Character Information
Character: Sakura Akira
Goes By/Known As: Sakura, Akira-chan (to Shiina), Sakura-senpai (to Kaizuka)
Canon: Narutaru
Age: 14
Appearance: Here (and this is her dragonet, Ensof)
Height: 165cm (5'5'')
Blood Type: AB
Before you read further, please be warned that some of the content is quite explicit. Also be wary of spoilers for the end of the manga.
History: Sakura's parents have owned a noodle restaurant in the Shiga prefecture since before she was born. As a small child, she was happy, vibrant, and outgoing. Her mother found her amusing; her father loved her dearly--maybe too dearly. When Sakura was six, her father became inappropriately intimate with her while her mother looked the other way. Sakura's father did not seem to think he was abusing her, and Sakura, too young to form real opinions of her own, did not know what to think, but felt that their relationship was wrong. Too afraid to speak out against her father or to ask others' opinions, she grew up to be a very sheltered, shy, withdrawn, and nervous person.
Sakura became pregnant when she was twelve, and her mother quietly took her for an abortion. Because she was suffering from placenta accreta, the baby was removed via c-section/hysterotomy. Sakura's mother never acknowledged this event, during or after.
During the summer of Sakura's thirteenth year, strange, star-shaped creatures began appearing all across the planet. Sakura discovered one of the creatures, red and gray in coloring, and found that she could link up with it mentally, sharing thoughts and feelings with it, and even control its actions. She named the creature Ensof (likely a corruption of Ein Sof), took it home, and treated it like a pet. During that same summer, she met the chatty Shiina Tamai (Narutaru's protagonist) in her fencing class. Shiina and Sakura immediately became best friends. With Shiina's help, Sakura became more cheerful and less sullen.
School resumed in September, but Sakura soon discovered a problem. She was linked to Ensof permanently, but Ensof could move around on its own, with or without her control. Often, when Sakura was sleeping or studying, Ensof would take off flying through the skies. This resulted in severe vertigo for Sakura, and to her embarrassment, she began fainting or throwing up in the middle of class, earning her a great amount of bullying and harassment from her classmates. For this reason, Sakura became wary of Ensof and tried to avoid the mental link with him, but to no avail.
Sakura soon learned that Shiina, too, had a star-shaped creature like Ensof. Shiina's was named Hoshimaru. Neither girl knew where the creatures had come from or what to do about them. Sakura was then contacted by a boy from her school, named Tomonori Komori. Komori, too, had a creature he could link up with. He dubbed the creatures "dragonets" (this nickname sticks for the rest of the series). But unlike Shiina and Sakura, his dragonet had evolved to take a much more sinister shape--that of an enormous, one-eyed knife. He called his dragonet Push Dagger.
With Push Dagger, Komori planned to create a new world order by killing all the intelligent and educated members of society and returning technology and civilization to the dark ages. He planned to kill Shiina first, and told Sakura that she would be his queen and bear his children, after commenting that he found Sakura to be beautiful. The girls did not take kindly to this. A battle took place between the dragonets. Push Dagger nearly managed to split Shiina in half, but Sakura threw Ensof in the way at the last moment. As her dragonet absorbed the blow meant for Shiina, Sakura experienced the physical pain for herself and began to vomit blood. Acting quickly, Sakura/Ensof expanded his elastic body to wrap around Push Dagger's hilt and force him back at Komori, thereby impaling Komori with his own dragonet.
Sakura passed out from pain. When she regained consciousness, she and Shiina used their dragonets to hide Komori's body and returned to their homes, deeply terrified. Sakura locked herself in her room for several weeks. Komori's remark that she was "beautiful" bothered her just as much as his death did. Using Ensof to replicate the form of a knife, she cut her previously long hair to a very short and choppy cut, attempting to make herself ugly. Shiina asked, "Why did you cut your hair? It was so beautiful..." and Sakura replied, "Too many people have said that," hinting that it was not just Komori's comment, but her own father's attention that disturbed her so deeply.
Komori's body was discovered by authorities despite Sakura and Shiina's best attempts. The government took his body into their custody because, to their great bewilderment, the knife-monster that had impaled him was starting to merge with his corpse in an attempt to revive it. The government did not understand the "Dragonet Phenomenon" and began placing cameras around Komori's neighborhood to see if any of his friends shared similar possession of a dragonet.
Sakura watched news reports from her bedroom regarding Komori's mysterious "disappearance" (the government prevented the media from disclosing information about Komori's death). Sakura learned that Komori had been taking care of his mother, who was severely disabled. Without her son's help, his mother had starved to death. Feeling a deep sense of guilt, Sakura finally left her bedroom, purchased flowers, traveled to Komori's neighborhood, and left them by his door. There, she was approached by an older boy and fellow dragonet owner named Naozumi Sudou, who warned her that the government was monitoring Komori's home.
In order to dodge the government, Sudou and a very reluctant Sakura (along with Ensof, her security blanket) went for a drive in Sudou's car, and Sudou explained a little more about the true nature of the dragonets to Sakura. Sudou claimed that dragonets were a manifestation of their owners' deepest, darkest, and ugliest feelings; therefore, not everyone possessed one. He explained to Sakura that by merging with a dragonet after death, its owner would outlast human mortality. He explained to Sakura that Komori had been his friend, and he and Komori had planned to slaughter the human race, enabling only dragonet-wielders to survive the massacre (because those who possessed and were linked to dragonets would merge with them after death, if the merging process was left uninterrupted). Sudou felt that dragon-bearers were "chosen ones." Sudou invited Sakura to join his group in Komori's place, but Sakura declined.
Following Sakura's rejection of his offer, Sudou dispatched one of his allies, Satomi Oozawa, to murder her. Satomi's dragonet, Amapola--shaped like a red lily with a human spine for a stem--kidnapped Sakura from her home and took her out to a private, rural area. A sadistic Satomi took her time torturing Sakura via Amapola. Amapola dangled Sakura above the ground, dislocating both her shoulders and punching her repeatedly in the stomach. Ensof was no match for the much stronger Amapola, so Sakura sent Ensof to find Shiina. Shiina and Hoshimaru came to Sakura's aid within an hour. Though Hoshimaru was unable to beat Amapola, Shiina used Hoshimaru to gain the attention of a small aviation company and draw one of its pilots to the scene of the crime. Worried about alerting the ASDF, Satomi/Amapola fled from the scene; a wary Shiina and Sakura went to the local hospital to be treated, lying to their parents about the cause of their injuries.
But the government became alerted to mysterious activities in the Kusatsu area, and Shiina and Sakura, due to their strange and unexplained injuries correlating with the mysterious attacks, soon found themselves brought in for questioning regarding these phenomena. Though both girls lied, insisting they knew nothing about the dragonets, their parents were suspicious to the contrary. Still, the Ministry of Defense had no choice but to release the girls to their families, as they had no evidence that either one knew anything about the dragonets.
Perhaps feeling that she would be safer if she stayed close to Shiina rather than hiding in her bedroom, Sakura started attending school regularly again, where a male classmate of hers, named Ishida, developed a crush on her. When Sakura fainted during gym class, Ishida made up an excuse for her and escorted her to the nurse's office, where he confessed his feelings to her. The boy had treated her kindly on many occasions before, so she didn't react with fear. However, Sakura came to the conclusion that her only worth was a sexual one, and she began emotionlessly removing her clothes for him. Ishida did not take advantage of her, but rather, left her in the nurse's office and stopped talking to her altogether. Sakura was left with a feeling of loneliness as she realized she had isolated herself from one of the few people who were willing to be her friends.
