♀ Dr. Kiriko ♠ Black Jack ♠ Application for Queen of Hearts
Player Information
Name: World
Personal Journal: worldrescue
Contact Info: Plurk: world_rescue. MSN: the.second.advent@hotmail.com
Other Characters: None.
Character Information
Name: Dr. Kiriko George
Source Canon: Black Jack by Osamu Tezuka
Age: Approximately 37.
Role In Canon: Antagonist, hitman.
Justification: Black Jack is somewhat known to be a rather sexist and sometimes misogynistic series, not because the author has a personal thesis on the subject but because of the personality and crude actions of the main character and others against women because of the times. All of the characters have extreme gender politics associated with them that is not the highlight of the book but definitely one of the subjects. Black Jack often uses violence and sexual harassment to get what he wants out of women, Dr. Kisaragi is a female to male transgender and sees his life in a much happier light now that he has become a man, Black Queen steps down as a famous amputation surgeon to please her husband, Pinoko is a trope of a devoted 1950's housewife who is subservient towards her husband and always the damsel in distress. Kiriko, on the other hand, is sort of a rare creature in this canon. While not effeminate, he has qualities that are not nearly as black and white as the other characters. His hair is long and thick, his fingers dainty and his nails long, tall and slender, suffers from an alien disease which is meant to look and act like a pregnancy, and has a younger sister who looks nearly identical to him. He does not show quick judgment towards women - one of his patients was once a French hardcore porn star who comes down with a deadly disease and has been shunned in the moviemaking business. He is the only one to show her unrequited care and compassion. And yet, he was a soldier, the only "purely male" (at the time) occupation depicted in the canon. He has an extreme anti-war sentiment and argues in his own way that war is the most wicked sin perpetrated by human beings, and also claims that war is the reason he is now a killer. For a character to have such a "masculine" background in a "masculine" canon with so many feminine and gender-neutral qualities I believe would be a fascinating subject for playing as the opposite gender. So it is for a fresh critical look at the character that I choose to play him as a woman, shifting the politics in the story to see what happens when the main villain of a rather chauvanistic series becomes female. I also think the competition for dominance between now female Black Jack and female Kiriko would be awesome to see.
History:
Kiriko was born to a Japanese musician and a Canadian Doctor in Banff, Alberta, Canada [not shitting you]. While nothing is said directly about her mother, her father Dr. Edward George was a world-reknown medical researcher. He discovered the serum of immortality: the Blood of Phoenix (BOP), a mutated virus that acted not only as a self-contained battery for artificial organs, but also gave the host the inability to age. Dr. George was also a founding member of the Noir Project, a research team dedicated to BOP run by several of the world's nobel prize winners and Chinese entrepreneur Zen Mantoku.
Growing up in her father's fame, Kiriko and her baby sister Yuri were rather spoiled, but very happy children. As Dr. George's firstborn, Kiriko was raised from a young age to become her father's sucessor, as well as slated to receive an injection of BOP to become immortal as well. She adored her father, and wanted to follow in his footsteps exactly. But in her early adult years, after moving to New York where the HQ of the Noir Project was located, America declared war. Around this time, it was discovered that the BOP caused many problems with the patients who were treated with it - they began developing deadly complications such as hematomas and cancer. Dr. George's reputation was fading, and with his eldest still living in the lap of luxury despite being of age to go to war, he was facing much scorn. It is not said whether or not her father forced her to enlist or whether she did so on her own accord, but either way, Kiriko ended up volunteering as a Nurse.
The war was never easy for Kiriko. Every day, she was forced to watch the constant suffering of the soldiers under her care. She had never faced failure before, and with many of her patients dying on her from complications due to the lack of medicine and sanitary conditions, Kiriko's soft and gentle personality began to harden. One night, after getting to know her soldier patients very well and when they were on the verge of recovery, their tent was bombed. Kiriko was terribly scarred from the blast, her left eye completely ripped apart. Worst of all, her patient's limbs were blown off, they were badly burned and wounded beyond help - yet did not die. They laid in the wreckage, nearly dead but unable to die, in abject suffering. Not knowing when they would be rescued, when the soldiers begged Kiriko to relieve their pain, she did the only thing she could do for them: mercy killed them all. Later, Kiriko was found alive among the bodies, unable to commit suicide... the only survivor of the tragedy.
Kiriko's recovery was slow and arduous. The remains of her destroyed eye needed to be amputated immediately, and in the poor conditions, lead to sepsis and deadly fever. She suffered greatly, and begged for the Doctors and Nurses to kill her, yet they refused. Miraculously, she recovered, and was sent back to serve... But she could no longer treat her job the same way. From then on, whenever her patients asked her for relief, she injected them with poison and let them die with dignity. One night, she murdered all of the patients in the military hospital - and when she was discovered, was dishonourably discharged and sent back to Canada.
