of the Yuri!!! on Ice fan fiction: “The blue rose stands proud and strong in the vase. The impossible love is dead, but it remains, leading into greater things. They can only grow from here.”¹⁸The Untamed fan fiction similarly concludes that the flowers—and the love that they embody—endure long after the end of the story, but it goes further by showing that love and care can emerge from neglected and barren spaces: the flowers “pepper fields that no flowers should be able to grow in.”¹⁹

Hanahaki’s flowers remain as an enduring figure embodying both the love and scary intimacies between the human and the nonhuman world. The trope begins with the premise that the afflicted person will die, however, most Hanahaki texts end on a note that prevents death once love is expressed. Similarly, we argue that the predominant rhetoric of the earth dying is a misdiagnosis, and that things could turn around with better expression of love and care for the earth and the human and nonhuman worlds it houses. By breathing new life into ideas of the natural beyond heteronormative and Western paradigms, we become more attuned to potential inclusive ecological futures.

Acknowledgments

We presented an earlier version of this article at the Popular Culture Association’s Annual Conference (2022). We are very grateful to our chair, Maria K. Alberto, our fellow participants, and the audience who offered their feedback on our work.

Notes

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