Who has the best OC lore? I’ll start.
Let me introduce you to a project of mine I’ve been working on for 6 years!
The Seven Faces of Nori Satashiro - or Seven Faces, 7F, for short.
This project was initially intended to be made into a manga, a very psychological and at times painful exploration of existentialism, fate, nihilism and the paradox of what it means to be human - or not.
Essentially, following the life - my bad, livES - of a boy who sees the world without the lens of human compassion and was granted seven lives by the guardian spirit of a cat. It’s meant to be real, raw, devastating - it’s a critique of society and the attributes it values, how psychopathy is treated, the way illness and nihilism rot a person, and the core of belief, purpose, and peace - not by devolving into gore or torture, but by staying perfectly elegant, professional, and cold - making the whole story even more devastating.
Trigger warning, because DAMN will I get banned if I don’t give one - suicide and descriptions of suicide, depression, nihilism, medical procedures, drowning, illness, physical restraint, imagery of death, obsession and nihilism. shit like that. Brutal existentialism should count, too.
Don’t read this is you don’t want to turn out like me.
Norihiko (family name Satashiro), born in a south-western Japanese city in 1978, an only child to his working mother and father. Brought up normally, if too perfectly. Which is more his doing than theirs. Two things are significant about the boy: he was born with almost no pigmentation in his skin, hair and eyes, giving him a very distinct appearance, and was born clinically psychopathic - more a caricature and alienation of humanity.
Everything starts in 1983, when - as a 5 year old boy - he carelessly crosses a street to pick up a cat that was in the way of the road. A fast moving car hits the boy, and his life is over.
Only that is not what happens - the car passes millimetres, MILLIMETRES before his face, and he is left not even feeling fear - just a sense of mechanical nearness of the danger.
The cat he held in his arms was an old Maine Coon, named, Kokori.
Now, understanding exactly who, or what Kokori IS - is incredibly complex, and becomes more clear and simultaneously more ambiguous as his lives pass through the flow of time. Kokori, grateful for the act of the boy, grants him its seven lives - and through this near miss - the first life is taken off. The life that started what would become something horrific, desperate, and mad.
As the sheer rules of logic state, for every absence of death a life is taken off the tally, and so cannot die until all seven are torn. Kokori is something… omnipresent, yet hiding in his life. Kokori is everything. Kokori is nothing. Kokori is real. Kokori is something only imagined by Satashiro. Kokori is not benevolent or malicious, only a neutral law-keeper, accountant, not a deity, not a monster.
Satashiro is pretty much a perfect boy - logical, always says and does the right things, does this as he had no choice but to LEARN humanity, not FEEL it instinctively. Slowly nailing down the patterns of behaviour and mimicry to pass as something remotely human, when his own empty interior is eating him. It’s not a struggle to act human - he excels at it. He is healthy, polite, intelligent, can say the right things to charm anyone. But he has no meaning in life, seeing everything cynically, with a sour taste, nihilism ever present in his delusionally-superior way of thinking. He does well in school, gains respect and friendship, which is more allying between a war than any shred of human connection from his side. He probably tries to dye his white hair black as a teenager and wear sunglasses, but gives up on his appearance and leaves it be - it will serve him in life.
Poor eyesight as an effect of the albinism mutation.
The second life is something he brings upon himself. One might even call him an idiot. But there is no such thing, only plan, action, and consequence.
Satashiro is 17, a student, and living in the academic apartments of his hometown school. He tries to hang himself - not out of an emotional longing, but from the lack of it, more out of curiosity. So, in the black uniform jacket, he ties a belt to the roof beam of the academic’s storage room, but the belt snaps after he hangs for a few seconds. Crashes to the ground, puts his shoes back on, and leaves.
The genius in this is that it is something completely probable, and natural - yet the law holds on: second life down.
So he stands, slightly bruised knees and burning throat, humiliated and sodden at such pathetic failure, and goes on.
At the age of 20 Satashiro moves from his hometown to further up north, seeking work after studies. He finds work in a Telebroadcasting company, likely a niche side branch of NHK leasing variety television, under the direction of a sturdy man, Y. YAMAMOTO. Classic middle aged late 90s company manager - high strung, tired, but also painfully human, and would genuinely give himself to protect his employees. Sato probably takes on an amateur position as a writer or directing some minor technical branch. He moved into the upper floor of a 2 small-apartment building, where the lower floor is inhabited by a middle aged solitary woman, Aki Watanabe, who lives alone and has little contact with the world. Satashiro, he is a quiet neighbour, polite, a ghost from upstairs who sometimes will bow when they pass on the stairwell and works odd hours into the night.