Due to this tragedy, she turned against her father, and was excommunicated from the family. Instead of becoming the world-famous Doctor she was meant to become, she turned to a life of crime. Kiriko George became only "Dr. Kiriko," the "Living Reaper," and was soon a legendary euthanasiast and hitman who brings only a beautiful death. With a strong conviction to "save" the suffering from the pain of living, Kiriko travels the world giving euthanasia to those who ask of her.. for a fee for her troubles. She built a "killing machine" from a silver suitcase which, when connected to a patient, manipulated their brain to give them the most euphoric and soothing sensation they have ever felt - while paralyzing their medulla, causing them to fall asleep and cease to breathe.
Not much else is known about Kiriko other than her interactions with the series main character: her closest friend and nemesis, Black Jack (who I will refer to as female since Kiriko will be playing opposite to her in the game, if that's alright), a fellow back-alley surgeon with unparalleled healing skill. She can cure almost any ailment if paid enough money. Black Jack and Kiriko oppose eachother due to their differences in beliefs - Black Jack, who was saved from the brink of death, believes only with suffering can people truly understand what it means to live. Kiriko, who wanted to die but was denied death, believes that forcing the suffering to live is an inimaginable evil. They continually and fruitlessly fight to change the other's mind. However, the two of them have a very complicated relationship... though they are enemies in trade and hate the other's opinions, when they are forced to work together, make a beautiful partnership that no other Doctor who has ever worked with Black Jack has ever replicated.
Outside of the operating room, when not fighting, they are good friends - sharing the occational friendly banter and joke at the other's expense, and looking out for the other. Later in the series, the two of them work together to save the life of a dying single mother. In Kiriko's introductory chapter, Kiriko and Black Jack silently crafted a plan to help a group of imprisoned crewmembers of a ship that had carried a biological weapon escape their fate. Instead of handing them over to be killed by the American military as they were supposed to, Black Jack set up their escape while Kiriko captured and tortured the men who had planned on handing them over. In the movie concluding the first series, Black Jack is attacked by an assasin - and Kiriko saves her life by taking a bullet that was meant for her, sacrificing her life to save Black Jack's. When Kiriko asks to be left for dead, Black Jack refuses, and in emergency conditions takes the bullet out of her intestines and saves her life.
But they are not always so harmonious. Later, Black Jack and Kiriko clash over Kiriko's father's illness. For the last five years of his life, Dr. George suffers from pneumothorax because of a complication from BOP - a condition where the lung is punctured and air becomes trapped inside the chest, causing a variety of complications, such an an inability to breathe and the heart slowly crushing from the building pressure. Pneumothorax is usually easily cured once the puncture is sealed, but no Doctor who examined him could find the hole, including Kiriko, who - though she no longer had a relationship with her father- tried many times over the course of his illness. Eventually, his suffering became too great, and Kiriko (believing she was doing the right thing) tried to inject him with poison as a way of making amends with him... but was stopped by her younger sister Yuri, who chased her off the premesis and hid their father from her.
Black Jack arrives to speak with Dr. George and cure his ailment, but Kiriko quickly discovers she is there... and hurries home to interfere. During the operation, Kiriko, believing the operation is useless, secretly injects poison into her father's bloodstream. But soon after she does, Black Jack finds the hole - it had been embedded in the trachea, forming a pressure valve that only opened during natural inhalation and not while connected to a heart-lung machine, which is why no other Doctor could locate it. But it is too late - the poison takes hold and Dr. George's heart fails. In the manga, he dies immediately. In the anime, Black Jack manages to save him long enough for him to say goodbye to his daughters... and, with his last breath, thank Kiriko for trying her best.
