Giving Higuchi a backstory and story arc bcs NOBODY ELSE IS DOING IT AND WHY NOT!
Disclaimer: I tried to incorporate aspects of the real Higuchi Ichiyo into this as much as I could just as I tried to base this on the bsd canon, but at the end of the day, this is still MY headcanons/story, so you can disagree with everything I'll say. ALSO, Higuchi is 20 in this whole scenario lmao.
Now for her backstory:
Born as Higuchi Natsuko, the fourth child and second daughter. She had an older sister (Fuji), two older brothers (Sentaro & Toranosuke) and a younger sister (Kuniko).
Her father (Noriyoshi), oldest brother (Sentaro) and older sister (Fuji) were all ability users.
The Higuchis come from a very old family of samurais and ability users who worked for the government as a secret division for a long time. But as the government disposed of their services, they started to work for underground organizations, including the Port Mafia.
Working for dangerous people, her oldest brother, Sentaro, and her father, Noroyishi, were killed when she was just 9 years old. The rest of her family managed to escape.
The Higuchi's lived in fear and poverty, since everyone turned their backs on them. They had accumulated an enormous amount of debts by the time Natsuko was 12 years old.
By the time she was 14 years old, her eldest sister went missing, and her other brother left them to seek a better life abroad, making Higuchi responsible for taking care of her sick mother and baby sister.
She stopped going to school and started getting jobs to put some food on the table. She eventually turned into stealing, and that's how she met Nakarai Tosui, the leader of a small but powerful underground organization and an ability user.
Nakarai took her in, and took care of her when he realized she was an ability user.
Nakarai made her his personal assistant (bcs of her ability, which I will explain later). For this, he taught her to use guns, since the job was dangerous but she was never expected to go around fighting people, she was just support.
Natsuko saw Nakarai as the man who saved her, a man who could do nothing wrong or bad to her, and she fell in love with him despite him being cruel to her several times. Nakarai repeated that it was for her own good, and Natsuko, as someone who had known only misery, always believed him.
Now, when she was 17, Nakarai got in trouble with the Port Mafia and used Natsuko to solve the problem. It was perfect and convenient for him; he gave the Mafia an ability to get an alliance, and at the same time, Nakarai is using her to get information about the mafia.
Nakarai, whose ability is to erase and modify memories, erases Natsuko's memories of himself and sends her to the Port Mafia, where Mori welcomes her at 17 years old and assigns her to the Black Lizards under the name of Higuchi Ichiyo.
Now some info dump:
Her ability is called "Flowers at Dusk", and she's a walking amplifier. She's the opposite of Dazai's ability, she can amplify the length of other people's abilities or make things louder and more endurable, it doesn't need to be an ability, like she can make a sound louder, if that makes sense, but it doesn't work on physical things. Now, I thought about this very hard, as I wanted her to have flaming swords, but after thinking about it too much and with the research I did on the author, I think this ability can do her justice.
Coming from a family with a samurai background (a real fact, in which the author’s family took pride of), her father taught her to use swords from a very young age, and she's very good at it, but swords don't really work against guns and explosions anymore so it's a hidden skill that she has. I had to at least, give her the bisexual swords lmao.
Her mother and sister are alive, while her mother is very sick. Her sister Kuniko is 16 years old currently, she was 13 when Higuchi joined the Port Mafia. While her mother does know what she does and worries a lot, her sister doesn't. Her sister thinks Higuchi works for a private security company and that she's a bodyguard or something like that.
Her sister lives with her mother but visits Higuchi's apartment frequently, since Higuchi hates labor and barely takes care of herself, so Kuniko does it for her.
Now, she's not aware of her own ability. Since it's not a physical ability and unlike Dazai she can't see how she affects people, she's never noticed her own ability. But Mori does know about it and that’s why he paired her up with Akugatawa.
Nakarai removed her memories of her. Instead of him, she just remembers entering the other organization for a while as a staff member and then she was transferred by the leader, but she doesn't remember her relationship to him. And that's why she falls for Akutagawa. Akutagawa reminds her (at least her subconscious) of Nakarai and it fills that void in her heart and memories.
Look, I'm gonna be honest, I desperately wanted Higuchi to be the Fifth Hunting Dog instead of Tachihara at the start, so I'm giving her a whole arc. She's being used by Nakarai as a spy for the Mafia. He usually approaches her once a month, reminding her of her true purpose, and she gives him all the information he needs before erasing her memories again. She's unaware of her being used by him. Mori probably suspects it, bcs it's Mori lol.
Only her family calls her by her real name.
And that's it for now folks, feel free to share your thoughts.
