The Grisaia series may explore its five main heroines in considerable depth over its duration and various routes, but ultimately, the central character to the overall narrative is protagonist Kazami Yuuji.
Yuuji is one of the most distinctive, memorable and unusual visual novel protagonists in the entire medium. Through The Fruit of Grisaia’s exploration of him over the course of the five heroines’ routes, we learn a few details about him and his mysterious past. If you had come to the series completely blind, this would have the effect of gradually shifting your expectations: what might initially appear to be a relatively conventional high school-themed ren’ai (romance) visual novel slowly reveals itself to be much, much more complicated than you might expect.
And then you come to The Labyrinth of Grisaia, whose “Grand Route”, also known as The Cocoon of Caprice, finally gives us some concrete answers about who Yuuji is, why he is the way he is and the circumstances that brought him to Mihama Academy in the first place.
The Fruit of Grisaia firmly establishes the central setting of Mihama Academy as an environment specifically set up to support young people who have, for one reason or another, fallen out of mainstream education due to traumatic or otherwise unusual events in their respective pasts. The exact circumstances of the five heroines’ routes don’t become apparent until their respective routes, as we’ve already explored.
Yuuji, meanwhile, remains something of a mystery right up until the end of this first installment, though across all of the five routes, we’re introduced to a number of plot threads from his past that are subsequently picked up and explored fully in The Cocoon of Caprice.
Specifically, we learn that he is some sort of “agent” with an organisation known as “Ichigaya”, which appears to have some sort of connection to the CIA. We know his parents are both deceased due to an incident that he believes was his fault. We know he had an older sister that he holds in unusually high regard, who was an important part of heroine Amane’s past and who is now apparently deceased. We know that he attributes the most important parts of his upbringing to someone he habitually refers to as his “master”, subsequently revealed to be an older woman named Asako. And we know that he very much knows his way around a woman.
Perhaps most importantly, we know that until he encounters the five women of Mihama Academy, he is struggling to find meaning in his life, unsure of whether he has any true “value” to the world. Something has kept him stubbornly clinging on to life without losing hope completely, however; something has stopped him from giving up.
That’s a lot of baggage for a young man to be carrying around with him. So what on Earth happened?
Yuuji’s childhood was, it’s fair to say, a total mess. If one had to blame this fact on one single factor, it would be his sister Kazami Kazuki — though it’s also worth noting that her impact on his childhood wasn’t directly her fault.
“At the age of 8, she had the IQ of a genius,” reads a report penned by Yuuji himself on his early years. “Given that the test was calibrated to her age, this wasn’t an impossible score by any means, but it was far, far above the average. “Her parents argued that Kazuki should skip grades to pursue more challenging lessons, but testimony suggests that Kazuki herself wanted to live as a ‘normal child’ to the degree possible. Kazami Kazuki could do anything she put her mind to better than most. Still, she was particularly gifted as an artist. It’s said that a painting she completed at the age of ten was appraised in the millions of yen.”
With an older sibling like that, it’s little surprise that the rather ordinary young Yuuji would have trouble meeting the lofty expectations his parents — and particularly his rather greedy father — would have of him. As a result, Yuuji became rather withdrawn, lacking confidence in his own abilities and deathly afraid of his father.
“When I failed, they’d say ‘And you call yourself Kazami’s brother?'” he explains. “And when, every once in a while, I succeeded, the compliments were always something like ‘Just what I’d expect from Kazami’s brother.’ I mean, I definitely wasn’t that talented, but I didn’t feel like I was depressingly incompetent, either. Guess you could say I was a pretty normal kid. Just not in the same league as my genius sister.”
Kazuki was a complex young woman, even in her childhood. Mature and wise beyond her years, her “genius” manifested itself not only through her artistic talents, but also through her understanding of her place in the world — and of the effect that had on Yuuji. Recognising that she was monopolising the affections of the Kazami parents, she took it upon herself to take care of the young Yuuji, offering him advice and support even as he started to suffer greater and greater levels of emotional — and, at times, physical — abused from his father.