Stricken with grief, Kiriko's mourning nearly costs her her life. Her patient following is a rubber farm entrepreneur living in Brazil who has contracted a mysterious disease from his native Amazonian workers. Unfocused, while killing the man Kiriko accidentally exposes herself to the virus, and contracts it. The first stage begins with strong stomach cramps and severe diarrhea, which Kiriko experiences on a plane ride to Japan. By now, Kiriko realizes she must have been exposed, and hides herself from the public so that she cannot spread the disease outside of Brazil. The second stage hits her soon after, in which bright red, blood-filled welts appear across her chest and stomach. At this point, the disease is said to be irreversible, and try as she might to save herself, she cannot alleviate the symptoms. Finally, Kiriko's abdomen swells to many times its size, and begins to resemble pregnancy. Though when she tries to drain the abcess, she finds it to be filled with water... just pure water, with no microbes or parasite to be found. When drained, her abdomen fills up again almost immediately. In the final stage of the disease, extreme waves of pain strike the patient's stomach, and their skin and muscle around their abdomen begins to tear apart like swiss cheese until the disease travels to their brain - and shuts it down. At the end, Kiriko places a dynamite time bomb beneath her bed and tries to fall asleep, thereby dying in peace and eradicating the virus by fire. But her younger sister walks in on her, and despite Kiriko's insistence on not exposing any other Doctors to the disease, contacts Black Jack. When Black Jack arrives, Kiriko loses her mind and lashes out on her and Yuri, picking up a stick of live dynamite and cornering them with it. But from the stress, the disease progresses into its final stage, and her stomach radiating with intense pain, Kiriko collapses, screaming and in tears. Black Jack uses her sudden weakness to sedate her and open her up. After freezing and removing half of her liver, where the water had collected, Black Jack discovers that Kiriko was actually bearing a deadly parasite... A clear alien 'jellyfish' made up of 99.9% water that was completely invisible to the naked eye until frozen, and capable of regenerating if not entirely removed from the host via surgery. Kiriko wakes up after the operation, completely ungrateful to either Yuri or Black Jack, and swears that she will continue to kill and kill especially because her life was spared.
From then on, Kiriko's story has no true conclusion. Other than chapters where she makes small appearances, she is only seen in a plot-relevant chapter again in the epilogue of the series, speaking to Black Jack within a dream, in which she promises her she will never give up on euthanasia no matter what. The story of Black Jack never truly ends - the series concluding with Black Jack waking up from this dream on a plane, remarking that people only experience such vivid, realistic dreams before they die. Her plane sinks into the sunrise, remarking that the future is uncertain, and the series ends. And so here I unceremoniously conclude Kiriko's history, as well.
Changes: In order to avoid anachronisms with Kiriko's unnamed war, I have changed Kiriko from being a military Doctor (or medic/soldier, in some versions) to a military Nurse. Female soldiers were not common in the 50s/60s (and female volunteers were very much pressured into becoming nurses), and so I made this change to make it more believable. But essentially this changes nothing whatsoever. Kiriko was not a LICENCED Doctor as of the war in canon, anyway. He was in medical school and brough to aid in the war effort because of his extensive family background in medicine (making him an unliscenced Doctor as well). This would work just as easily if Kiriko had been hired as a nurse - not yet a licenced Doctor, but able to treat patients well enough as a nurse because of her experience. Kiriko also explains that the pain he saw the soldiers' suffering in the military hospitals was enough to drive him to kill them all to give them proper relief - something that does not change if Kiriko was a nurse. Of course, once she is discharged from the war, she goes back to being "Dr. Kiriko."
As well, as a female back-alley Doctor struggling to gain power, worldwide respect and even fear, especially in patriachal Japan, I believe female Kiriko would have to be a little bit tougher and a bit colder than her male counterpart. As a six-foot-tall veteran, ghoulish-looking and frightening male with much upper-body strength, male Kiriko had no problem appearing fearsome and as someone to be respected. Female Kiriko, on the other hand, lacks the tone and imposingness of her male counterpart and would have to compensate with a firm attitude and an unshakable will. In her emotional interactions with family members, male Kiriko has no problem appearing distant because of the masculine trait in the 1970s for men to be much less emotionally involved in family matters - his sister is the sobbing, clingy, loving female who dotes on both her father and her brother like "any woman should". But in emotional interactions with female Kiriko, she will have to appear much colder and even more cruel to hold up this contrast between her and her little sister.
Other than very minor gender details, like the shock value of male Kiriko more or less bearing an alien baby now changed due to Kiriko's gender, everything else remains the same.
Personality:
Even as a hired killer, Kiriko does her best to be a good person overall. She’s very kind, has her own moral compass of right and wrong, and is never slow to show generosity. She shows true sympathy to her patients, and never imposes herself upon them (their family, however, is another story… she tends to get quite mean with clingy family members that annoy her) - she only comes to their aid upon their personal request. She is her enemy Dr. Black Jack's contrast: while Black Jack is regarded as a legendary woman who does very kind things in the name of saving lives, Black Jack only uses her patients to get what she wants: violent revenge upon the men who murdered her mother. Kiriko, on the other hand, is regarded as a worthless criminal and does very "wicked" things for a living, but only in the name of mercy and compassion. She is a good woman, capable of utmost selflessness despite her calling. For example, in the 1990 OVAs, Kiriko finds a woman half-dead in the wreckage of an abandoned car, rescues her, makes camp near the area and nurses her back to health until she has the strength to return. It turns out, she was actually a patient's of Black Jack's (who had taken every penny from her) and she was searching for Dr. Kiriko - she wanted to die because Black Jack was moving too slow in saving her, and she was suffering. Instead of revealing her identity, knowing that she had a fair chance of recovery, Kiriko instead tries to help her heal, plays her music she wrote, lifts her spirits, brings her flowers, encourages her, and eventually finds the cure for her illness, for no charge and entirely out of the kindness of her heart. Even after she begged him with tears in her eyes to surrender her to "Dr. Kiriko," she refused to "contact her." This is just one of the many acts of kindness Kiriko has made throughout the plot, also including but not limited to helping prisoners of war escape their captivity, saving the life of a dying single mother who ingested a lethal dose of poison, and in the 21 timeline even taking a bullet intended for Black Jack.
