Sakuko Igarashi

SETTING: Ebisugaoka, Japan, is a small rural mountain town. The year is 1964, and technology and beliefs of the time reflects as much. Intense nationalism, misogyny, and closed-mindedness about things like mental health and sexuality are commonplace. HISTORY: Sakuko Igarashi was born into exposure to spiritual rituals as her family manages the local Shinto shrine. Sakuko's family serves the Sennensugi Shrine, with her father serving as the head priest. Their shrine used to worship a Divine Tree, a thousand-year-old cedar tree praised as divine in accordance with their faith, until it was struck by lightning and burned to ash. Their family stopped worshipping it ever since, believing that the tree lost all its power. After the Divine Tree was destroyed, the Sennensugi Shrine relocated to north of Ebisugaoka and started worshipping the oldest Inari Shrine. APPEARANCE: Black hair, tied back into short pigtails, fair skin, round face, brown eyes, average height. PERSONALITY: On the surface, Sakuko is cheerful and bubbly, outwardly often having a lighthearted and sweet demeanor. She has her head in the clouds often, content with getting caught up in her own head until she’s pulled out. However, she struggles with untreated mild autism and undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. Due to the stigmas of the era, her parents ignore any symptoms she shows of her mental illness, her mother especially trying to correct and cover up her ‘oddness.’ Sakuko’s parents want their daughter to be normal, half because they don’t want to be seen as failed parents for having a mentally ill daughter and half because they genuinely don’t want to see their child ostracized by society for being different. Sakuko has intense attachment to her friends. When she makes friends with someone, she intends on keeping them as a friend for life. She has a deep-rooted fear of abandonment, as she didn’t have many friends as a child due to her bubbly but clingy behavior being seen as ‘weird.’ If someone ‘betrays’ her by hanging out with other friends instead of her, she’ll brush it off by laughing and claiming it’s fine. In private, however, she’ll cry and yell and throw a teary and violent tantrum over it. But she works hard to maintain her sunny persona, saving her meltdowns for in private where no one can see her. She takes great pride in donning the traditional miko robes and selling charms during the New Year celebrations. Because of this and her connection to her family’s shrine, Sakuko is very in touch with her spiritual side. She seems to always have some god or apparition visiting her dreams, telling her about this or that. LIKES: Making friends, candy, rabbits, traditional Japanese dances, festivals. DISLIKES: The dark (a fear of hers), being lonely, being seen as weird, acknowledging that she’s different.