But following this, Sakura and Shiina soon befriended Hiroko Kaizuka, another girl with a dragonet, and the three girls became very close. Hiroko was a very intelligent girl, with borderline genius IQ, who had skipped a few grades in school. Hiroko, like any child of such extraordinary ability, was bullied by jealous girls in her class named Aki Honda, Mihaya Ozaki, Miyoko Shito, and Hiroka Takamura. Aki and her friends became cruel and sadistic in their punishments toward Hiroko. On one occasion, they forced her to ingest a beaker filled with worms. On another, they cornered her in the school's backyard and sexually assaulted her with a test tube. Hiroko's parents refused to help her, even cutting off her contact with Shiina and Sakura because they felt that the friendship was distracting her from her school work. Hiroko snapped. Her dragonet, Oni, took on the monstrous form of a hulking man with claws for fingers and pincers for a face. Oni/Hiroko began a rampage, first murdering her parents, then systematically torturing and killing the girls who had bullied her. Oni broke into Shiina's/Sakura's school, in the middle of class. Hiroko, losing her grasp on reality, began harming people who had done nothing to her, including their school teacher. Oni grabbed Sakura with his wide hands and dropped her out a window.
Sakura was saved from the fall by Ensof and taken back home. She later learned everything that had happened to Hiroko--and that Shiina/Hoshimaru had been forced to kill the girl and her dragonet in order to stop her. The loss of her friend made Sakura re-evaluate her own life. Her father came into her bedroom to sleep with her once more, but instead of accepting the treatment, Sakura again willed Ensof to take the form of a knife and stabbed her father to death. Sakura's mother, discovering the murder, attacked Sakura in return. Both mother and daughter were institutionalized.
Sakura spent the rest of the manga in a juvenile correction center for girls, where she turned fourteen in December. Her depression and grief disconnected her mentally from Ensof. Nobody told Shiina where Sakura had gone, so she took Hoshimaru out in the dead of night and went looking for her on her own. Her search led them to Jane Franklin, an American woman whose son had been kidnapped by the Japanese government. Jane's son Robert, a dragon-bearer, was dying of inoperable cancer, and had fallen into a permanent coma. His dragonet, Tarasque, was trying to merge with him prematurely; but the Japanese government had forcibly distanced Robert from Tarasque in an attempt to stop the merging process. The forced separation caused Tarasque to go insane and attack civilians in the Osaka and Kyoto areas. With Shiina and Hoshimaru's help, Jane was able to free Robert from his prison. Robert died in Jane's arms. Tarasque, reunited with his owner, merged with the dead boy and brought him back to life. Having watched a sick child literally rise from the dead, Shiina finally realized the importance of the dragonet phenomenon. Understanding its dire implications, she hastened her search to find Sakura.
It was around this time that Japan finally made it illegal to own a dragonet and passed a law requiring all civilians to report dragon-bearers to the authorities. Dragonets were officially classified as weapons of mass destruction to the highest degree. Proven dragon-bearers would be automatically imprisoned on a federal level. The Ministry of Defense dispatched Special Assault Teams to capture dragonets when possible and kill them when necessary. Therein lay a problem as the government realized dragonets could not be killed so long as their wielders were still alive.
Meanwhile, Naozumi Sudou, who still wished to annihilate the entire human race except for the dragon-bearers, used his dragonet (named Trickster) to attack Japanese military bases, forcing the JSDF to use a large amount of nukes in retaliation. In this manner, Sudou managed to induce a nuclear winter in the summer of 2008. Masses of individuals began dying from exposure to nuclear fallout. The Japanese government realized that dragonets were too powerful to be destroyed by nukes. Because they now knew that dragonets couldn't die unless their owners died, the government constructed a plan to kill all dragonet owners, one by one. Compiling a list of known and suspected dragonet wielders, they came across Sakura's name. Sakura's death was an underhanded one; the government officials decided that they would manipulate her into killing herself. In order to drive her to suicide, they isolated her from all of her friends in the institute (sending them away to different wards) and paid one of the adults taking care of her to abuse her. A delirious Sakura threw herself out a window, believing that Ensof would be there to catch her again; but with their mental link broken, Ensof was nowhere to be found, and Sakura's body shattered against the pavement below. Meanwhile, Shiina had finally found the prison where Sakura was being kept...and arrived in time to watch Sakura die.
Following Sakura's death, Shiina discovered that her true dragonet was not Hoshimaru, but the entire planet. Rather, Hoshimaru had belonged to her close friend, Takeo Tsurumaru, and had been following her and looking out for her on his orders. Having lost everyone she'd ever loved--her friends and family all gone--Shiina subconsciously induced the end of the human race and merged with her "dragonet," the Earth itself.
Personality: At the beginning of Narutaru, meeting new people typically makes Sakura very nervous. Her skin tingles, she sweats, and she stammers and avoids eye contact. The reason she is so shy is probably because she has been made uncertain of and ambivalent towards everything--herself, her life, and others--by the confusion and buried pain she feels towards her father's abuse. Psychologically, she is not very sound, and she has severe sexual problems. Boys with crushes on her, people complimenting her looks, and even menstruation and sexual maturity make her feel both depressed and terrified. It can be said that her father's abuse has taught her to view all things of a sexual nature with revolsion and fear. In addition to this, she is much less comfortable, face-to-face, around men than she is around women. (From a distance, this phobia seems manageable, as she was able to remain relatively calm while speaking to Sudou over the telephone.) Her father has always been her archetype of what a man should be; thus, it goes without saying that her first instinct is to distrust, fear, or dislike men. She knows it is irrational to fear all men just because of the wrongdoings of one man. She simply cannot help her feelings.
When Sakura has become familiar with a person, most of her nervous tendencies disappear. She proves herself to be a silly and cheerful girl. She is surprisingly kind and maternal, dedicated to looking out for those she considers dear; in fact, she is almost obsessed with "protecting" her best friend, Shiina. She will let nothing stop her when it comes to defending Shiina; at one point, when Komori was going to impale Shiina with Push Dagger, she threw Ensof in the way instead, even though the mental link between Ensof and Sakura meant that Sakura herself would feel the pain of the impalation. She often relates things she considers pleasant to "a mother's embrace," viewing much of the world in terms of a parent-child relationship. Despite her history of abuse, she is a girl who wants to maintain a maternal relationship with someone, although it's unclear whether she would ever think positively enough of intimacy to have a child of her own. (I imagine, however, that she must feel a confusing mixture of longing, hatred, and remorse towards the abortion of her own child.) Her maternal instincts are reflected in the way she treats Ensof, often cradling him or babying him. This can alternatively be interpreted as Sakura trying to mother herself; she and Ensof are one and the same, Sakura being able to feel anything that Ensof feels, and by cradling him, it feels as though someone is cradling her.
By the end of the manga, prior to her death, Sakura has become substantially more independent and outgoing, able to make her own decisions and to engage people in conversation when she wants or needs to; contrast this with the beginning of the story, where she was so shy that she would not acknowledge people who spoke to her or would cower or cringe in others' presence. By the time Sudou has begun his onslaught, she is much more outspoken and more comfortable showing affection and concern to others. Her nervous stammer has decreased in frequency. At this point, she has also taken a more active role in helping Shiina and Hoshimaru ward off Sudou's attacks. (The anime never chronicles this point, sadly.) It is probably Shiina's friendship that lends Sakura the confidence she starts to exhibit in Narutaru's later chapters; Shiina is, without a doubt, Sakura's emotional crutch and the only character in the story who can consistently make Sakura smile.
Sakura rather humorously (and superstitiously) consults tarot cards, almanacs, and horoscopes on a day-to-day basis, believing that her future is firmly mapped out in these sources. She is shown to appreciate Jewish mysticism; she nicknames her dragonet "Ensof" (most fans believe this was a mistranslation/mistransliteration of Ein Sof, the name God went by before he created the world according to Kabbalah), and she often refers to "Sheol" (the earliest concept of an afterlife, according to Judaism) as the final resting place of human souls. (She also refers to the Earth itself as Sheol, which is later mirrored by Mamiko Kuri.)
A running gag is that she is well-meaning but terrible at almost every task she undertakes. She cannot cook (complex dishes, anyway), although she tries. She cannot sew, although she tries. She attempts very hard to keep her room orderly and neat, but cannot prevent the clutter that forms on her floor, bed, and shelves. She passes out or trips often during P.E. class and can barely ride a bike.
She is a very lonely girl. When someone shows signs of wanting to be her friend, she latches on and doesn't let go. There is also a large part of her that sees herself solely as a sexual object. Her father, Komori, and Ishida were all interested in her sexually, and with the exception of Sudou, these are the only males she gets to interact with in Narutaru. (She does interact with Takeo, but only as Hoshimaru.) Therefore, all her examples of male-female interaction have been negative ones and have firmly cemented for her the idea that "Men only want sex."