But Kiriko is by no means a perfect human being. She is very moody, and her anger can become violent very quickly - for as simple a reason as she didn‘t get what she wanted. In an example, later in the series when Dr. George is on his death bed, and Yuri locks the door to her and refuses to let her see him, Kiriko bursts in uninvited during the night and tries to kill her father with a shotgun instead of being forced to watch him suffer. …But when her father tells her he wants to die by Kiriko's hand, Kiriko randomly changes her mind and starts screaming insults at him, telling him he’s a pathetic man for giving up.
She is also prone to unnecessary pettiness, and sometimes, even tantrums. While she may start out with good intentions, if a person she dislikes becomes involved, she will push the issue as far as she can just to spite them. For example, in the final chapter she's seen in in the manga, Kiriko has one last conversation with Black Jack. She asks the Doctor if she will continue to extort people unnecessarily. When Black Jack answers that she won’t stop, Kiriko presents to Black Jack an 180 year old man. The old man has undergone every surgery imaginable in order to achieve immortality, and since Black Jack can do nothing to make him live forever, Kiriko drags the patient off to kill him just so she can make Black Jack angry. Also, in a chapter where Kiriko contracts the Amazonian parasite, she begins with good intentions: she tries to kill herself so she will not become Japan's Patient Zero and no one else will die because of her. When her sister catches her attempting suicide and runs for help, Kiriko isn’t all that angry… until she finds out she ran to get Black Jack. She completely snaps and tries to kill herself and her sister in a fit of insanity, setting a bomb to detonate in three minutes and threatening her with it. Even when she collapses on the ground in terrible pain, she starts swearing at Black Jack when the Doctor tries to alleviate her suffering. When she wakes up to discover she’s been cured, she’s completely indifferent, and thanks no one for their aid in saving her life. Instead, she ridicules them, saying that she will continue to commit murder after murder just because they let her live, out of pure pettiness.
Kiriko naturally was not a violent person, but after being put through such an unnatural experience during the war, when pushed to a certain limit she has the tendency to crack or completely overreact in ways that include frustration, anger, violence, hysteria, and sometimes even sorrow. Though it's never canonically said, she appears to be suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One could also connect this pettiness to her crimes of war - Kiriko herself suffered greatly, and when the other Doctors didn’t kill her as she had asked of them, she retaliated by murdering all the patients in the military hospital.
Abilities: Kiriko is incredibly intelligent. As her father was her inspiration in her youth, she began studying the basics of chemistry, biology, physics and general medicine at a young age. Later in life, after she is excommunicated from the family, shows proficiency in pharmacology, the ability to mix any toxin she desires perfectly, as well as skill in mechanics, as she builds a unique death machine with a complex ultrasonic contraption that causes the person hooked up to it to drift into a euphoric trance - while their brain shuts down and dies. As well, she is very artisitcally talented. She has a deep love for music and the arts, composing and recording songs she has written and going by the alias "Mozart" when she doesn't want to reveal herself as Dr. Kiriko.
Sample:
[ACCIDENTAL VIDEO BROADCAST]
[A woman's back is turned to the mirror. A newcomer; she seems to have found her belongings. Hunched over a silver machine, her fingers play across its intricate inner workings as if to check for any crack or imperfection (her gestures so complex as to have set off the Vine). She clicks it off and closes the lid.
Standing, she turns slightly to change. It's the sort of woman you get the impression could have been beautiful once, but her prematurely silvering hair and starved body have long since stolen it all away. Her only eye is sunken in, her face gaunt and drawn, and as she shrugs off the shift, old scars cover much of her skin. But before she is completely exposed, she turns around and catches the sight of the mirror with an angry gasp. Shrugging her jacket over her shoulders to cover herself, she approaches the Vine.]
Hmph! What a fickle system this is! Is everything in this god-forsaken garden so primitive?
[This revelation secretly worries her. The generator in her machine won't last forever by itself. But she stares at the mirror with cold blue eyes, without any trace of emotion or feeling.]
Very well. If you insist. [She makes a small, introductory gesture with her skeletally thin fingers.] I am the Living Reaper. I don't know which of you summoned me, but the theatrics were hardly necessary.
[The woman suddenly glares into the mirror, her tone sharpening into an impatient demand.]