The lack of human connection, passion, and any meaning in life is what leads to the tearing of the 3rd.
1998, Sato is 21. Fruitless in finding hope and beyond tired of the monotony that is consciousness with no meaning, he walks in the evening to the bank of the urban river, a bridge crossing over. It is early spring, so both water and air are sharp and cold, but Sato is… not exactly peaceful, just empty. Filled with nothing at all, as if everything he would execute as his last act is mechanical, programmed, completely devoid of any mistake or hesitation. The man is still healthy, standing at 178 cm, 59kg, dressed in a white shirt and ribbon around the neck, leaving the folded blazer and shoes on the bank. He walks slowly into the water, resisting the cold shock for immaculate control. Waterline first at the knees, then at the stomach, then at the ribs, when the water reaches his throat - he exhales all of the air in his lungs, and bows his head under the river.
But Kokori doesn’t need to act. It lets human panic do that for itself. It would take more… on watching.
There’s a figure on the bridge, overlooking the river - 19 year old Art and Media student, Takeji Ogata, who is there to jump himself. The complete opposite of the man he’s never even met: a loserly, sensitive son who does this because he is so filled with the despair and fear, even as he grips the barrier so hard his knuckles go white. He’s a soft looking kid with round glasses, scrambled black hair, looks like nobody who would ever stand out, feels like nobody who would ever be special, successful, admired.
He doesn’t want to be here, but he can’t bear the embarrassment of turning back - he’s crying by the time he slips off his shoes.
Ogata sees the white strands of hair and clothes surface face up, and without even another synapse of thought, bolts off the bridge and down to the bank. Ogata, with difficulty, wades into the water, rolls up his sleeves as if that would stop any of the wet cold biting into his arms, deep enough to his thighs, and hauls the body out. This complete stranger has been under for 5-6 minutes, skin cold and hard as enamel, inhaled and swallowed the river, and isn’t breathing.
Ogata has tears frozen on his cheeks from the bridge, and feels all the crushing weight of guilt, life, and blame. The boy is the very embodiment of human chaos, overwhelm, and panic, essentially thinking he pulled a corpse out of the river and it’s all his fault.
His hopes jump between the extremes of “he’s just asleep..” and “he was already dead, you didn’t kill him”. The kid yells at the corpse, then into the air until his voice cracks beyond legibility, nobody is around the river. It’s late.
Law of the lives won’t allow this to be the end for someone seeking peace like Satashiro. Even if that means miracles happening through the shittiest human intervention, ever.
After panicking in a beautifully human way and still midway through a mental-breakdown, Takeji tries to inhale and receives a shock of cold water, stumbling back and choking. But despite everything inside him yelling to run, he stays. Tries a few more times, and the drowned bends over in half coughing, then opens his eyes and looks right at Takeji. Blue. Ogata straightens up, bows, yells IM SORRY!, then bolts. Bolts without his shoes and jacket, drenched wet, all the way home, not slowing down until blue lights pass him and he lets himself pause for just a second - disbelief, laughter, crying, as he lets the universe hit him with everything.
Takeji’s mother scolds him at the door, phone in hand, because her son came home incredibly late, drenched in river water. Takeji just half smiles and says, “I fell”.
He never lets himself process everything, just sits upstairs in a towel and buries his head into a textbook, not reading the words, just trying to fill his head with anything -
A police patrol car sees the kid running in the wrong direction, drenched wet, gasping, at this inhuman hour. Someone’s called them down to the river, cause, yknow, there was someone SCREAMING, and it’s incredibly late - likely someone drunk, mad, or drowned. A half-veteran, a rookie and a trainee barely out of college weren’t expecting someone on the bank freshly out of drowning, some calls of “oh shiitttt!”, some calls of “hey, tilt his head - no, other way -“, someone says “you drank half the river kid, now spit it out, don’t be so greedy” before forcing a fist under the ribs. Getting slightly panicked every time his eyes roll back, the constant tapping on the cheek. The lines thrown around, the laughter, the improvisation.
They’re doing what they can, and because Kokori’s law holds, it’s enough.
Before the ambulance pulls in, Satashiro stands, throws his blazer over the foil blanket wrapped over his shoulders, picks up his shoes, and walks.
All he tells them is “I fell”.
