Profile Meme
[Character Name] Kazutaka Muraki
[Canon] Yami no Matsuei
[Point Taken from Canon] Late volume 8, as he's "dying" in the lab fire
[Age] 34 in canon, 36 in Somarium
[Gender] Male
[Sexual Orientation] Pansexual - he doesn't care as long as someone's pretty or useful
[Eye Color] Left eye is silver, right eye is pale blue
[Hair Color] Silver
[Height] 6'4
[Other] No distinguishing marks and his fake right eye is hard to tell as a fake aside from the part where it looks creepy
[Clothing]
[Background] Both Muraki’s father and grandfather were doctors who worked to genetically modify him - Muraki's mentor inwardly calls him a "bug-filled project" before being killed, blaming them for it and Muraki himself has inner monologue calling both himself and Tsuzuki "genetically modified, produced imitation of 'life'" and his mother was obsessed with porcelain dolls, often treating her only child like one of them instead of a person. When he was young, he learned that he had a half-brother, Saki, born as the product of his father’s affair with a patient on or near the day he was conceived. He hated his father for the affair and for taking Saki into their household.
At some point, Muraki began to blame Saki for a change in how his mother treated him, later saying that he stole the heart of someone Muraki cared for. His parents died under mysterious circumstances - the anime implies that Saki played a part in it while the manga has Muraki stating that he killed his mother himself. Whatever the case, Saki was killed by the family’s guards and Muraki vowed to learn how to bring people back from the dead to kill his half-brother himself, although the only part of Saki that he has is his head and spinal cord.
Muraki went to college, where he became third in the family line of doctors and made the only two friends he’d ever have - Oriya Mibu, who seems to have helped Muraki gain some of his ties to important business and political figures because of his family’s history of running a restaurant that fronts a geisha house, and Ukyou Sakuraiji, a sickly woman he becomes engaged to perhaps because she always looks far younger than her true age. It’s not known how he acquired his powers or when he began to prey on those pretty enough to attract his attention, but he says that he does it to gain the power to keep people from dying.
At some point, he learns through his grandfather’s research about a man who did not eat or sleep for nine years and keeps that knowledge stored in the back of his mind. Also during this time period, he rapes and curses a thirteen-year-old boy named Hisoka Kurosaki as punishment for witnessing one of his murders, calling him “too pretty to kill quickly”, though he'd only just killed a pretty young woman, and sealing up his memory of what happened. The curse left Hisoka in terrible pain for three years before he died
Much to his surprise, he meets both that victim and his grandfather’s patient, Asato Tsuzuki, in their second lives as shinigami, death gods who work wherever people are not dying according to the proper order. Muraki quickly becomes obsessed with Tsuzuki and goes out of his way to kill in ways that attract the pair’s attention and investigation so that he can hopefully win over both Tsuzuki’s body and his mind. Our introduction to him in canon is in Nagasaki, where Muraki has revived the body of a singer who killed herself, but as a vampire and not a human, both so she can continue making money for her stepmother and so that Muraki can take the life energy from the vampire's victims even as the singer takes their blood.
Tsuzuki and Hisoka arrive, though they don't know they're partners when they first meet, and work to find out that Muraki is the true Nagasaki Vampire. Muraki kidnaps Hisoka and uses him as bait to lure Tsuzuki to a church where he hopes to find out how strong Tsuzuki is. After a magical battle, Muraki is temporarily beaten back and continues his evildoings elsewhere.
When we see him next, it's again in a place where strange things have been happening, forcing Tsuzuki and Hisoka to investigate. This time, the strangeness is disappearances and changes in life spans tied to a cruise ship. They suspect Muraki as soon as they see him, given what they know of him already, but they're forced to reevaluate their theories when people onboard die and Muraki ends up as the second victim of strychnine poisoning. But Muraki isn't dead, simply in a state of suspended animation. He comes back three days later, revealing that he was the one manipulating the killer. Tsubaki, one of his patients, had been drugged and manipulated into having an evil second personality to eliminate threats to Muraki's plans, including her own father.
Muraki used the ship to transplant organs into wealthy businessmen to prolong their lives. Organs that came from poor or street children he purchased and then removed their limbs, sewed their mouths shut, and continually replaced their real organs with artificially created, likely inferior ones in order to prolong how useful they were to him. He sinks the ship to destroy all evidence and once again eludes capture.