Bring me to the one who wishes to die!
Name: World
Personal Journal: worldrescue
Contact Info: Plurk: world_rescue. MSN: the.second.advent@hotmail.com
Other Characters: None.
Character Information
Name: Dr. Kiriko George
Source Canon: Black Jack by Osamu Tezuka
Age: Approximately 37.
Role In Canon: Antagonist, hitman.
Justification: Black Jack is somewhat known to be a rather sexist and sometimes misogynistic series, not because the author has a personal thesis on the subject but because of the personality and crude actions of the main character and others against women because of the times. All of the characters have extreme gender politics associated with them that is not the highlight of the book but definitely one of the subjects. Black Jack often uses violence and sexual harassment to get what he wants out of women, Dr. Kisaragi is a female to male transgender and sees his life in a much happier light now that he has become a man, Black Queen steps down as a famous amputation surgeon to please her husband, Pinoko is a trope of a devoted 1950's housewife who is subservient towards her husband and always the damsel in distress. Kiriko, on the other hand, is sort of a rare creature in this canon. While not effeminate, he has qualities that are not nearly as black and white as the other characters. His hair is long and thick, his fingers dainty and his nails long, tall and slender, suffers from an alien disease which is meant to look and act like a pregnancy, and has a younger sister who looks nearly identical to him. He does not show quick judgment towards women - one of his patients was once a French hardcore porn star who comes down with a deadly disease and has been shunned in the moviemaking business. He is the only one to show her unrequited care and compassion. And yet, he was a soldier, the only "purely male" (at the time) occupation depicted in the canon. He has an extreme anti-war sentiment and argues in his own way that war is the most wicked sin perpetrated by human beings, and also claims that war is the reason he is now a killer. For a character to have such a "masculine" background in a "masculine" canon with so many feminine and gender-neutral qualities I believe would be a fascinating subject for playing as the opposite gender. So it is for a fresh critical look at the character that I choose to play him as a woman, shifting the politics in the story to see what happens when the main villain of a rather chauvanistic series becomes female. I also think the competition for dominance between now female Black Jack and female Kiriko would be awesome to see.
History:
Kiriko was born to a Japanese musician and a Canadian Doctor in Banff, Alberta, Canada [not shitting you]. While nothing is said directly about her mother, her father Dr. Edward George was a world-reknown medical researcher. He discovered the serum of immortality: the Blood of Phoenix (BOP), a mutated virus that acted not only as a self-contained battery for artificial organs, but also gave the host the inability to age. Dr. George was also a founding member of the Noir Project, a research team dedicated to BOP run by several of the world's nobel prize winners and Chinese entrepreneur Zen Mantoku.
Growing up in her father's fame, Kiriko and her baby sister Yuri were rather spoiled, but very happy children. As Dr. George's firstborn, Kiriko was raised from a young age to become her father's sucessor, as well as slated to receive an injection of BOP to become immortal as well. She adored her father, and wanted to follow in his footsteps exactly. But in her early adult years, after moving to New York where the HQ of the Noir Project was located, America declared war. Around this time, it was discovered that the BOP caused many problems with the patients who were treated with it - they began developing deadly complications such as hematomas and cancer. Dr. George's reputation was fading, and with his eldest still living in the lap of luxury despite being of age to go to war, he was facing much scorn. It is not said whether or not her father forced her to enlist or whether she did so on her own accord, but either way, Kiriko ended up volunteering as a Nurse.
The war was never easy for Kiriko. Every day, she was forced to watch the constant suffering of the soldiers under her care. She had never faced failure before, and with many of her patients dying on her from complications due to the lack of medicine and sanitary conditions, Kiriko's soft and gentle personality began to harden. One night, after getting to know her soldier patients very well and when they were on the verge of recovery, their tent was bombed. Kiriko was terribly scarred from the blast, her left eye completely ripped apart. Worst of all, her patient's limbs were blown off, they were badly burned and wounded beyond help - yet did not die. They laid in the wreckage, nearly dead but unable to die, in abject suffering. Not knowing when they would be rescued, when the soldiers begged Kiriko to relieve their pain, she did the only thing she could do for them: mercy killed them all. Later, Kiriko was found alive among the bodies, unable to commit suicide... the only survivor of the tragedy.
Kiriko's recovery was slow and arduous. The remains of her destroyed eye needed to be amputated immediately, and in the poor conditions, lead to sepsis and deadly fever. She suffered greatly, and begged for the Doctors and Nurses to kill her, yet they refused. Miraculously, she recovered, and was sent back to serve... But she could no longer treat her job the same way. From then on, whenever her patients asked her for relief, she injected them with poison and let them die with dignity. One night, she murdered all of the patients in the military hospital - and when she was discovered, was dishonourably discharged and sent back to Canada.