So close, yet such a humiliating, frustrating survival, all because of some boy who had a shred of compassion. And because panic replaced coldness.
They try to follow him and tell him, don’t move, hospital!
The first time his neighbour Watanabe ever sees him clearly, apart from the perfect doll that leans out of the door to pick up misdelivered mail, is this husk - dripping water onto the steps, heaving, hands shaking as he unlocks the door, foil blanket draped over shoulders. She doesn’t say anything.
He goes inside, and drenches himself with cold water in the shower.
Satashiro, in his work in TV, is perfect for the role of a presenter. Immaculate control, charm, very distinct appearance, obsessed with idealism and elegance. So Yamamoto has him try.
Here ya gotta know exactly what I’m talking about - early 2000s Japanese niche variety TV, from interviews to reviews to idols and pop culture, to news and media coverage, to chaos and formality. Even as a Polish kid I sat in this niche, really something that can never fully come back. NHK over TLC or TVP, man. Whatever, NHK was DIFFERENT back in the day. Only place you’ll find the same vibe is clips from those 2000s russian channels that dubbed over everything.
Not a CEO, not a surgeon, but a TV presenter. Perfect.
And for some time, nothing kills him.
Then comes 2000, he is 22, develops a fever working in his apartment. He ignores it, pride over surrender, and it becomes worse. He is still distant and reserved, polite but PRIVATE, quiet, and doesn’t even know his neighbour, who in this life - will be the saviour.
Fever becomes really bad, unable to swallow or move anymore, half-conscious on the floor and totally delirious. Again: Kokori’s law holds through kind human intervention - gentler this time, a lot more gentle than the brutality of the river. Watanabe is an observant lady, and notices some uncanny detail - the curtains drawn for too long, the door not opening at a regular time, something mundane and trivial like that - and by instinct knows to go upstairs and knock.
Kokori has left one little mischievous trick: Satashiro didn’t lock his door.
The figure of a small white cat, moving between the windows.
Aki is not afraid of breaching formality when something is on the line. And when she walks into the sweet scent of illness and shakes him half-awake, and all he can do is beg “no hospital”, she knows what she should do - but something inside of her just can’t. So she spends the next 4 days in the apartment, changing cold compresses, pouring water over the face, telling her about her adult son who moved to the USA 2 years ago and hasn’t made any contact, how she hopes he’ll become a leading biologist, how her pancakes burnt yesterday, how her wallpaper is peeling off - even though the pale boy isn’t listening, more so in a deep stupor. On the fourth day the fever breaks, and she folds the towel and leaves. When he comes to memory again, he has no clue she had ever been there. Just that… he had missed several days. When he sees her the next time on the stairwell, his bow is the same. No change in the gaze. No change in the tone.
The 5th life, is an OD. Perfectly planned, ideally calculated, no tremor in the hand, no hesitation as he lines the pills against the tiled bathroom floor. He’s in pyjamas, shirt half undone, left the glasses in the other room. Takes them all one by one, curled up beside the bathtub.
By what manifests as disgrace and failure, could be interpreted as mercy - mercy with a lesson learnt, a consequence thrown in. Kokori.
The world swims back from sleep and before he can move out of his own will he’s throwing up black bile, the floor, the bathtub, Kokori doesn’t leave the pills to rot in his stomach as he so duly planned. He sleeps on that floor for 50 hours, sifting in and out of life itself. But alive.
Kokori isn’t malicious, or kind, but one could assume from the outside - especially such a man as Satashiro - that Kokori punished him, rather than carried. As if a stern lecture for even trying to die without its consent, to cheat through any loophole.
And for some time he lives, without the weight of nonexistence on his shoulders. He works. He thrives in the world, in fact, Kansai’s Angel from channel 8.
Spring, 2002, Satashiro is 24. Pale and thin, resembling both an angel and a paper sheet, immaculate in the way he has engineered himself to be. His work in TV is something he thrives in, as if it’s perfectly engineered to be work for someone who thinks in the alien way he does. The inside is hollow and nihilistic. But he’s learnt to live in a human world. And live with merit.
Early morning, when everybody is out for commute to work, urban city, those wide-ass massive crosswalks they have in Japan that like a hundred people cross on at once. Hes just like any other of them, formal dress and messenger bag. Kokori manifests as itself in the crowd. A copy, Satashiro himself, grinning at the original. It only wanted to appear. To discuss. He sees it among the flood of people on the crossing.