Things come to a head in Kyoto. Muraki kills 10 women there, luring Tsuzuki by leaving traces of his hair at the scenes because he knows by now that Tsuzuki will not resist a chance to stop him. He uses every skill at his disposal to break Tsuzuki, from taking him to see a play and telling him that he's not completely human to summoning monsters that kill a girl whose only wrongdoing was being able to see the shinigami. This makes Tsuzuki self-destruct and he tries to kill both himself and Muraki by summoning a powerful creature that controls fire hot enough to obliterate virtually everything after stabbing Muraki in the stomach. Hisoka saves Tsuzuki from himself with Tatsumi's help. Muraki's fate appears unknown, though it's later revealed that he somehow survives the fire and it takes many years for him to reappear in the real world. What happened, exactly, is a mystery that has yet to be answered in canon.
[Personality] Everything Muraki does in public, from helping children when they faint to taking care of the sick daughter of a wealthy business owner, is to earn people's trust, to charm them, to make them think he is nothing more than a skilled, trustworthy doctor that wants to help people and feels terrible when he's unable to help a patient. And that may be what he was once, before the feelings overwhelmed him and pushed him towards a path of evil and trying to acquire more power to completely control life and death. In fact, his first words to Tsuzuki, after getting his attention by making a girl pass out (though Tsuzuki doesn't know it was his fault) are "Humans are actually very weak creatures. Many times, patients of mine have died and I've been called a murderer by their families. No matter how far medicine advances, people cannot outrun death….During these eight years that I have been a doctor, I have discovered the limits of human life. I live to find that power which can surpass life or death." It's hard to say how much of that is the truth and how much is just him putting on an act, but given that it's stated elsewhere that his fiancée, Ukyou, is very frail and ill, in fact looking far younger than Muraki despite their similarity in age, and that he asks her to forgive him as he thinks death is near, it's not hard to assume that there's more than a slight grain of truth to it. Those motives are likely to have twisted over time, and to have grown tied in with how much he hates everything, but part of what drives him is that need for power over life and death.
The common perception of him, stated by several characters including Tsuzuki at first - is that he's an angel - beautiful, talented, kind, and helpful, although maybe slightly odd because of his fascination with antique dolls. The dolls are more than just a throwback to his past, of the mother he loved, who both owned dolls and treated him like one, until his brother stole her affection and, in Muraki's mind, made him kill her. They're symbols for how he views everyone. The vast majority of the world is nothing more than toys for him to play with and manipulate as he sees fit. He blackmails, murders, uses children as organ donors for the rich and ill, and on one memorable occasion, rapes and curses someone because he believes that Hisoka is too pretty to kill quickly. It takes three years for him to waste away painfully.
He uses everyone he's close to, even the only friend he has, who's too devoted to him to ever stop helping cover up his crimes. Muraki knows Oriya's feelings, exploits them, but in the past he asked if Oriya would cry if something ever happened to him, so it's likely he cares for the man in some way. Muraki also cares for his fiancée, Ukyou, because as he's dying, he asks her to forgive him. Aside from them, everyone else is unimportant unless they can either give him something or help him achieve his goal of bringing his dead brother back to life to kill him personally; the family guards killed Saki when they were both 16, likely because they blamed him for Muraki's mother's murder. It's actually stated in a side note by the mangaka that Muraki doesn't care if someone's a man or a woman as long as they're useful and although that explains Oriya - he helps cover up Muraki's crimes and in turn uses him to take care of troublesome elements at the brothel - it doesn't completely explain Ukyou. Her family owns a pharmaceutical company, as explained in the first side story, and that may be a tie Muraki wishes to use, but it's equally likely that he truly loves her and her illness fuels part of his motives.