Sakura is usually treated as a serious character in Narutaru, but when played for laughs, her personality tics generally involve having her overreact to very small situations with a fretful, panicked response. A papercut or a spilled bottle of ink might be the end of the world. On these occasions, she usually seeks to be mollified by Shiina. Also played for laughs are her superstitious beliefs in fortune reading and vengeful deities. For example, when she and Shiina are first trying to track down Takeo Tsurumaru, and traffic separates her from her target, she becomes convinced that her almanac already told her this would happen when it warned of "an inauspicious day for traveling west."
Sakura doesn't like to be touched, undoubtedly the result of her father's abuse, although she does not mind being touched by Shiina and even becomes deeply flustered when they embrace. She often feels compassion or sympathy even towards people who are cruel to her. Note the guilt she experienced after Tomonori Komori's death, despite his harassment and psychological torture of her. When she meets again with her mother towards the end of the manga, she tries to soothe and console the woman, even though the woman more or less admitted outright that she knew her husband was hurting her daughter and simply did not want to acknowledge it or care to stop it. (Her mother even states that she considered killing Sakura several times, when Sakura was as young as six years old.)
Though quite unintelligent (or at least book-dumb), she is often very perceptive of others' emotions or capabilities. Early on in the story, she believed this meant that she was "a little bit psychic."
The most complex aspect of Sakura's personality is that, regarding her beliefs about humanity, she contradicts herself--frequently--sometimes within the same sentence. She believes that there is no species crueler than a human, that all humans harbor dark thoughts, that humans are to be feared, distrusted, even despised in certain circumstances... But on the same token, she wants to ensure the safety and happiness of other human beings by default. She shuts herself off from human contact fairly early on in the manga; yet when Komori, Sudou, and Kaizuka all offer her the opportunity to help eliminate the human race on separate occasions, she adamantly refuses to do so each time the offer is extended. She sees both the worst and the best in humanity, and her ambivalence often hinders her from making a distinction between the two. You are a human: So does she care about you because you are a human, or does she hate you because you are a human? It's both. Throughout Narutaru, Sakura is the only character who constantly walks the line between the "good characters" and the "bad characters."
This applies only to RPGs: Monsters, demons, aliens, dinosaurs, fire-breathing dragons? No problem. She will readily interact with any character of any species and treat him or her like an equal. Send a human male her way and she'll be terrified. Sakura is somehow convinced that no species is quite so cruel as the human species, that nobody can harm you the way a human can harm you. And with the canon she comes from, you can't honestly blame her...
In addition to Jewish mysticism, she likes potpourri, fencing, and various tea recipes. She secretly wishes she could dance, but knows she lacks the necessary grace. She does not like kendo and claims never to be dishonest with the people she speaks to. She fills her bedroom with paper cranes and has recurring dreams about falling from the sky.
Abilities: Provided that emotional stress is not causing a mental disconnect, Sakura is permanently linked to Ensof, her dragonet. Sakura can see through Ensof's eyes, and Ensof can see through Sakura's. Sakura can control Ensof's every movement without verbal command. Presumably, Ensof can also control Sakura, except Ensof is Sakura, and that tends to get a little confusing. (I rationalize it by thinking of dragonets as a second body for a single human mind.) Ensof can fly (allowing Sakura to ride on him when he lies flat), and because his physiological makeup is elastic, he can expand like rubber. This comes in handy when Sakura is falling, and Ensof expands into a net shape to catch her. Ensof can also replicate weapons (and presumably other objects) if he is given a long enough time, uninterrupted, to absorb them, provided that they are not too complex in mechanism.
Some RPGs require a power limitation on Ensof. When this is applicable, I will take away Ensof's weapon replication technique and initially disable the mental link between Ensof and Sakura.
On her own, Sakura is actually quite a speedy runner. She is frail as hell, yet the manga puts her through a significant amount of physical trauma from which she always recovers brilliantly. Her parents own a restaurant, which she has been helping them with since she was at least nine; so at the very least, she must have mastery of some basic noodle and soup recipes.
She won third place in Kusatsu's Citywide Epee (Fencing) Tournament in 2007.
THIS IS IMPORTANT: Dragonets cannot be destroyed unless their owners are dead. In an RPG, if you engage Ensof in contact, you must keep this in mind. It is not my decision, it is canon. The little bastard can pull push daggers and gatling guns out of his ass. You cannot chop him in half; he'll just reattach. You can incapacitate a dragonet, with effort, but unless you kill its owner, you cannot outright destroy a dragonet. (Note: A much simpler method of incapacitating Ensof would be to incapacitate Sakura. There is little Ensof can do on his own unless Sakura is linked to him.) I honestly believe the "no death" deal is Kitoh's parody on Pokemon "fainting" all the time and never dying. Narutaru is a deconstruction of mons series like Pokemon, remember.
Disabilities: Sakura can feel everything Ensof feels. Attack Ensof and Sakura will feel the pain. In addition to this, linking up with him often makes her feel dizzy or sick. On her own, she is easily intimidated and far from strong. She performs poorly in school and, in general, is a rather unintelligent girl who tends to fail at nearly every task she undertakes. She is shown to be very clumsy when helping out in her parents' restaurant.
Other: Sakura has four different haircuts/hairstyles throughout the manga. She starts the story with plain long hair, later switching to braids. After Komori calls her beautiful, she shears her hair very short, into a boy's haircut, uneven strands sticking out behind her ears and neck. Her hair later evens out while retaining its spiky quality and grows down to her chin, and she spends most of the manga with her hair at this length. By the end of the manga, however, her hair is long again.
At the very end of the manga, when the dragonets are shown in their final forms (or the forms they take before ultimately becoming planets), Sakura's dragonet (Ensof) seems to evolve into the shape of a deformed deer with an elongated tail.
She is apparently on birth control pills, as Ishida catches her picking up a birth control prescription at the drug store in the beginning of volume seven. The English language version of the manga changed the birth control pills to painkillers. This does not make sense, as Sakura did not have any kind of pre-existing condition at the time that would call for painkillers.
If she is really from the Shiga prefecture of Japan, then she probably speaks with a Kansai regional accent. The animation ignores this and has all the characters conform to a standard dialect. For the sake of authenticity, I will present her as speaking Kansai-ben.
Ensof has been used to kill three people; Komori, Mr. Akira, and an unnamed SAT agent who was tasked with detaining a mentally unstable Kaizuka. (At the time, Sakura thought she was helping Kaizuka.)
She appears to be knock-kneed and pigeon-toed. In addition to this, she has knobbly hands, a nearly shapeless frame, and she is very tall and lanky, clocking in at an impressive 165 centimeters. She is definitely not pretty, so Komori and Ishida's attraction to her escapes me.
Chapters: It can be argued that Narutaru has three main characters: Shiina, Sakura, and Kaizuka. In addition to sharing story time across the pages of the main plot, each girl has her own "focal" chapters that take a break from the plot and are devoted very specifically to that one girl.
For the convenience of prospective Narutaru readers, Sakura's chapters are:
Blinded by the Light
Knife Edge
The Weight of a Scream*
Nothing But the Truth, Part Two
Her First Errand
Fish Life, Human Life
My Eyes are the Eyes of a Victim; My Hands are the Hands of an Assailant**
Dream of Falling
* = Shared with Shiina
** = Shared with Kaizuka
What Are Dragonets?: Dragonets are baby planets that search the galaxies for hosts to bond with. When bonded to a living host, the dragonet and the host are linked mentally, physically, and emotionally. Any physical sensation which one experiences, the other also experiences--including touch and pain. The host can control the dragonet's movements without verbal command. The host can see through the dragonet's eyes, essentially allowing the host to be in two places at once. In addition to this, the dragonet's growth reflects the emotions and thoughts of its owner--hence why Sudou believes that the dragonets are a manifestation of "dark feelings." Mamiko Kuri calls them an "outlet for emotion."