And suddenly kokori is gone, and hes standing over the body of someone lying on the asphalt of the crossing, wearing the same face. For the first time in his life, Satashiro is truly empty. Peaceful.
First time, he is peaceful. He is free from pain, from hunger, from fatigue, from any mundane ailment - even from the weight of each limb, of the wear on legs walking the pavements. Watching a young woman in a fitted blazer kneel by the man and shake the shoulders. Watching people pass by in an arc, hundreds, thousands of legs. Looks down at his own face, leans, detail doesn't hold him. Moves on.
And for exactly 29 minutes, Satashiro is free. Walking the streets, passing by the shopkeeper smoking by the konbini, passing by the people crossing the pavement, watching the light turn green.
He walks onto the tram. Doors open but nobody see him. His reflection passes through them. Rides until the end. Can see every detail of these peoples faces - tired, dressed, workers. Gets off at the end of the line. A station. Walks down. To the edge of the platform. On the opposite platform stands a man with white hair and blazer, head bent down to look at the ground. Doesnt look up at him, cannot see the face, just holds a ticket between two fingers - the kanji for "six" marked onto it with black ink.
A hand on his shoulder, then on his face, then behind his neck, 5 hands, then 20, then 200. 200 hands all holding him, hands made out of air, not painful, just, static.
I should tell you what actually happened.
At the Shinjuku crossing he just folded mid stride. No sound, no movement, just hitting the pavement with a dull thud. All the commuters are on their way to work, at this time - just another salaryman who fainted. Too thin and too tired. First person to stop is a young woman who panics and kneels down, asking daijoubu? Daijoubu??? And shaking him. People walk by. A man in a grey blazer, maybe 30, even 40, combed black hair, stops, slips his blazer off, folds it, and places it under the head. Guy seems stressed but manages to keep composed. Chin up, two fingers to the neck - nothing. Back of hand to the mouth - still.
The temperature in the air drops in an instant.
"Dareka! Hitori— koko ni - byosha!”
And the universe replies with thousands of full footsteps.
In the crowd, Kokori was there for Satashiro.
But on the crossing there is nobody looking into blue eyes -
Just the clipped orders of medics, the steady whirr of equipment and thousands. Of. Dull. Footsteps.
Central Metropolitan Hospital, a young trainee nurse, Yamashita, sits in the corridor. Here, Kokori does something for the first time, that it CAN do because Satashiro is dead - it manifests to another person.
To Kokori, this death was almost like an insult, if it could even feel insulted - something that occured outside its control - which is why it does what it does next.
But first, outside Resus bay 6, theres a man with a black coat, white hair and blue eyes in the corridor, looking out of the window. Moving as if its something trying to remember how to be human. Expression on its face as if its only just learning how to contort the muscles of the face enough to give a smile. There's been a code going for 25 minutes, futile enough that they even let the woman who claimed to be his neighbour stand outside the glass. Yamashita stands up and shakily tells him "sorry, this is a restricted area-"
Kokori turns around and Yamashita freezes.
She blinks and hes closer, not threateningly, just as if a neutral spirit more than a human.
Yamashita wants to yell that he was there, he was in the room, but the man just seems to lean his head and whisper, was I?
She interacts with him because she sees it as a human being. He walked here empty handed, but now leans closer and hands her a single red rose - with a hospital wristband wrapped around the stem. SATASHIRO n 24.
And kokori just replies, "I am Satashiro"
Yamashita wants to yell that its impossible, that Satashiro is laying on a steel table with a tube down his throat, but Kokori just smiles. Kokori is a cat - its only approximating what its like to be human.
and the real satashiro broke its law, so he would go to bring it back.
"You should go, theyre calling you."
Kokori walks the opposite way, out the door on the end of the hallway.
Someone opens the door open and yells for Yamashita to come here - he just flatlined again.
This occurs at the exact same time that the white-haired man holds up the ticket at the train station, then envelops Satashiro in 200 hands. Well, sato's ghost - this is the phenomenon where people who survive clinical death sometimes report being out of their body and walking the earth - ive had this myself!
When the hands envelop him, he is taken to the bay, and is once again looking down at these people trying to bring a dead man back to life. Its like Takeji, but so, so much worse. Kokori holds his metaphysical eyes open so he can watch as this spirit outside of his own body, see what death and survival entails. This is horror, horror at being refused peace, refused death, and seeing himself as just a bag of flesh. Its being violated all over again, even though the body on the table still looks angelic. Kokori's hands let go, and he falls.