In particular, the young Kazuki encouraged Yuuji to try new things and not be afraid to fail at them. This was difficult for him to accept at first, since perceived “failure” was usually what invited his father’s wrath down upon him.
“It’s such a waste of your potential not to try new things just because you’re scared of losing,” says Kazuki to the young Yuuji. “Try out all sorts of things and make all sorts of mistakes. That’s what children are supposed to do. What really matters is that you don’t give up. Learn to be stubborn, Yuuji, and one day it’ll be your greatest weapon. Even in the most difficult of situations, even when everyone around you starts to give up hope, you’ll be the one who says ‘not yet’ and stands back up. That’s the sort of man I want you to become.”
Kazuki’s position as the “primary meal ticket” to the Kazami household — even after deliberately “handicapping herself in pursuit of normality”, as Yuuji puts it, means that she ultimately gains pretty much total dominance over her family, whether or not she really wants it. And the question of whether or not she did really want that sort of power is one that is somewhat up for debate, since she quickly learned to leverage her apparent ability to influence the actions of others.
“Even for our parents, Kazuki’s word was law,” explains Yuuji. “They treated her with a respect that wasn’t far from worship. But strong sunlight creates deep shadows, and it’s probably fair to say that I was a neglected child.” He goes on to cite an example when he is left home alone in the family household with only some stale bread to eat; having at least learned to be resourceful during his childhood of neglect, he discovers that soaking the old bread in water makes it surprisingly soft and palatable.
Kazuki, meanwhile, is horrified to discover the level to which he has sunk. It is, however, telling that Yuuji’s first reaction to Kazuki’s horror is not that he is doing something unusual; rather, he is afraid that he wasn’t supposed to eat the bread in the first place. He is quickly put in his place by his sister, however — and from hereon we see the two develop a close relationship, with Kazuki very much proving herself to be a dominant force in Yuuji’s development, right down to attempting to mould him into, as she put in her earlier years, “the man she wants him to become”.
This eventually crossed a line into incestuous sexual abuse, with Kazuki very much taking the lead as usual. Even years later, Yuuji is unwilling to speak particularly ill of his sister’s behaviour, however, and maintains that there were no cruel intentions behind it.
“I don’t know if ‘abuse’ is exactly… Well, hmm, I guess you could call it that…” he explains to his case officer JB with uncharacteristic hesitance. “I guess you could call it ‘harassment’, sure. But it didn’t really feel that way at the time. I didn’t even think we were doing anything particularly strange.”
The pair’s incestuous relationship stopped short of full intercourse, but they were otherwise extremely intimate with one another. Having never known anything else, Yuuji went along with it — perhaps due to the fact that his parents’ emotional abuse had left him craving the feeling of being genuinely loved.
“My sister loved me so much,” he explains. “It almost made me want to cry. I couldn’t do anything for her, so at the very least, I had to obey her. Kazuki definitely wasn’t a ‘normal’ big sister, but I’d figured that out a long time ago. It wasn’t anything worth getting surprised about now.”
“Kazuki was Kazuki,” continues Yuuji. “Nothing more, nothing less. But if you really want something more conceptual, I guess I saw her as something akin to God. I was the only one who knew what my sister really was. And that was only because she’d discussed her real intentions so frankly with me ever since we were young. Even our parents weren’t aware they were dancing on Kazuki’s strings.”
With such a strong influence present in their lives, it’s perhaps understandable that the Kazami family unit, as fragile as it already was, would fall apart completely following the apparent death of “God” in the bus crash explored in Amane’s route of The Fruit of Grisaia. And although Yuuji’s life had been challenging up until this point, this would prove to be the turning point that would break him completely, ultimately moulding him into the unusual young man he is today.
