hanahaki

English

Etymology

From Japanese 花吐き病 (hanahaki-byō), from 花 (hana, “flower”) + 吐く (haku, “to vomit”). An invention of Matsuda Naoko (松田奈緒子) for her manga Hanahaki Otome (『花吐き乙女』).

Noun

hanahaki (uncountable)

(chiefly Japanese fiction) A fictional illness in which a person bearing an unrequited love coughs up flower petals until they die or their feelings are reciprocated. The disease can also be cured by a surgical procedure that removes the flowers, but this will result in them losing their feelings of affection and all memories of the person they loved.
- 2019, Unzila Iftikhar, Before Your Eyes - Despite It All, You Still Rise‎^[1], page 9:
  The cascading emotions are
  giving me hanahaki tonight, they're
  beautiful but it's suffocating.
- 2020, Katharine Elizabeth McCain, "Today Your Barista Is: Genre Characteristics in The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe", dissertation submitted to Ohio State University, page 27:
  It is familiar. In that most everyone is familiar with a coffee shop and thus understands the AU’s basic premise on sight. Unlike, say, Hanahaki fics.
- 2020, Ivy Wong, "The Cure for Hanahaki", English Literary Magazine (St. Paul's Co-Educational College, Hong Kong), page 22:
  However, to a hanahaki patient, it's probably far more terrifying for them to have the surgery to cure their feelings than the disease.
- For more quotations using this term, see Citations:hanahaki.