And just for half a second, the shock jerks him awake, and he is back inside his actual body, feeling every ounce of PAIN, fracture, burning, before the bliss of unconsciousness takes him again. After 29 minutes, they got a pulse.
And somewhere on the crossing a man in a grey blazer sits on the curb, his head in his hands, as someone offers him water. Then he stands, eyes vacant, and boards the bus home. He remembers to call in sick to work.
Kokori isnt evil - it doesnt have the capability to be evil. Its not torturing him. Just showing him what the price of a life is.
Oh yeah, and my favourite detail is through the entire ordeal nobody took his glasses off - as if that crucial part of image and elegance is preserved.
Satashiro would spend the next week completely unconscious, slipping in and out of crisis, Kokori keeping a watchful eye, but not present in this world anymore... for now.
He would wake up coughing and choking, under fluorescent lights, with someone's hands on his shoulders and orders being clipped through. The one thing he had wanted to scream this entire time is "DONT TOUCH ME", but even his hands could not move.
His neighbour Watanabe and boss Yamamoto take shifts in the hospital.
Sato signs his own discharge papers, and walks out after 2 months, much earlier than the minimum he should've stayed. He leaves the hospital on crutches, leaning on Aki's shoulder. She takes on the role of caring for him. His life is in fractures, and through gritted teeth he swears he will not forgive Kokori for as long as he lives. Often a dull thud comes from upstairs, or wet coughing and choking. But he insists, as if to let himself continue the delusional illusion that he is in control - and he knows its impossible, but its the very structure of what hes made of.
Everywhere he tries to go, hes carried back from wrapped in his own coat with lights flashing. He eats the bare minimum, still wears his white shirt with the ribbon tied, tries to go back to work.
Satashiro had been missing for 2 months, and when he walks in through the doors, bones and skin, grey, drained, but still smiling, quiet metal thuds along footsteps, and the angel from channel 8 come back weaker but alive -
Only Yamamoto is unhappy - because he's quietly tremoring in fear.
Ill tell you, finally, about the 7th life.
2004, 2 years since he died and came back. Satashiro isnt eating. Hes overworking. Desperately holding onto that beautiful ideality of control, even though he himself knows everything fell apart when his heart stopped.
Kokori had warned him, doctors have warned him over and over again, that if he keeps on like this, he will die.
In 2004 his heart hits the limit. Midway through work he hits another medical crisis - but this time the lives are up, and Kokori comes to collect him. To let him have his peace.
But ever since he woke up from the 6th life, Satashiro gained a fiery, aggressive will to live. Kokori and Satashiro stand opposite each other in an endless plane of mirrors. Satashiro is a wasted, thin, elegantly dressed man with red knuckles and glasses perched on the end of a thin nose. Kokori wears a kimono, with 7 talismans hanging off every corner of it, kokori stands decorated with paper charms.
Satashiro, is human greed, selfishness, and delusion - god complex, refusal, denial. Kokori is this beautiful being that comes to take him because he had lived all his lives, as the law stated, and Satashiro KILLS IT.
Satashiro smashes the mirror in his apartment and looks at the thousand shards - each with his own face reflecting back at him, the same blue eyes, at different times of his life. He grabs the central shard and unseams Kokori down the centre. The creature doesn't make a sound, only gazes vacantly at the human, and falls apart, still beautiful, as thousands of talismans spill out from its form and stick onto satashiro.
He stands, alone, in his apartment, black liquid on his hands, every mirror in the home SMASHED. He takes his coat, and walks out, and walks into the world. For he is no longer human.
Satashiro's actual body is covered by a blue sheet and pronounced dead before it was even brought to hospital.
Watanabe pushes past the Police at the entrance to his apartment only to see the smashed mirrors and black blood. She doesnt cry. She smiles, that smile one gives when the world cracks open.
The head medic gave the cut sign after 10 minutes, not 20.
Satashiro is walking through the carriages of a train, snow falling as the cold takes over. He is smiling. His ribs hurt, his legs sway, but he is peaceful.
Satashiro died at 26 in 2004, in Kansai telebroadcasting studio. People were there.
And his body is on a steel table covered over with a tarp, glasses still on the nose.
Be civil everyone, a lot of these are real events from my life.
It’s why I want to shape them into something legible - even if instead of a Japanese TV presenter, it’s a Polish start-up engineer fresh out of school who lies on his floor at night, thinking he can see Kokori swimming in the smoke.
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