When a dragon-bearer dies, the dragonet can merge with his or her corpse postmortem to bring him or her back to life. Aki Sato of Narutaru refers to this as becoming a "dragon." However, the merging of human and dragonet can eventually result in the birth of a new planet.
Essentially, if Sakura were to die, and Ensof were to merge with her, she would become an immortal being; following this, she might eventually turn into a planet, losing all sense of human self.
Yeah. Weird.
Takeo Tsurumaru claims that dragonets are empty shells who bond with their hosts in search of a soul to call their own. (Mamiko Kuri, on the other hand, omits the word "soul" and replaces it with "central nervous system.") Hosts are not limited to humans. In one chapter of Narutaru (for reference, the chapter title is "What Can I Do For You Now?"), a dragonet is shown to have merged with a dolphin.
A dragonet cannot be killed unless its owner is killed, and an immortal being resulting from the merging of a human and dragonet will not die unless by unnatural means. An immortal "dragon" is nearly invulnerable.
It is implied that the concept we have nowadays of dragons--i.e., winged, reptilian creatures--comes from an ancient sighting of a dragonet. So technically, the "dragons" in Narutaru do not displace the traditional concept of dragons. Rather, Narutaru suggests that traditional dragons are simply one possible template for a much larger scope of creature.
Confusing Name Changes in Narutaru: "Narutaru" is an abbreviation of Mukuro Naru Hoshi Tama Taru Ko, which literally means "The Star That Died and the Jewel of a Girl." It is abbreviated to "Narutaru" by most of the fanbase, and its title appears as "Narutaru" (なるたる) on most official Japanese materials.
Narutaru began as a manga, and later was adapted into an anime. When Narutaru was licensed to be translated into English, the anime's dubbing company marketed it as "Shadow Star," and the manga's translation company marketed it as "Shadow Star Narutaru."
The creatures that are featured in Narutaru, the dragonets, have a different name depending on which version of which medium you are viewing. In the original Japanese context, they are called "ryukodomo." This was adapted early on by fan translators as "dragonets." Dark Horse, who had picked up the manga for official English adaptation, translated "dragonet" as "shadow dragon," even though the word for "shadow" is nowhere in the original name. Central Park Media, in charge of dubbing the anime, translated the term as "dragon's child" for singular and "dragon children" for plural. Among the fan community, "dragonet" and "shadow dragon" are used most commonly.
Even the characters' names may change from one version of the story to another. Miyoko Shito becomes Mio in the anime. Oddly enough, while Shiina's name is 秕 / シイナ (Shi-i-na, "an empty husk"), the manga's publishing company originally romanized her name as Shina in promotional materials. Sakura Akira became Akira Sakura when the manga became an anime, and the English adaptation of the manga followed suit, though the manga's translating team later botched this when one panel referred to Sakura's father as "Mr. Akira." Komori's name becomes "Akinori" in the English version of the anime, and Hiroko Kaizuka simply becomes "Kaizuka," her first name excluded completely. That same dub changed Mihaya Ozaki's name to Mihaya Oozawa. (Did they get her confused with Satomi, or were they trying to make the two related?) Bungo Takano is Kazuyuki Takano in the English adaptation of the manga. To make matters worse, Dark Horse confused Bungo/Kazuyuki with Sakura's friend Ishida very early on, and both characters were treated as one character nicknamed Kaz (which especially made matters weird when "Kaz" was crushing on Sakura in one frame and kissing Satomi in the next!). Sakura's dragonet's name was romanized as Ensof in the original materials; Dark Horse kept this in tact when they translated the manga to English, but Central Park Media changed his name to Ein Sof. None of these changes were ever explained and were perhaps only arbitrary or aesthetic.
Confusing? Yes. Gd it.
SO FOR ABSOLUTE CLARITY, in the original source this character's given name is Sakura and her surname is Akira. (Evidence here, a page from the Manga Sketchbook fan translation as opposed to Dark Horse's official translations.) The anime adaptation of the manga reversed this to make her given name Akira and her surname Sakura. For marketing purposes, the English adaptation of the manga followed the anime's lead and made Akira her given name. I am going by the original manga, so her full name, in western order, is Sakura Akira. This should not change the fact that Shiina typically calls her "Akira-chan."
WTF is Wrong with This Manga?!: Yeah, it's a bit...heavy-handed in its shock factor. Literally every page seems designed to stun or disgust the reader. The mangaka, Mohiro Kitoh, only writes two types of stories: slice-of-life (Zansho, Noririn) and deconstruction (Wings of Vendemiaire, Narutaru). Narutaru is a deconstruction of the "mons" genre. Narutaru is supposed to make you think, "What would happen if Ash Ketchum took Pikachu and slaughtered everyone, ever?!" And realistically, if a bunch of school children did get their hands on magical creatures with fighting capabilities... Don't you think they would use them to attack the people who invoked their trivial anger? The teachers who gave them bad test grades, the bullies who treated them unkindly, the parents who gave them a curfew? Narutaru, I think, is an attempt to show how, realistically, it would suck if Pokemon were real (no matter how much we all wanted one as kids) because their powers would be horrifically abused by the people who came in possession of them.
Narutaru also seems to enjoy making a moral point: that abuse perpetuates abuse. Aki Honda, for example, forces Hiroko to drink "worm juice" and shoves a test tube inside of her; but not half a chapter later, we learn that Aki herself once went through the "worm juice" treatment, and that she's being sexually abused by her brother at home. Satomi Oozawa tortures Sakura in one scene; we later learn that Satomi underwent horrific hazing in her "rich girls school" for coming from a destitute, lower class family. Even Komori, the psychopath who wants to kill Shiina (and everyone else), is suffering from AIDS dementia complex and has had to take care of his physically disabled mother since he was a young boy. Narutaru seems to be of the opinion that you do not become an abuser without some kind of history of abuse. In that respect, Narutaru humanizes everyone, even the monsters. There's no "We are all good" or "We are all bad" message going on here; just "We are all human."
That's it, basically. Oh, yeah, and everyone dies.
Other Works by Mohiro Kitoh: If you enjoy the disturbing Narutaru, or if you want to read something like it but can't quite stomach its hyperviolence, you might like some of these different works by the same mangaka.
Slice of Life
Zansho -- A collection of short stories following everyday families living in modern-day Japan. Chronicles first love, coming of age, and even marriage and childbirth. Very tame and family-friendly.
Hallucination from the Womb -- Follows two detectives living in the fictitious Shelled City as they solve various mysteries in the slowly collapsing town. This is actually not tame at all; it contains murder, sexuality, and child abuse.
Noririn -- The eponymous teenage bicyclist convinces a jaded 28-year-old to partake in competitive bike riding. Another tame work.
Miles to the Edge of the World -- Fan abbreviation: Miles/Edge. It follows a couple who live on a floating continent where spirits possess machines. Erm, yeah. Not tame at all, as the main characters like to have a lot of sex.
Deconstruction
Bokurano -- A deconstruction of the mecha genre. A class of middle schoolers are contracted to pilot a giant robot in order to save the planet, not knowing that as soon as their contract is up, they will die. The manga follows Narutaru's shock factor pattern, with gratuitous violence and implied child sexuality, but it is nowhere near as horrific as Narutaru, and its hyperviolence outside of the robot comes off as somewhat needless (whereas Narutaru's at least has a point). I personally find the anime to be much more heartwarming and emotional, as well as more tasteful and plot-driven, and thus a lot sadder when the children inevitably die. I recommend watching the anime before reading the manga.
Wings of Vendemiaire -- A deconstruction of the magical girl genre. Set in a steampunk environment, the ringmaster of a circus has created sentient, winged women out of wood. He calls each of them "Vendemiaire," but they are all very independent, with different appearances and personalities. The manga follows each girl's life and "death," questioning the definition of life and the definition of a soul, and has a subplot involving one of the Vendemiaire girls murdering her human lookalike and taking her identity.
Isn't Something Different? -- This work has not been translated into English yet. Its official title is "Nanika Mochigatte Masu Ka?" It seems fans have begun abbreviating it to "NaniMochi." The main character is a bespectacled high schooler with psychic powers, who often uses them to maim or kill. I don't know much more than that, as I haven't read it.