As his father descended into alcoholism and, concurrently, his abuse of his surviving family members escalated considerably, Yuuji and his mother ran away on several occasions, though each time his father would ultimately track them down. Her mother displayed remarkable stubbornness in the face of this adversity, however; that very quality that Kazuki had urged Yuuji to nurture in that conversation all those years ago.
“I don’t think she was worried about my safety for its own sake,” muses Yuuji, remembering those dreadful days. “Now that Kazuki was gone, my mother had simply grown dependent on me. I was the only ally she had left. Telling herself ‘I’ll hang in there for your sake, dear’ was probably the only way Mom could see living as anything but a source of meaningless pain. The idea of protecting her only remaining child was a convenient means of bolstering her courage against the temptation to die.”
And she protected Yuuji right up until the very end. Even when her husband eventually caught up with the pair, she submitted herself to being raped by him — one last, desperate attempt by him to produce another “golden egg” like Kazuki — in order to allow Yuuji to escape.
Yuuji’s mind was at breaking point by this stage, however. During his flight from the scene, he started to feel more and more fury at the situation and his father in particular; the initial, passive thought of “I wish he’d just die” subsequently escalated into “I’ll kill him”.
“Stand up. Fight back,” Yuuji recalls thinking at the time. “Nothing was ever going to change if we kept running away. Nothing was ever going to change unless I changed myself. No matter how bitter reality might be, I had to face it. I had to fight back. There was no other choice.”
Filled with raging, irrational emotions, Yuuji prepared to make the irreversible decision to murder his father, but he’s given momentary pause.
“Fierce anger pulsed through me until it felt like my head would burst,” he explains. “And cutting through it all, I thought I heard my sister’s voice. ‘Use your right hand for your chopsticks and your pencil. Use your left when you’re batting or throwing a ball.’ But which hand do I use for killing someone…?”
Yuuji quickly settled on his right hand, which is the birth of the belief he mentions in Makina’s route in The Fruit of Grisaia that his right arm houses a “demon”. He comes to associate killing with his right arm –and his loss of that limb in Makina’s good ending is, of course, deeply symbolic as a result.
Fleeing the scene at his mother’s insistence after he’d done the deed, it’s not long before he was overcome with remorse at what he’d done — but he was too late to stop his mother from performing her final act to protect him: pinning the blame for the murder on herself, and killing herself to make the scene look like a murder-suicide.
“After convincing me to run away, she’d written a note stating ‘I murdered my husband,’ then took her own life,” Yuuji explains, though his own recollection of the incident is rather hazy and is consequently mostly based on it being explained to him after the fact. “[The doctor] showed me her final message. The characters were warped and mismatched in size; it was the writing of someone who’d lost their grip on reality. And at the very end of that note, she’d left me her usual apologies. ‘Why did it turn out like this? What did we do to deserve any of this? I’m sorry, Yuu-chan, I’m so sorry…’ Those were my weak-willed mother’s final words, written in the last moment before her fear of reality overwhelmed her fear of death.”
It’s not hard to see from this incident why Yuuji admonishes Yumiko in particular so frequently and emphatically when she apologises for things that really aren’t her fault. He interprets his mother’s constant apologies for his father’s behaviour as being “weak”, and he perceives that weakness — both from his mother and his young self — as being responsible for the way things eventually turned out. It is, as a result, perfectly natural that he doesn’t want anyone else to fall into this same trap of “weakness”, which is why he subsequently encourages Yumiko to say “thank you” instead whenever she feels the urge to apologise rising up inside herself.
Yuuji’s “fall” truly began with the murder of his father, but he was pulled deep into the darkness as a result of his adoption by a former acquaintance of his father, one Kirihara. This man had taken an immediate interest in Yuuji long before even Kazuki’s death, so he immediately stepped forward to adopt the troubled youngster after the dust had settled from the murder and suicide of his parents.
“Every time that man named Kirihara came to our house, he would send strange glances in my direction,” remembers Yuuji. “Something about the way he looked at me was definitely different from the other adults I’d met so far. Even at the time, I vaguely sensed the desire in his eyes, and it made me uncomfortable. Somehow, it didn’t seem like the way an adult should look at a child.”