Due to this tragedy, she turned against her father, and was excommunicated from the family. Instead of becoming the world-famous Doctor she was meant to become, she turned to a life of crime. Kiriko George became only "Dr. Kiriko," the "Living Reaper," and was soon a legendary euthanasiast and hitman who brings only a beautiful death. With a strong conviction to "save" the suffering from the pain of living, Kiriko travels the world giving euthanasia to those who ask of her.. for a fee for her troubles. She built a "killing machine" from a silver suitcase which, when connected to a patient, manipulated their brain to give them the most euphoric and soothing sensation they have ever felt - while paralyzing their medulla, causing them to fall asleep and cease to breathe.
Not much else is known about Kiriko other than her interactions with the series main character: her closest friend and nemesis, Black Jack (who I will refer to as female since Kiriko will be playing opposite to her in the game, if that's alright), a fellow back-alley surgeon with unparalleled healing skill. She can cure almost any ailment if paid enough money. Black Jack and Kiriko oppose eachother due to their differences in beliefs - Black Jack, who was saved from the brink of death, believes only with suffering can people truly understand what it means to live. Kiriko, who wanted to die but was denied death, believes that forcing the suffering to live is an inimaginable evil. They continually and fruitlessly fight to change the other's mind. However, the two of them have a very complicated relationship... though they are enemies in trade and hate the other's opinions, when they are forced to work together, make a beautiful partnership that no other Doctor who has ever worked with Black Jack has ever replicated.
Outside of the operating room, when not fighting, they are good friends - sharing the occational friendly banter and joke at the other's expense, and looking out for the other. Later in the series, the two of them work together to save the life of a dying single mother. In Kiriko's introductory chapter, Kiriko and Black Jack silently crafted a plan to help a group of imprisoned crewmembers of a ship that had carried a biological weapon escape their fate. Instead of handing them over to be killed by the American military as they were supposed to, Black Jack set up their escape while Kiriko captured and tortured the men who had planned on handing them over. In the movie concluding the first series, Black Jack is attacked by an assasin - and Kiriko saves her life by taking a bullet that was meant for her, sacrificing her life to save Black Jack's. When Kiriko asks to be left for dead, Black Jack refuses, and in emergency conditions takes the bullet out of her intestines and saves her life.
But they are not always so harmonious. Later, Black Jack and Kiriko clash over Kiriko's father's illness. For the last five years of his life, Dr. George suffers from pneumothorax because of a complication from BOP - a condition where the lung is punctured and air becomes trapped inside the chest, causing a variety of complications, such an an inability to breathe and the heart slowly crushing from the building pressure. Pneumothorax is usually easily cured once the puncture is sealed, but no Doctor who examined him could find the hole, including Kiriko, who - though she no longer had a relationship with her father- tried many times over the course of his illness. Eventually, his suffering became too great, and Kiriko (believing she was doing the right thing) tried to inject him with poison as a way of making amends with him... but was stopped by her younger sister Yuri, who chased her off the premesis and hid their father from her.
Black Jack arrives to speak with Dr. George and cure his ailment, but Kiriko quickly discovers she is there... and hurries home to interfere. During the operation, Kiriko, believing the operation is useless, secretly injects poison into her father's bloodstream. But soon after she does, Black Jack finds the hole - it had been embedded in the trachea, forming a pressure valve that only opened during natural inhalation and not while connected to a heart-lung machine, which is why no other Doctor could locate it. But it is too late - the poison takes hold and Dr. George's heart fails. In the manga, he dies immediately. In the anime, Black Jack manages to save him long enough for him to say goodbye to his daughters... and, with his last breath, thank Kiriko for trying her best.
Stricken with grief, Kiriko's mourning nearly costs her her life. Her patient following is a rubber farm entrepreneur living in Brazil who has contracted a mysterious disease from his native Amazonian workers. Unfocused, while killing the man Kiriko accidentally exposes herself to the virus, and contracts it. The first stage begins with strong stomach cramps and severe diarrhea, which Kiriko experiences on a plane ride to Japan. By now, Kiriko realizes she must have been exposed, and hides herself from the public so that she cannot spread the disease outside of Brazil. The second stage hits her soon after, in which bright red, blood-filled welts appear across her chest and stomach. At this point, the disease is said to be irreversible, and try as she might to save herself, she cannot alleviate the symptoms. Finally, Kiriko's abdomen swells to many times its size, and begins to resemble pregnancy. Though when she tries to drain the abcess, she finds it to be filled with water... just pure water, with no microbes or parasite to be found. When drained, her abdomen fills up again almost immediately. In the final stage of the disease, extreme waves of pain strike the patient's stomach, and their skin and muscle around their abdomen begins to tear apart like swiss cheese until the disease travels to their brain - and shuts it down. At the end, Kiriko places a dynamite time bomb beneath her bed and tries to fall asleep, thereby dying in peace and eradicating the virus by fire. But her younger sister walks in on her, and despite Kiriko's insistence on not exposing any other Doctors to the disease, contacts Black Jack. When Black Jack arrives, Kiriko loses her mind and lashes out on her and Yuri, picking up a stick of live dynamite and cornering them with it. But from the stress, the disease progresses into its final stage, and her stomach radiating with intense pain, Kiriko collapses, screaming and in tears. Black Jack uses her sudden weakness to sedate her and open her up. After freezing and removing half of her liver, where the water had collected, Black Jack discovers that Kiriko was actually bearing a deadly parasite... A clear alien 'jellyfish' made up of 99.9% water that was completely invisible to the naked eye until frozen, and capable of regenerating if not entirely removed from the host via surgery. Kiriko wakes up after the operation, completely ungrateful to either Yuri or Black Jack, and swears that she will continue to kill and kill especially because her life was spared.