Goes By/Known As: Sakura, Akira-chan (to Shiina), Sakura-senpai (to Kaizuka)
Canon: Narutaru
Age: 14
Appearance: Here (and this is her dragonet, Ensof)
Height: 165cm (5'5'')
Blood Type: AB
Before you read further, please be warned that some of the content is quite explicit. Also be wary of spoilers for the end of the manga.
History: Sakura's parents have owned a noodle restaurant in the Shiga prefecture since before she was born. As a small child, she was happy, vibrant, and outgoing. Her mother found her amusing; her father loved her dearly--maybe too dearly. When Sakura was six, her father became inappropriately intimate with her while her mother looked the other way. Sakura's father did not seem to think he was abusing her, and Sakura, too young to form real opinions of her own, did not know what to think, but felt that their relationship was wrong. Too afraid to speak out against her father or to ask others' opinions, she grew up to be a very sheltered, shy, withdrawn, and nervous person.
Sakura became pregnant when she was twelve, and her mother quietly took her for an abortion. Because she was suffering from placenta accreta, the baby was removed via c-section/hysterotomy. Sakura's mother never acknowledged this event, during or after.
During the summer of Sakura's thirteenth year, strange, star-shaped creatures began appearing all across the planet. Sakura discovered one of the creatures, red and gray in coloring, and found that she could link up with it mentally, sharing thoughts and feelings with it, and even control its actions. She named the creature Ensof (likely a corruption of Ein Sof), took it home, and treated it like a pet. During that same summer, she met the chatty Shiina Tamai (Narutaru's protagonist) in her fencing class. Shiina and Sakura immediately became best friends. With Shiina's help, Sakura became more cheerful and less sullen.
School resumed in September, but Sakura soon discovered a problem. She was linked to Ensof permanently, but Ensof could move around on its own, with or without her control. Often, when Sakura was sleeping or studying, Ensof would take off flying through the skies. This resulted in severe vertigo for Sakura, and to her embarrassment, she began fainting or throwing up in the middle of class, earning her a great amount of bullying and harassment from her classmates. For this reason, Sakura became wary of Ensof and tried to avoid the mental link with him, but to no avail.
Sakura soon learned that Shiina, too, had a star-shaped creature like Ensof. Shiina's was named Hoshimaru. Neither girl knew where the creatures had come from or what to do about them. Sakura was then contacted by a boy from her school, named Tomonori Komori. Komori, too, had a creature he could link up with. He dubbed the creatures "dragonets" (this nickname sticks for the rest of the series). But unlike Shiina and Sakura, his dragonet had evolved to take a much more sinister shape--that of an enormous, one-eyed knife. He called his dragonet Push Dagger.
With Push Dagger, Komori planned to create a new world order by killing all the intelligent and educated members of society and returning technology and civilization to the dark ages. He planned to kill Shiina first, and told Sakura that she would be his queen and bear his children, after commenting that he found Sakura to be beautiful. The girls did not take kindly to this. A battle took place between the dragonets. Push Dagger nearly managed to split Shiina in half, but Sakura threw Ensof in the way at the last moment. As her dragonet absorbed the blow meant for Shiina, Sakura experienced the physical pain for herself and began to vomit blood. Acting quickly, Sakura/Ensof expanded his elastic body to wrap around Push Dagger's hilt and force him back at Komori, thereby impaling Komori with his own dragonet.
Sakura passed out from pain. When she regained consciousness, she and Shiina used their dragonets to hide Komori's body and returned to their homes, deeply terrified. Sakura locked herself in her room for several weeks. Komori's remark that she was "beautiful" bothered her just as much as his death did. Using Ensof to replicate the form of a knife, she cut her previously long hair to a very short and choppy cut, attempting to make herself ugly. Shiina asked, "Why did you cut your hair? It was so beautiful..." and Sakura replied, "Too many people have said that," hinting that it was not just Komori's comment, but her own father's attention that disturbed her so deeply.
Komori's body was discovered by authorities despite Sakura and Shiina's best attempts. The government took his body into their custody because, to their great bewilderment, the knife-monster that had impaled him was starting to merge with his corpse in an attempt to revive it. The government did not understand the "Dragonet Phenomenon" and began placing cameras around Komori's neighborhood to see if any of his friends shared similar possession of a dragonet.
Sakura watched news reports from her bedroom regarding Komori's mysterious "disappearance" (the government prevented the media from disclosing information about Komori's death). Sakura learned that Komori had been taking care of his mother, who was severely disabled. Without her son's help, his mother had starved to death. Feeling a deep sense of guilt, Sakura finally left her bedroom, purchased flowers, traveled to Komori's neighborhood, and left them by his door. There, she was approached by an older boy and fellow dragonet owner named Naozumi Sudou, who warned her that the government was monitoring Komori's home.
In order to dodge the government, Sudou and a very reluctant Sakura (along with Ensof, her security blanket) went for a drive in Sudou's car, and Sudou explained a little more about the true nature of the dragonets to Sakura. Sudou claimed that dragonets were a manifestation of their owners' deepest, darkest, and ugliest feelings; therefore, not everyone possessed one. He explained to Sakura that by merging with a dragonet after death, its owner would outlast human mortality. He explained to Sakura that Komori had been his friend, and he and Komori had planned to slaughter the human race, enabling only dragonet-wielders to survive the massacre (because those who possessed and were linked to dragonets would merge with them after death, if the merging process was left uninterrupted). Sudou felt that dragon-bearers were "chosen ones." Sudou invited Sakura to join his group in Komori's place, but Sakura declined.
Following Sakura's rejection of his offer, Sudou dispatched one of his allies, Satomi Oozawa, to murder her. Satomi's dragonet, Amapola--shaped like a red lily with a human spine for a stem--kidnapped Sakura from her home and took her out to a private, rural area. A sadistic Satomi took her time torturing Sakura via Amapola. Amapola dangled Sakura above the ground, dislocating both her shoulders and punching her repeatedly in the stomach. Ensof was no match for the much stronger Amapola, so Sakura sent Ensof to find Shiina. Shiina and Hoshimaru came to Sakura's aid within an hour. Though Hoshimaru was unable to beat Amapola, Shiina used Hoshimaru to gain the attention of a small aviation company and draw one of its pilots to the scene of the crime. Worried about alerting the ASDF, Satomi/Amapola fled from the scene; a wary Shiina and Sakura went to the local hospital to be treated, lying to their parents about the cause of their injuries.
But the government became alerted to mysterious activities in the Kusatsu area, and Shiina and Sakura, due to their strange and unexplained injuries correlating with the mysterious attacks, soon found themselves brought in for questioning regarding these phenomena. Though both girls lied, insisting they knew nothing about the dragonets, their parents were suspicious to the contrary. Still, the Ministry of Defense had no choice but to release the girls to their families, as they had no evidence that either one knew anything about the dragonets.
Perhaps feeling that she would be safer if she stayed close to Shiina rather than hiding in her bedroom, Sakura started attending school regularly again, where a male classmate of hers, named Ishida, developed a crush on her. When Sakura fainted during gym class, Ishida made up an excuse for her and escorted her to the nurse's office, where he confessed his feelings to her. The boy had treated her kindly on many occasions before, so she didn't react with fear. However, Sakura came to the conclusion that her only worth was a sexual one, and she began emotionlessly removing her clothes for him. Ishida did not take advantage of her, but rather, left her in the nurse's office and stopped talking to her altogether. Sakura was left with a feeling of loneliness as she realized she had isolated herself from one of the few people who were willing to be her friends.