Kirihara’s motivations for taking an interest in Yuuji are never made completely explicit, but from his behaviour towards the young boy, we can infer that they weren’t entirely wholesome. Whether or not they crossed the line into outright paedophilia is a matter of interpretation, but it would be an understandable and plausible conclusion to draw.
“Kirihara loved dressing me up like a doll and sitting me on his lap,” Yuuji explains. “Lacking the will to object, I did exactly what he wanted. In those days, I was completely hollow. I couldn’t muster the energy to speak. Kirihara’s caresses didn’t even register as unpleasant. ‘Emptiness’ might be another word for absolute emotional overload. Even to myself, it was eerie how calm I felt.”
Yuuji’s “emptiness” was eventually broken by one of Kirihara’s acquaintances attempting to sadistically and sexually abuse him — an incident that triggered memories of his abusive father and, subsequently, caused his desire to lash out in a murderous rage to resurface.
“I’d sealed it all away, made a conscious effort to forget,” says Yuuji, describing his inner turmoil at that point. “By deliberately emptying my mind, I’d found a kind of peace. But that man violently pulled everything back to the surface.”
Kirihara, having been established as a charismatic but undoubtedly loathsome character by this point, wasn’t angry at Yuuji for murdering his acquaintance. In fact, he praised him for it.
“There was real joy in his face,” recalls Yuuji. “It was the irrepressible glee of a man who’d discovered an unexpected use for a toy he’d thought purely ornamental.”
There’s a big question here: had Kirihara really seen Yuuji as purely ornamental, or had he perceived some greater “purpose” in this young boy even during their first encounter at a relatively stable period in the youngster’s life? Yuuji seems to believe the former, but Kirihara was instrumental in establishing Kazuki as a force to be reckoned with in the art world, so it’s not unreasonable to draw the conclusion that he may have been attempting to manipulate the situation to his advantage for many years. Specifically, he may have been attempting to establish a sense of turmoil and resentment in Yuuji by pitting him against his family, using his sister’s “genius” as a catalyst.
Regardless of his original intentions, Kirihara — or “Heath Oslo” as he subsequently becomes known for the remainder of the narrative — ultimately recruited Yuuji into a training facility he established, where it becomes clear beyond any doubt that this mysterious man is a terrorist, and he wants Yuuji to follow in his footsteps. Yuuji ends up with somewhat conflicted feelings by this point: he recognises that he’s starting to discover things that he’s genuinely good at — marksmanship proves to be a particular talent — but he also understands that his position as “Heath Oslo’s pet” wasn’t going to make him particularly popular.
“In any group, those who’re singled out as ‘special’ will earn their share of envy, no matter what the circumstances,” says Yuuji, remembering his time at Oslo’s peculiar “school”. “I could understand the feeling. I’d felt the same way about the attention Kazuki earned within our family. I could do most things if I tried hard enough, and I always tried hard. But that only added to the antipathy the others felt for me. After all, it was a ‘school’ full of people who’d fallen out of society, misshapen puzzle pieces with no place in the world. In that place, the ‘successful’ always inspired jealousy and hatred.”
Ultimately, Yuuji wasn’t quite able to let go of his humanity sufficiently to become a totally mindless killing machine. During his “graduation” test from Oslo’s school, when he was challenged to fight a duel to the death against Marin, a female classmate with whom he had enjoyed a close, friendly and supportive relationship, his memories of the past resurfaced and prevented him from taking that final step over the precipice.
“In that moment, I found myself looking straight into her face,” he recalls, describing the experience of being forced to inflict terrible physical harm on a girl he had liked, perhaps even loved. “Her battered, swollen, ghastly face, dark with bruises, red with blood. That face woke up something that had been lying latent inside me, and suddenly my body wasn’t moving like I wanted it to. That face. I’d seen that face before. It was the face of my mother, hanging from the ceiling. Someone had stabbed a rod of ice into the centre of my heart. I trembled uncontrollably at the sudden cold inside me. ‘What am I doing? Hitting a woman until she looks like this… how am I any different from him?'”