From then on, Kiriko's story has no true conclusion. Other than chapters where she makes small appearances, she is only seen in a plot-relevant chapter again in the epilogue of the series, speaking to Black Jack within a dream, in which she promises her she will never give up on euthanasia no matter what. The story of Black Jack never truly ends - the series concluding with Black Jack waking up from this dream on a plane, remarking that people only experience such vivid, realistic dreams before they die. Her plane sinks into the sunrise, remarking that the future is uncertain, and the series ends. And so here I unceremoniously conclude Kiriko's history, as well.
Changes: In order to avoid anachronisms with Kiriko's unnamed war, I have changed Kiriko from being a military Doctor (or medic/soldier, in some versions) to a military Nurse. Female soldiers were not common in the 50s/60s (and female volunteers were very much pressured into becoming nurses), and so I made this change to make it more believable. But essentially this changes nothing whatsoever. Kiriko was not a LICENCED Doctor as of the war in canon, anyway. He was in medical school and brough to aid in the war effort because of his extensive family background in medicine (making him an unliscenced Doctor as well). This would work just as easily if Kiriko had been hired as a nurse - not yet a licenced Doctor, but able to treat patients well enough as a nurse because of her experience. Kiriko also explains that the pain he saw the soldiers' suffering in the military hospitals was enough to drive him to kill them all to give them proper relief - something that does not change if Kiriko was a nurse. Of course, once she is discharged from the war, she goes back to being "Dr. Kiriko."
As well, as a female back-alley Doctor struggling to gain power, worldwide respect and even fear, especially in patriachal Japan, I believe female Kiriko would have to be a little bit tougher and a bit colder than her male counterpart. As a six-foot-tall veteran, ghoulish-looking and frightening male with much upper-body strength, male Kiriko had no problem appearing fearsome and as someone to be respected. Female Kiriko, on the other hand, lacks the tone and imposingness of her male counterpart and would have to compensate with a firm attitude and an unshakable will. In her emotional interactions with family members, male Kiriko has no problem appearing distant because of the masculine trait in the 1970s for men to be much less emotionally involved in family matters - his sister is the sobbing, clingy, loving female who dotes on both her father and her brother like "any woman should". But in emotional interactions with female Kiriko, she will have to appear much colder and even more cruel to hold up this contrast between her and her little sister.
Other than very minor gender details, like the shock value of male Kiriko more or less bearing an alien baby now changed due to Kiriko's gender, everything else remains the same.
Personality:
Even as a hired killer, Kiriko does her best to be a good person overall. She’s very kind, has her own moral compass of right and wrong, and is never slow to show generosity. She shows true sympathy to her patients, and never imposes herself upon them (their family, however, is another story… she tends to get quite mean with clingy family members that annoy her) - she only comes to their aid upon their personal request. She is her enemy Dr. Black Jack's contrast: while Black Jack is regarded as a legendary woman who does very kind things in the name of saving lives, Black Jack only uses her patients to get what she wants: violent revenge upon the men who murdered her mother. Kiriko, on the other hand, is regarded as a worthless criminal and does very "wicked" things for a living, but only in the name of mercy and compassion. She is a good woman, capable of utmost selflessness despite her calling. For example, in the 1990 OVAs, Kiriko finds a woman half-dead in the wreckage of an abandoned car, rescues her, makes camp near the area and nurses her back to health until she has the strength to return. It turns out, she was actually a patient's of Black Jack's (who had taken every penny from her) and she was searching for Dr. Kiriko - she wanted to die because Black Jack was moving too slow in saving her, and she was suffering. Instead of revealing her identity, knowing that she had a fair chance of recovery, Kiriko instead tries to help her heal, plays her music she wrote, lifts her spirits, brings her flowers, encourages her, and eventually finds the cure for her illness, for no charge and entirely out of the kindness of her heart. Even after she begged him with tears in her eyes to surrender her to "Dr. Kiriko," she refused to "contact her." This is just one of the many acts of kindness Kiriko has made throughout the plot, also including but not limited to helping prisoners of war escape their captivity, saving the life of a dying single mother who ingested a lethal dose of poison, and in the 21 timeline even taking a bullet intended for Black Jack.