But following this, Sakura and Shiina soon befriended Hiroko Kaizuka, another girl with a dragonet, and the three girls became very close. Hiroko was a very intelligent girl, with borderline genius IQ, who had skipped a few grades in school. Hiroko, like any child of such extraordinary ability, was bullied by jealous girls in her class named Aki Honda, Mihaya Ozaki, Miyoko Shito, and Hiroka Takamura. Aki and her friends became cruel and sadistic in their punishments toward Hiroko. On one occasion, they forced her to ingest a beaker filled with worms. On another, they cornered her in the school's backyard and sexually assaulted her with a test tube. Hiroko's parents refused to help her, even cutting off her contact with Shiina and Sakura because they felt that the friendship was distracting her from her school work. Hiroko snapped. Her dragonet, Oni, took on the monstrous form of a hulking man with claws for fingers and pincers for a face. Oni/Hiroko began a rampage, first murdering her parents, then systematically torturing and killing the girls who had bullied her. Oni broke into Shiina's/Sakura's school, in the middle of class. Hiroko, losing her grasp on reality, began harming people who had done nothing to her, including their school teacher. Oni grabbed Sakura with his wide hands and dropped her out a window.
Sakura was saved from the fall by Ensof and taken back home. She later learned everything that had happened to Hiroko--and that Shiina/Hoshimaru had been forced to kill the girl and her dragonet in order to stop her. The loss of her friend made Sakura re-evaluate her own life. Her father came into her bedroom to sleep with her once more, but instead of accepting the treatment, Sakura again willed Ensof to take the form of a knife and stabbed her father to death. Sakura's mother, discovering the murder, attacked Sakura in return. Both mother and daughter were institutionalized.
Sakura spent the rest of the manga in a juvenile correction center for girls, where she turned fourteen in December. Her depression and grief disconnected her mentally from Ensof. Nobody told Shiina where Sakura had gone, so she took Hoshimaru out in the dead of night and went looking for her on her own. Her search led them to Jane Franklin, an American woman whose son had been kidnapped by the Japanese government. Jane's son Robert, a dragon-bearer, was dying of inoperable cancer, and had fallen into a permanent coma. His dragonet, Tarasque, was trying to merge with him prematurely; but the Japanese government had forcibly distanced Robert from Tarasque in an attempt to stop the merging process. The forced separation caused Tarasque to go insane and attack civilians in the Osaka and Kyoto areas. With Shiina and Hoshimaru's help, Jane was able to free Robert from his prison. Robert died in Jane's arms. Tarasque, reunited with his owner, merged with the dead boy and brought him back to life. Having watched a sick child literally rise from the dead, Shiina finally realized the importance of the dragonet phenomenon. Understanding its dire implications, she hastened her search to find Sakura.
It was around this time that Japan finally made it illegal to own a dragonet and passed a law requiring all civilians to report dragon-bearers to the authorities. Dragonets were officially classified as weapons of mass destruction to the highest degree. Proven dragon-bearers would be automatically imprisoned on a federal level. The Ministry of Defense dispatched Special Assault Teams to capture dragonets when possible and kill them when necessary. Therein lay a problem as the government realized dragonets could not be killed so long as their wielders were still alive.
Meanwhile, Naozumi Sudou, who still wished to annihilate the entire human race except for the dragon-bearers, used his dragonet (named Trickster) to attack Japanese military bases, forcing the JSDF to use a large amount of nukes in retaliation. In this manner, Sudou managed to induce a nuclear winter in the summer of 2008. Masses of individuals began dying from exposure to nuclear fallout. The Japanese government realized that dragonets were too powerful to be destroyed by nukes. Because they now knew that dragonets couldn't die unless their owners died, the government constructed a plan to kill all dragonet owners, one by one. Compiling a list of known and suspected dragonet wielders, they came across Sakura's name. Sakura's death was an underhanded one; the government officials decided that they would manipulate her into killing herself. In order to drive her to suicide, they isolated her from all of her friends in the institute (sending them away to different wards) and paid one of the adults taking care of her to abuse her. A delirious Sakura threw herself out a window, believing that Ensof would be there to catch her again; but with their mental link broken, Ensof was nowhere to be found, and Sakura's body shattered against the pavement below. Meanwhile, Shiina had finally found the prison where Sakura was being kept...and arrived in time to watch Sakura die.
Following Sakura's death, Shiina discovered that her true dragonet was not Hoshimaru, but the entire planet. Rather, Hoshimaru had belonged to her close friend, Takeo Tsurumaru, and had been following her and looking out for her on his orders. Having lost everyone she'd ever loved--her friends and family all gone--Shiina subconsciously induced the end of the human race and merged with her "dragonet," the Earth itself.
Personality: At the beginning of Narutaru, meeting new people typically makes Sakura very nervous. Her skin tingles, she sweats, and she stammers and avoids eye contact. The reason she is so shy is probably because she has been made uncertain of and ambivalent towards everything--herself, her life, and others--by the confusion and buried pain she feels towards her father's abuse. Psychologically, she is not very sound, and she has severe sexual problems. Boys with crushes on her, people complimenting her looks, and even menstruation and sexual maturity make her feel both depressed and terrified. It can be said that her father's abuse has taught her to view all things of a sexual nature with revolsion and fear. In addition to this, she is much less comfortable, face-to-face, around men than she is around women. (From a distance, this phobia seems manageable, as she was able to remain relatively calm while speaking to Sudou over the telephone.) Her father has always been her archetype of what a man should be; thus, it goes without saying that her first instinct is to distrust, fear, or dislike men. She knows it is irrational to fear all men just because of the wrongdoings of one man. She simply cannot help her feelings.
When Sakura has become familiar with a person, most of her nervous tendencies disappear. She proves herself to be a silly and cheerful girl. She is surprisingly kind and maternal, dedicated to looking out for those she considers dear; in fact, she is almost obsessed with "protecting" her best friend, Shiina. She will let nothing stop her when it comes to defending Shiina; at one point, when Komori was going to impale Shiina with Push Dagger, she threw Ensof in the way instead, even though the mental link between Ensof and Sakura meant that Sakura herself would feel the pain of the impalation. She often relates things she considers pleasant to "a mother's embrace," viewing much of the world in terms of a parent-child relationship. Despite her history of abuse, she is a girl who wants to maintain a maternal relationship with someone, although it's unclear whether she would ever think positively enough of intimacy to have a child of her own. (I imagine, however, that she must feel a confusing mixture of longing, hatred, and remorse towards the abortion of her own child.) Her maternal instincts are reflected in the way she treats Ensof, often cradling him or babying him. This can alternatively be interpreted as Sakura trying to mother herself; she and Ensof are one and the same, Sakura being able to feel anything that Ensof feels, and by cradling him, it feels as though someone is cradling her.
By the end of the manga, prior to her death, Sakura has become substantially more independent and outgoing, able to make her own decisions and to engage people in conversation when she wants or needs to; contrast this with the beginning of the story, where she was so shy that she would not acknowledge people who spoke to her or would cower or cringe in others' presence. By the time Sudou has begun his onslaught, she is much more outspoken and more comfortable showing affection and concern to others. Her nervous stammer has decreased in frequency. At this point, she has also taken a more active role in helping Shiina and Hoshimaru ward off Sudou's attacks. (The anime never chronicles this point, sadly.) It is probably Shiina's friendship that lends Sakura the confidence she starts to exhibit in Narutaru's later chapters; Shiina is, without a doubt, Sakura's emotional crutch and the only character in the story who can consistently make Sakura smile.
Sakura rather humorously (and superstitiously) consults tarot cards, almanacs, and horoscopes on a day-to-day basis, believing that her future is firmly mapped out in these sources. She is shown to appreciate Jewish mysticism; she nicknames her dragonet "Ensof" (most fans believe this was a mistranslation/mistransliteration of Ein Sof, the name God went by before he created the world according to Kabbalah), and she often refers to "Sheol" (the earliest concept of an afterlife, according to Judaism) as the final resting place of human souls. (She also refers to the Earth itself as Sheol, which is later mirrored by Mamiko Kuri.)
A running gag is that she is well-meaning but terrible at almost every task she undertakes. She cannot cook (complex dishes, anyway), although she tries. She cannot sew, although she tries. She attempts very hard to keep her room orderly and neat, but cannot prevent the clutter that forms on her floor, bed, and shelves. She passes out or trips often during P.E. class and can barely ride a bike.
She is a very lonely girl. When someone shows signs of wanting to be her friend, she latches on and doesn't let go. There is also a large part of her that sees herself solely as a sexual object. Her father, Komori, and Ishida were all interested in her sexually, and with the exception of Sudou, these are the only males she gets to interact with in Narutaru. (She does interact with Takeo, but only as Hoshimaru.) Therefore, all her examples of male-female interaction have been negative ones and have firmly cemented for her the idea that "Men only want sex."