Yuuji continued to search for meaning in the terrible events of his life, even as he lay battered and broken having completely yielded to his drug-addled opponent in their final confrontation. He saw his relenting in his assault not as giving up, but of giving Marin the opportunity to escape the situation in which she had found herself — though he was also keenly aware that “graduating” from Oslo’s horrific school was absolutely not the way one should go about finding a normal life. As it transpired, Yuuji was absolutely correct; some two weeks after Marin graduated, she died on her first real “job”.
As Yuuji is explaining these incidents to JB, his classmates at Mihama are simultaneously reading a reconstructed early draft of his report, and find themselves compelled to continue reading, even as it gets more and more harrowing. Michiru in particular finds it very difficult to understand why Yuuji didn’t just give up and kill himself; a callback to her route in The Fruit of Grisaia where she was both unable to end her own life and unable to save her friend from suicide, a defining event that helped make her into the person she is today — beneath the hard, tsundere outer shell, of course.
“Why didn’t Yuuji kill himself?” she asks, clearly suffering a great deal from what she has read. “I know! I know, I don’t have any right to say that, but I still want to know! I mean, if you die, that’s the end, right? You’re done! It’s all over! Isn’t that a heck of a lot easier? I mean, yeah, it’s scary! Dying is scary! But once you’re dead, it all goes away! All the good stuff, all the bad stuff! You’re back to nothing! If you’ve got the courage to die, at least it’s all over! Who cares about what happens after? Lots of people say they don’t wanna live! Most of them are too scared to die! But if you’re brave enough to live through all that pain, aren’t you brave enough to kill yourself? If you’re just gonna stagger miserably through life, aren’t you better off dead?”
“I think he needed someone who would acknowledge him,” suggests Yumiko, referring to Yuuji’s relationship with Oslo having “saved” him in some twisted manner. “Someone who would accept him and praise him, no matter how clumsily he struggled. Even if that person was evil to the core.”
“That’s an escape even worse than suicide,” says Michiru, letting slip her real feelings about those who simply leave their worldly worries behind — and also referring back to her route, in which Yuuji demonstrates clearly to her that no, one’s death is not just “the end” thanks to everything and everyone you leave behind.
“He was a child himself, you know,” continues Yumiko. “One of those shameless, thoughtless children you hate so much.”
After her outburst, Michiru runs away, clearly unable to process the conversation any longer. The remainder of the group take the opportunity to ponder exactly why she claims to despite children so much — and, more to the point, exactly why she reacted so strongly to Yuuji’s story.
“What she hates is herself,” suggests Yumiko, referring back to Michiru’s traumatic past of being abused by her tutors.. “Or the child she used to be. She can’t stand remembering how powerless she was. She despised the carefree children that surrounded her, innocently enjoying their lives while she suffered, and seeing that bitter jealousy in herself only intensified her self-loathing. Looking at Kazami-kun’s past, she must have seen a mirror image of the person she was back then. It’s no wonder she’d be on edge.”
In other words, hearing Yuuji’s story makes Michiru afraid — and, more than likely, grateful — that she hadn’t ended up in such a horrific situation herself. As her route in The Fruit of Grisaia demonstrates, she nonetheless ended up with plenty of her own troubles to deal with after her medical issues. And there’s another consideration, too.
“Unlike Matsushima-san,” continues Yumiko, “Kazami-kun was able to move forward and take control of his life, and she couldn’t accept that he’d found such a different path from hers. Hence the outburst.”
This “taking control of his life” isn’t an immediate process, however, and Michiru has even misunderstood the situation a little. We learn more about this stage of Yuuji’s life when he and JB continue their discussion — this time with JB playing a more active role, as this was the point at which she came into his life, along with the woman Yuuji would come to refer to as his “master”: Kusakabe Asako.