But Kiriko is by no means a perfect human being. She is very moody, and her anger can become violent very quickly - for as simple a reason as she didn‘t get what she wanted. In an example, later in the series when Dr. George is on his death bed, and Yuri locks the door to her and refuses to let her see him, Kiriko bursts in uninvited during the night and tries to kill her father with a shotgun instead of being forced to watch him suffer. …But when her father tells her he wants to die by Kiriko's hand, Kiriko randomly changes her mind and starts screaming insults at him, telling him he’s a pathetic man for giving up.
She is also prone to unnecessary pettiness, and sometimes, even tantrums. While she may start out with good intentions, if a person she dislikes becomes involved, she will push the issue as far as she can just to spite them. For example, in the final chapter she's seen in in the manga, Kiriko has one last conversation with Black Jack. She asks the Doctor if she will continue to extort people unnecessarily. When Black Jack answers that she won’t stop, Kiriko presents to Black Jack an 180 year old man. The old man has undergone every surgery imaginable in order to achieve immortality, and since Black Jack can do nothing to make him live forever, Kiriko drags the patient off to kill him just so she can make Black Jack angry. Also, in a chapter where Kiriko contracts the Amazonian parasite, she begins with good intentions: she tries to kill herself so she will not become Japan's Patient Zero and no one else will die because of her. When her sister catches her attempting suicide and runs for help, Kiriko isn’t all that angry… until she finds out she ran to get Black Jack. She completely snaps and tries to kill herself and her sister in a fit of insanity, setting a bomb to detonate in three minutes and threatening her with it. Even when she collapses on the ground in terrible pain, she starts swearing at Black Jack when the Doctor tries to alleviate her suffering. When she wakes up to discover she’s been cured, she’s completely indifferent, and thanks no one for their aid in saving her life. Instead, she ridicules them, saying that she will continue to commit murder after murder just because they let her live, out of pure pettiness.
Kiriko naturally was not a violent person, but after being put through such an unnatural experience during the war, when pushed to a certain limit she has the tendency to crack or completely overreact in ways that include frustration, anger, violence, hysteria, and sometimes even sorrow. Though it's never canonically said, she appears to be suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One could also connect this pettiness to her crimes of war - Kiriko herself suffered greatly, and when the other Doctors didn’t kill her as she had asked of them, she retaliated by murdering all the patients in the military hospital.
Abilities: Kiriko is incredibly intelligent. As her father was her inspiration in her youth, she began studying the basics of chemistry, biology, physics and general medicine at a young age. Later in life, after she is excommunicated from the family, shows proficiency in pharmacology, the ability to mix any toxin she desires perfectly, as well as skill in mechanics, as she builds a unique death machine with a complex ultrasonic contraption that causes the person hooked up to it to drift into a euphoric trance - while their brain shuts down and dies. As well, she is very artisitcally talented. She has a deep love for music and the arts, composing and recording songs she has written and going by the alias "Mozart" when she doesn't want to reveal herself as Dr. Kiriko.
Sample:
[ACCIDENTAL VIDEO BROADCAST]
[A woman's back is turned to the mirror. A newcomer; she seems to have found her belongings. Hunched over a silver machine, her fingers play across its intricate inner workings as if to check for any crack or imperfection (her gestures so complex as to have set off the Vine). She clicks it off and closes the lid.
Standing, she turns slightly to change. It's the sort of woman you get the impression could have been beautiful once, but her prematurely silvering hair and starved body have long since stolen it all away. Her only eye is sunken in, her face gaunt and drawn, and as she shrugs off the shift, old scars cover much of her skin. But before she is completely exposed, she turns around and catches the sight of the mirror with an angry gasp. Shrugging her jacket over her shoulders to cover herself, she approaches the Vine.]
Hmph! What a fickle system this is! Is everything in this god-forsaken garden so primitive?
[This revelation secretly worries her. The generator in her machine won't last forever by itself. But she stares at the mirror with cold blue eyes, without any trace of emotion or feeling.]
Very well. If you insist. [She makes a small, introductory gesture with her skeletally thin fingers.] I am the Living Reaper. I don't know which of you summoned me, but the theatrics were hardly necessary.
[The woman suddenly glares into the mirror, her tone sharpening into an impatient demand.]
Bring me to the one who wishes to die!