His good doctor act works because he truly is skilled at surgery and treating people. If he were terrible at it, his reputation would have faltered long ago. Muraki is the third generation of doctors and researchers in his family and his father and grandfather genetically engineered his looks and possibly some of his strange, unexplainable skills. He was researching ways to clone people, though he told the mentor assisting him "You research in order to give life to others. My research is to kill." And he is very aware that he is evil, but doesn't care. In fact, he inwardly compares himself to Tsuzuki, a shinigami whose job in life after death is to claim souls, by thinking "We are the same. Going against the natural law, genetically modified, produced imitation of 'life'. The only path for those who receive life from the chaos of darkness is darkness. For that reason, we are the sons of those who must bear on their brow the mark of one who commits crimes. Because we are the descendants of darkness," after Tsuzuki stabs him. When accused of playing God and committing terrible crimes, his reply is, "Pollution can be purified by washing away with water. All of those saints have said it, haven't they? "Crimes, no matter how many, can be atoned." That is correct! Whatever crimes you commit, as long as you 'purify' yourself, it will be alright. At that time, I am reborn, pure. Over and over!! That is my reason for existing, my proof of existence! And then I will be reborn as a much higher existence."
If there is anything that truly drives Muraki through his life, it is hate. Oriya tells Hisoka at the end of the series that Muraki hates everything, and that hatred (including possibly self-hatred) is what gives him focus and strength to continue the path he’s chosen. It's never stated openly what he hates, other than Saki, but things can be implied. Muraki blames Saki for taking everything away from him and yet he says he killed his mother personally and that at first, he tried to be friends with Saki and thought the fault for his older half-brother's existence simply rested on his father, who'd had the affair. Something happened to change that and pushed young Muraki over the edge, likely something that pushed him to hate his mother, a woman with long hair, and kill her. In fact, most of his later victims end up having long hair as she did.
All in all, though, there are enough hints placed that he does have, or at one point had, some core of decency and respect for his position as a doctor, that denying it would be foolish. In fact, he gives a young patient a doll for taking her medicine as she should in the drama CD. Would he give someone a toy he values if he were completely cold and uncaring towards anything other than his goal, even to get someone on his good side? My answer is no, since dolls are that important a theme to him. The shreds of emotion we've seen in him, from possible love to obvious hate to twisted lust, combined with the life he's led and the choice he made to become what he is mean that Muraki is even more broken than the dolls he enjoys, whether porcelain or human. If he were less broken, it would be easier to tell where the lies and facades end and the truth begins, but since they blend so smoothly together, it's hard to tell what might be reality aside from the evil deeds - actions speak louder than words, after all - and what's simply an act. However, it's most likely that by now, the decency towards everyone other than Oriya and Ukyou is simply part of his games and intent to use people.
[Specialties/Abilities] Muraki has quite a few canon abilities. First and foremost - he is an energy vampire. He can take energy from the dead and use them to either heal his injuries in a rapid manner or simply enhance his own life energy, making him stronger and more capable of performing magical attacks. He states in canon that, while growing up, he deliberately ingested increasing amounts of poisons to build up a resistance, so that counts as an ability as well. Combining those two are what enable him to simply go into suspended animation for 3 days following being given 10x the lethal dose of strychnine in his wine - it doesn't kill him and he drains energy from other murder victims to heal himself.
However, this isn't all he can do. He's also shown summoning various creatures such as a three-headed dragon (which is then killed), a swarm of bats, and flesh-eating birdlike creatures that are said to thrive on the flesh of young girls best of all, turning a suicide victim into a bloodthirsty zombie (the blood keeps her alive, the energy from the victims feeds his urges), drugging a girl and warping her mind until she creates a separate personality, using a magically-created wire, and teleporting away from a scene leaving only a flash of feathers behind. The teleportation even lets him travel between the worlds of the living and the dead.
NOTE: As of late April 2011, his powers have been stripped from him and he's completely human.
[Affection] Any sort of physical affection is fine with him, though expect him to exploit anyone who takes an interest in him. If he seems interested in you, he's probably looking for something he can get.
[Fighting] Fighting is fine, but expect him to heal himself if there's any leaking spiritual energy in the area. He'll teleport away if he's close to losing unless he's too badly injured to use his energy on that. Muraki doesn't provoke battles often and only does so with good reason in his mind.
NOTE: As of late April 2011, his powers have been stripped, meaning he's less willing to get in any fights, Talk to me first.
[Other Permissions] Feel free to read his mind/emotions if the character's capable of it, but tell me before someone reveals the darkness underneath his mask. 4th walling him is fine, if anyone would actually know his canon at all. Just ask if there are other questions.
[Other Facts] If he's ever being too much of a creep, let me know and I'll tone it down/stop it completely!