The young Yuuji was rescued from Oslo’s compound during a partially botched raid by a branch of the CIA, the Central Intelligence and Research Second Division, or CIRS for short. Asako played a leading role in this raid and brought Yuuji back from his imprisonment; he’d gradually been losing his grip on reality since graduating from Oslo’s terrible “school”, and would often be restrained in a dark basement to prevent him from doing harm to himself.
Asako, seeing something of herself in this battered and broken young man, arranged to take him in as a foster parent. JB was initially perturbed by this but, recalling her own childhood in an orphanage with Asako, she understood where her friend and colleague was coming from.
“Abandoned ‘dogs’ are abandoned for a variety of reasons,” she recalls. “In my case, and Asako’s, the reason involved our parents’ problems. That’s probably the single most typical situation. Some people can’t afford to raise their children. Some are inclined to violence and abuse. Some become parents before they’re really adults themselves. Situations like that naturally give rise to victims. Kazami Yuuji was just another perfectly ordinary case… another child whose life was disrupted by his family circumstances.”
It’s not quite that simple, though, as JB continues: “That said, ‘ordinarily’ we expect that a child who suffered such hardships will be ‘saved’ once they’re over. But the man who took in Yuuji after the death of his family was, of all things, an international terrorist, The random cruelty of it was unspeakable. Not only had his parents failed him, his ‘foster father’ had trained him to bite anybody who touched him. A traumatised puppy, tottering down the path to ruin without a hint of doubt in his mind. That was Kazami Yuuji in a nutshell.”
Asako understood this when she made the decision to take responsibility to Yuuji. As a “victim” herself, she knew very well how the world worked, and expresses this up-front to Yuuji as she comes to take him home.
“Listen up, Yuuji,” she said to him. “At the end of the day, the world’s one big pile of shit. There’s no salvation anywhere, especially for maggots like you. No-one’s gonna lend you a hand. People who sidle up to you acting like they’re saints are the worst bastards of all. You know that much by now, right? I’m not gonna be ‘nice’ to you. I’m not interested in what you can do for the world, or why you were born, and I don’t give a shit why you’ve stayed alive so far, either. Seriously, who cares?”
Asako’s words may have sounded harsh, but they reflect a clear understanding of Yuuji and a respect for his situation. In many ways, her coarse words demonstrated the most “acceptance” Yuuji had ever felt in his life prior to that point, which would go a long way to explaining how he came to rely on Asako so much.
Asako was not the greatest role model by conventional standards, but Yuuji’s circumstances were far from “conventional”, and she consequently proved herself to be exactly what he needed to start rebuilding his life and start the long process of understanding his place in the world. Part of this involved a fairly substantial amount of “tough love” on Asako’s part.
“You’ve got it all wrong, kid,” she said to him when he started expressing his constant fears that everyone who had ever gotten close to him had died. “They didn’t die because they got close to you. They died because you sat around doing nothing. You’re too old to get away with the helpless, blubbering baby number, all right? When someone helps you out, pay them back in kind. Problem is, you convinced yourself you’re not capable of that, and you don’t know how to try. That’s why things keep going south for you.”
The philosophy of “when someone helps you out, pay them back in kind” is one of Asako’s many life lessons that Yuuji takes to heart. Indeed, it’s advice that he ends up giving to several of his classmates at Mihama Academy — particularly Amane and Yumiko, both of whom are riddled with guilt and self-doubt about aspects of their pasts, and unable to move beyond this into feeling gratitude for the sacrifices that others made on their behalf.
This is a lesson that took Yuuji some time to learn himself. Indeed, even after seemingly settling into his new life living with Asako in her remote forest cabin, one night he found himself compelled to flee from his new living arrangements after hearing Oslo’s voice in his subconscious. But the steps forward he had already taken by this point allowed him to re-evaluate the situation from a whole new perspective.