Sakura is usually treated as a serious character in Narutaru, but when played for laughs, her personality tics generally involve having her overreact to very small situations with a fretful, panicked response. A papercut or a spilled bottle of ink might be the end of the world. On these occasions, she usually seeks to be mollified by Shiina. Also played for laughs are her superstitious beliefs in fortune reading and vengeful deities. For example, when she and Shiina are first trying to track down Takeo Tsurumaru, and traffic separates her from her target, she becomes convinced that her almanac already told her this would happen when it warned of "an inauspicious day for traveling west."
Sakura doesn't like to be touched, undoubtedly the result of her father's abuse, although she does not mind being touched by Shiina and even becomes deeply flustered when they embrace. She often feels compassion or sympathy even towards people who are cruel to her. Note the guilt she experienced after Tomonori Komori's death, despite his harassment and psychological torture of her. When she meets again with her mother towards the end of the manga, she tries to soothe and console the woman, even though the woman more or less admitted outright that she knew her husband was hurting her daughter and simply did not want to acknowledge it or care to stop it. (Her mother even states that she considered killing Sakura several times, when Sakura was as young as six years old.)
Though quite unintelligent (or at least book-dumb), she is often very perceptive of others' emotions or capabilities. Early on in the story, she believed this meant that she was "a little bit psychic."
The most complex aspect of Sakura's personality is that, regarding her beliefs about humanity, she contradicts herself--frequently--sometimes within the same sentence. She believes that there is no species crueler than a human, that all humans harbor dark thoughts, that humans are to be feared, distrusted, even despised in certain circumstances... But on the same token, she wants to ensure the safety and happiness of other human beings by default. She shuts herself off from human contact fairly early on in the manga; yet when Komori, Sudou, and Kaizuka all offer her the opportunity to help eliminate the human race on separate occasions, she adamantly refuses to do so each time the offer is extended. She sees both the worst and the best in humanity, and her ambivalence often hinders her from making a distinction between the two. You are a human: So does she care about you because you are a human, or does she hate you because you are a human? It's both. Throughout Narutaru, Sakura is the only character who constantly walks the line between the "good characters" and the "bad characters."
This applies only to RPGs: Monsters, demons, aliens, dinosaurs, fire-breathing dragons? No problem. She will readily interact with any character of any species and treat him or her like an equal. Send a human male her way and she'll be terrified. Sakura is somehow convinced that no species is quite so cruel as the human species, that nobody can harm you the way a human can harm you. And with the canon she comes from, you can't honestly blame her...
In addition to Jewish mysticism, she likes potpourri, fencing, and various tea recipes. She secretly wishes she could dance, but knows she lacks the necessary grace. She does not like kendo and claims never to be dishonest with the people she speaks to. She fills her bedroom with paper cranes and has recurring dreams about falling from the sky.
Abilities: Provided that emotional stress is not causing a mental disconnect, Sakura is permanently linked to Ensof, her dragonet. Sakura can see through Ensof's eyes, and Ensof can see through Sakura's. Sakura can control Ensof's every movement without verbal command. Presumably, Ensof can also control Sakura, except Ensof is Sakura, and that tends to get a little confusing. (I rationalize it by thinking of dragonets as a second body for a single human mind.) Ensof can fly (allowing Sakura to ride on him when he lies flat), and because his physiological makeup is elastic, he can expand like rubber. This comes in handy when Sakura is falling, and Ensof expands into a net shape to catch her. Ensof can also replicate weapons (and presumably other objects) if he is given a long enough time, uninterrupted, to absorb them, provided that they are not too complex in mechanism.
Some RPGs require a power limitation on Ensof. When this is applicable, I will take away Ensof's weapon replication technique and initially disable the mental link between Ensof and Sakura.
On her own, Sakura is actually quite a speedy runner. She is frail as hell, yet the manga puts her through a significant amount of physical trauma from which she always recovers brilliantly. Her parents own a restaurant, which she has been helping them with since she was at least nine; so at the very least, she must have mastery of some basic noodle and soup recipes.
She won third place in Kusatsu's Citywide Epee (Fencing) Tournament in 2007.
THIS IS IMPORTANT: Dragonets cannot be destroyed unless their owners are dead. In an RPG, if you engage Ensof in contact, you must keep this in mind. It is not my decision, it is canon. The little bastard can pull push daggers and gatling guns out of his ass. You cannot chop him in half; he'll just reattach. You can incapacitate a dragonet, with effort, but unless you kill its owner, you cannot outright destroy a dragonet. (Note: A much simpler method of incapacitating Ensof would be to incapacitate Sakura. There is little Ensof can do on his own unless Sakura is linked to him.) I honestly believe the "no death" deal is Kitoh's parody on Pokemon "fainting" all the time and never dying. Narutaru is a deconstruction of mons series like Pokemon, remember.
Disabilities: Sakura can feel everything Ensof feels. Attack Ensof and Sakura will feel the pain. In addition to this, linking up with him often makes her feel dizzy or sick. On her own, she is easily intimidated and far from strong. She performs poorly in school and, in general, is a rather unintelligent girl who tends to fail at nearly every task she undertakes. She is shown to be very clumsy when helping out in her parents' restaurant.
Other: Sakura has four different haircuts/hairstyles throughout the manga. She starts the story with plain long hair, later switching to braids. After Komori calls her beautiful, she shears her hair very short, into a boy's haircut, uneven strands sticking out behind her ears and neck. Her hair later evens out while retaining its spiky quality and grows down to her chin, and she spends most of the manga with her hair at this length. By the end of the manga, however, her hair is long again.
At the very end of the manga, when the dragonets are shown in their final forms (or the forms they take before ultimately becoming planets), Sakura's dragonet (Ensof) seems to evolve into the shape of a deformed deer with an elongated tail.
She is apparently on birth control pills, as Ishida catches her picking up a birth control prescription at the drug store in the beginning of volume seven. The English language version of the manga changed the birth control pills to painkillers. This does not make sense, as Sakura did not have any kind of pre-existing condition at the time that would call for painkillers.
If she is really from the Shiga prefecture of Japan, then she probably speaks with a Kansai regional accent. The animation ignores this and has all the characters conform to a standard dialect. For the sake of authenticity, I will present her as speaking Kansai-ben.
Ensof has been used to kill three people; Komori, Mr. Akira, and an unnamed SAT agent who was tasked with detaining a mentally unstable Kaizuka. (At the time, Sakura thought she was helping Kaizuka.)
She appears to be knock-kneed and pigeon-toed. In addition to this, she has knobbly hands, a nearly shapeless frame, and she is very tall and lanky, clocking in at an impressive 165 centimeters. She is definitely not pretty, so Komori and Ishida's attraction to her escapes me.
Chapters: It can be argued that Narutaru has three main characters: Shiina, Sakura, and Kaizuka. In addition to sharing story time across the pages of the main plot, each girl has her own "focal" chapters that take a break from the plot and are devoted very specifically to that one girl.
For the convenience of prospective Narutaru readers, Sakura's chapters are:
Blinded by the Light
Knife Edge
The Weight of a Scream*
Nothing But the Truth, Part Two
Her First Errand
Fish Life, Human Life
My Eyes are the Eyes of a Victim; My Hands are the Hands of an Assailant**
Dream of Falling
* = Shared with Shiina
** = Shared with Kaizuka
What Are Dragonets?: Dragonets are baby planets that search the galaxies for hosts to bond with. When bonded to a living host, the dragonet and the host are linked mentally, physically, and emotionally. Any physical sensation which one experiences, the other also experiences--including touch and pain. The host can control the dragonet's movements without verbal command. The host can see through the dragonet's eyes, essentially allowing the host to be in two places at once. In addition to this, the dragonet's growth reflects the emotions and thoughts of its owner--hence why Sudou believes that the dragonets are a manifestation of "dark feelings." Mamiko Kuri calls them an "outlet for emotion."