“This woman named ‘Kusakabe Asako’ just might be able to help me,” he recalls thinking at the time. “Even if the devil caught up to me, and my right hand tried to kill someone again… she might be able to stop me. Even if my hand tried to kill her, she might be able to survive. She didn’t seem like the type to die easily. Maybe she’d even be kind enough to kill me instead. There aren’t many saints out there; no-one’s really ‘on your side.’ I knew all that by now, but… maybe I could try trusting that woman anyway. Couldn’t hurt to give it one last shot, right?”
From here, Yuuji resolved to pay attention to Asako’s teachings, learning from them in an attempt to be more like her. Her first lesson for him was on the nature of “strength”.
“When you use power correctly, it’s ‘strength’,” she explained to him. “When you use it incorrectly, it’s ‘violence’. And you’re the one who has to decide what’s ‘correct’ and what isn’t. You don’t have to do something just because you can. Not using your strength is another form of power. An iron will moves mountains, see? Real ‘strength’ isn’t anything like a knife in the hand of some stupid thug. It’s something a man uses when he has to be a man. Whether he’s protecting the weak, or standing up for his way of life, there comes a time in any man’s life when he needs to fight, no matter what the cost.”
Yuuji, up until this point, has looked back on incidents such as his murder of his father as gratuitous violence; terrible things that his right hand “made him do”, but here, Asako is explaining that sometimes, there are situations when using one’s power is the right thing to do; sometimes, there are situations when taking some sort of decisive action is the correct choice, even if the consequences may seem troublesome.
“No matter how badly you get knocked around,” she continued, “you haven’t lost the fight until you fold. Doesn’t matter how desperate things are. There’s always a chance, as long as you don’t give up.”
It all comes back to stubbornness, as Kazuki once told him; it all comes down to refusing to give up, even when you’re knocked to the ground. Slowly but surely coming to understand this, Yuuji threw himself into his lessons with Asako with the ultimate intention of succeeding her in her role as “agent 9029” for CIRS — a desire which he initially kept to himself.
Complications arose as a result of the “safety pin” that Asako placed in Yuuji’s mind through hypnotic suggestion — an attempt to override the brainwashing that Oslo placed on him to turn him into a remorseless killing machine. Yuuji finds himself unable to kill anything — even a wild bear that breaks into the cabin and kills his pet dog. Frustrated and terrified by his own impotence, he begged Asako to let him become “strong” like her.
“You said I’m fine the way I am, but I don’t think I can take any more of this,” he said. “I want to be strong. I want to be like you, Asako. I’m not talking about physical power, or knowing how to fight… I want to become a genuinely ‘strong’ person… I think I owe that to her… No matter how I spend the rest of my life, I’m going to die with a lot of regrets. So in the meantime, I might as well try to do something worthwhile. I might not be good for much, but I want to find a way to be useful to someone. If I can manage that, I think I’ll be able to die with a smile on my face.”
From here, the relationship between the pair changed somewhat. Rather than being one of “child” and “parent” as it had been up until this point — despite Yuuji already calling Asako “master” by now — it became one of experienced veteran and disciple. And Asako’s lessons were nothing if not thorough, running the gamut from marksmanship to sleeping with women. The latter lessons, unsurprisingly, proved to be a rather shocking development for JB, but Asako dismissed them as just another lesson in the art of stubbornness.
“A woman like me is definitely a bit too much for a virgin like that to handle,” she says, “but I wanted to teach him that nothing’s impossible if you really fuckin’ try, you know? I don’t want him to give up on anything before he even tries. It doesn’t matter if a woman’s totally out of your league, if you want to sleep with her, you can.”
Asako’s lessons in the art of carnal pleasures mirrored Yuuji’s relationship with Kazuki to an uncanny degree. “He’s definitely had some experience bein’ played with by women, y’know?” she explained when JB interrogated her after the fact. “And when a woman hurts you, another woman’s the best medicine, right?”
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