When a dragon-bearer dies, the dragonet can merge with his or her corpse postmortem to bring him or her back to life. Aki Sato of Narutaru refers to this as becoming a "dragon." However, the merging of human and dragonet can eventually result in the birth of a new planet.
Essentially, if Sakura were to die, and Ensof were to merge with her, she would become an immortal being; following this, she might eventually turn into a planet, losing all sense of human self.
Yeah. Weird.
Takeo Tsurumaru claims that dragonets are empty shells who bond with their hosts in search of a soul to call their own. (Mamiko Kuri, on the other hand, omits the word "soul" and replaces it with "central nervous system.") Hosts are not limited to humans. In one chapter of Narutaru (for reference, the chapter title is "What Can I Do For You Now?"), a dragonet is shown to have merged with a dolphin.
A dragonet cannot be killed unless its owner is killed, and an immortal being resulting from the merging of a human and dragonet will not die unless by unnatural means. An immortal "dragon" is nearly invulnerable.
It is implied that the concept we have nowadays of dragons--i.e., winged, reptilian creatures--comes from an ancient sighting of a dragonet. So technically, the "dragons" in Narutaru do not displace the traditional concept of dragons. Rather, Narutaru suggests that traditional dragons are simply one possible template for a much larger scope of creature.
Confusing Name Changes in Narutaru: "Narutaru" is an abbreviation of Mukuro Naru Hoshi Tama Taru Ko, which literally means "The Star That Died and the Jewel of a Girl." It is abbreviated to "Narutaru" by most of the fanbase, and its title appears as "Narutaru" (なるたる) on most official Japanese materials.
Narutaru began as a manga, and later was adapted into an anime. When Narutaru was licensed to be translated into English, the anime's dubbing company marketed it as "Shadow Star," and the manga's translation company marketed it as "Shadow Star Narutaru."
The creatures that are featured in Narutaru, the dragonets, have a different name depending on which version of which medium you are viewing. In the original Japanese context, they are called "ryukodomo." This was adapted early on by fan translators as "dragonets." Dark Horse, who had picked up the manga for official English adaptation, translated "dragonet" as "shadow dragon," even though the word for "shadow" is nowhere in the original name. Central Park Media, in charge of dubbing the anime, translated the term as "dragon's child" for singular and "dragon children" for plural. Among the fan community, "dragonet" and "shadow dragon" are used most commonly.
Even the characters' names may change from one version of the story to another. Miyoko Shito becomes Mio in the anime. Oddly enough, while Shiina's name is 秕 / シイナ (Shi-i-na, "an empty husk"), the manga's publishing company originally romanized her name as Shina in promotional materials. Sakura Akira became Akira Sakura when the manga became an anime, and the English adaptation of the manga followed suit, though the manga's translating team later botched this when one panel referred to Sakura's father as "Mr. Akira." Komori's name becomes "Akinori" in the English version of the anime, and Hiroko Kaizuka simply becomes "Kaizuka," her first name excluded completely. That same dub changed Mihaya Ozaki's name to Mihaya Oozawa. (Did they get her confused with Satomi, or were they trying to make the two related?) Bungo Takano is Kazuyuki Takano in the English adaptation of the manga. To make matters worse, Dark Horse confused Bungo/Kazuyuki with Sakura's friend Ishida very early on, and both characters were treated as one character nicknamed Kaz (which especially made matters weird when "Kaz" was crushing on Sakura in one frame and kissing Satomi in the next!). Sakura's dragonet's name was romanized as Ensof in the original materials; Dark Horse kept this in tact when they translated the manga to English, but Central Park Media changed his name to Ein Sof. None of these changes were ever explained and were perhaps only arbitrary or aesthetic.
Confusing? Yes. Gd it.
SO FOR ABSOLUTE CLARITY, in the original source this character's given name is Sakura and her surname is Akira. (Evidence here, a page from the Manga Sketchbook fan translation as opposed to Dark Horse's official translations.) The anime adaptation of the manga reversed this to make her given name Akira and her surname Sakura. For marketing purposes, the English adaptation of the manga followed the anime's lead and made Akira her given name. I am going by the original manga, so her full name, in western order, is Sakura Akira. This should not change the fact that Shiina typically calls her "Akira-chan."
WTF is Wrong with This Manga?!: Yeah, it's a bit...heavy-handed in its shock factor. Literally every page seems designed to stun or disgust the reader. The mangaka, Mohiro Kitoh, only writes two types of stories: slice-of-life (Zansho, Noririn) and deconstruction (Wings of Vendemiaire, Narutaru). Narutaru is a deconstruction of the "mons" genre. Narutaru is supposed to make you think, "What would happen if Ash Ketchum took Pikachu and slaughtered everyone, ever?!" And realistically, if a bunch of school children did get their hands on magical creatures with fighting capabilities... Don't you think they would use them to attack the people who invoked their trivial anger? The teachers who gave them bad test grades, the bullies who treated them unkindly, the parents who gave them a curfew? Narutaru, I think, is an attempt to show how, realistically, it would suck if Pokemon were real (no matter how much we all wanted one as kids) because their powers would be horrifically abused by the people who came in possession of them.
Narutaru also seems to enjoy making a moral point: that abuse perpetuates abuse. Aki Honda, for example, forces Hiroko to drink "worm juice" and shoves a test tube inside of her; but not half a chapter later, we learn that Aki herself once went through the "worm juice" treatment, and that she's being sexually abused by her brother at home. Satomi Oozawa tortures Sakura in one scene; we later learn that Satomi underwent horrific hazing in her "rich girls school" for coming from a destitute, lower class family. Even Komori, the psychopath who wants to kill Shiina (and everyone else), is suffering from AIDS dementia complex and has had to take care of his physically disabled mother since he was a young boy. Narutaru seems to be of the opinion that you do not become an abuser without some kind of history of abuse. In that respect, Narutaru humanizes everyone, even the monsters. There's no "We are all good" or "We are all bad" message going on here; just "We are all human."
That's it, basically. Oh, yeah, and everyone dies.
Other Works by Mohiro Kitoh: If you enjoy the disturbing Narutaru, or if you want to read something like it but can't quite stomach its hyperviolence, you might like some of these different works by the same mangaka.
Slice of Life
Zansho -- A collection of short stories following everyday families living in modern-day Japan. Chronicles first love, coming of age, and even marriage and childbirth. Very tame and family-friendly.
Hallucination from the Womb -- Follows two detectives living in the fictitious Shelled City as they solve various mysteries in the slowly collapsing town. This is actually not tame at all; it contains murder, sexuality, and child abuse.
Noririn -- The eponymous teenage bicyclist convinces a jaded 28-year-old to partake in competitive bike riding. Another tame work.
Miles to the Edge of the World -- Fan abbreviation: Miles/Edge. It follows a couple who live on a floating continent where spirits possess machines. Erm, yeah. Not tame at all, as the main characters like to have a lot of sex.
Deconstruction
Bokurano -- A deconstruction of the mecha genre. A class of middle schoolers are contracted to pilot a giant robot in order to save the planet, not knowing that as soon as their contract is up, they will die. The manga follows Narutaru's shock factor pattern, with gratuitous violence and implied child sexuality, but it is nowhere near as horrific as Narutaru, and its hyperviolence outside of the robot comes off as somewhat needless (whereas Narutaru's at least has a point). I personally find the anime to be much more heartwarming and emotional, as well as more tasteful and plot-driven, and thus a lot sadder when the children inevitably die. I recommend watching the anime before reading the manga.
Wings of Vendemiaire -- A deconstruction of the magical girl genre. Set in a steampunk environment, the ringmaster of a circus has created sentient, winged women out of wood. He calls each of them "Vendemiaire," but they are all very independent, with different appearances and personalities. The manga follows each girl's life and "death," questioning the definition of life and the definition of a soul, and has a subplot involving one of the Vendemiaire girls murdering her human lookalike and taking her identity.
Isn't Something Different? -- This work has not been translated into English yet. Its official title is "Nanika Mochigatte Masu Ka?" It seems fans have begun abbreviating it to "NaniMochi." The main character is a bespectacled high schooler with psychic powers, who often uses them to maim or kill. I don't know much more than that, as I haven't read it.