#oneaday Day 760: I Love You, Kana

I’m on a bit of a “narrative-based games that challenge the conventions of what is ‘normal’ and/or ‘acceptable’ for video games to tackle” kick at the moment, if you can even have a “kick” in such a thing. So it was that I found myself playing Kana Little Sister recently.

“What is Kana Little Sister?” I hear you ask. It’s another one of them visual novel type things from Japan, meaning lots of reading, occasional decisions to make, anime-style pictures and, in many (though not all) cases, some naughty pictures. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can acquire a legal copy that works on modern machines right here. Link is pretty much NSFW, just so you know.

It will probably not surprise you to note that there are likely to be spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned. Spoileriffic stuff is below the break. All discussion here is based on a single playthrough which achieved Ending No. 6, aka “Live Now”, aka “Intellectual Ending No. 3”, so any and all spoilers will relate to that route only.

Okay, let’s get the inevitable, unavoidable things out of the way first. Yes, there is sex in it. Yes, it’s pretty explicit and makes use of some frankly unnecessary onomatopoeia at times. (SQUELCH.) Yes, one of the central narrative threads is a “will they, won’t they” incestuous relationship between protagonist Taka and the eponymous Kana. (Reassuring spoiler the first: Kana was adopted, so they’re not actually related at all.)

There we are. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now, let’s talk about the game proper.

Kana is dying. She’s been dying for a long time, and her whole family knows it. Her older brother Taka, the protagonist of our story, used to resent her for the attention and love that her condition (chronic renal insufficiency, if you’re curious) got her from her parents, but after the two became separated from their parents and lost in the woods as children, Taka, feeling some sense of having to start acting like a “big brother” rather than the spoiled brat he has been until that point, feels an overwhelming urge to protect his fragile little sister from harm, culminating in his throwing himself on top of her to take the brunt of an attack by a swarm of bees — an attack which leaves him so severely injured that his role is temporarily switched with the usually bed-ridden Kana as he recovers in hospital.

The story proceeds through several stages in Taka and Kana’s growing up. As the pair mature, Taka maintains his protective “big brother” nature over Kana, to the extent that he tries to be with her as much as possible and even keep her away from his skirt-lifting friend Masa. If anything, he’s somewhat overprotective of her in the early years while she’s still well enough to go to school and be out of the hospital, but Kana certainly doesn’t resent this, coming to depend on Taka’s support when she is forced back to her lonely life in hospital, observing the world passing her by through the window.

Taka is an intriguing character as he is a deeply, deeply flawed protagonist. His protection of — some may say obsession with — Kana in the early years causes him to be somewhat socially awkward simply because he spends so much time in the pair’s private little bubble. So much so, in fact, that when the slightest possibility of getting together with class hottie Yumi comes up, he literally runs away terrified, lashing out at the poor girl after it emerges his classmates had read a sort-of love letter that he penned her in an attempt to simply get her alone and talk about, you know, The Feels and shit.

As it happens, Yumi had nothing to do with the letter being found — Taka’s classmates discovered it by themselves, but Yumi panicked and didn’t know what to do. As a popular girl, she didn’t want to lose face in front of her classmates, but equally she felt guilty about the humiliation it put Taka through. Taka, meanwhile, harboured an obsessive grudge against Yumi right from the incident in elementary school all the way up until the end of high school. He eventually grudgingly forgave her, however, and gave her a button off his blazer on graduation day as a memento to remember him by — assuming, at the time, that this would be the last the pair would see of each other.

It wasn’t the last the pair would see of each other, as it happened. Yumi had herself been harbouring something of an obsession over Taka, culminating with a chance meeting of them both at a college party, her getting him very drunk, seducing him, dragging him back to a motel and then doing what can only be described as fucking the bejeezus out of him. It becomes painfully apparent during their rather awkward lovemaking that Taka’s mind is elsewhere — while Yumi screams about how much she loves him, Taka’s mind keeps being smitten with flashes of Kana’s face. He sees traits of Kana’s in Yumi, even though the two are polar opposites — Kana is shy, quiet and retired while Yumi is brash, confident, used to getting her own way and rather pushy.

Taka agrees to go along with a relationship with Yumi, however, in an attempt to get his growing feelings for Kana out of his mind — or perhaps to deny they even exist in the first place. Yumi is ecstatic at finally having snared the man she had her eye on since elementary school, and does everything she can to make their relationship happy, dynamic and fun. Taka is repeatedly wracked with doubt about whether or not he’s doing the right thing, though, and his heart is never quite in it. He doesn’t want to introduce Yumi to Kana, and is mortified any time Kana sees the two together — including one utterly toe-curling moment where Kana walks in on the two of them having sex.

Yumi doesn’t pick up on Taka’s hesitance and reluctance until it’s too late — perhaps because she doesn’t want to see it — but the pair eventually split as Kana’s condition gradually worsens. Taka doesn’t explain exactly why he ditches Yumi, noting only that there is someone else that is important to him, and that he “had to make a choice”. He’s still in denial about the feelings he’s harbouring towards the girl he has grown up knowing as his sister — though after finding a family album with no photos of Kana as a young girl, he starts to have suspicions.

Taka sacrifices most of his life to take care of Kana as her health goes into a slow decline. He drops out of college, gets a menial job to earn some money and spends every waking moment he can with Kana. Kana appreciates his visits and draws strength from his presence — she’d later note in her diary that she wasn’t fighting alone, because her “Bro” was with her all along, allowing her to far outlive the life expectancy the doctors gave her.

Taka, growing increasingly desperate as he sees this girl that he loves — though he’s still confused exactly how — attempts to give her the opportunity to live as normal a life as possible. He takes her out, allows her to fulfil her modest dreams of seeing the ocean and, eventually, confesses his feelings to her. Kana reciprocates them, and the pair both admit that they’ve known for a while that they weren’t blood relatives.

The two make love in a scene that is a far cry from the urgent, animal intensity of Taka’s encounters with Yumi. Taka is gentle and tender with Kana, not only because he’s afraid of her fragility due to her illness, but because she’s the one that he really loves, and has done for some time. The pair are happy in each others arms, with Kana saying that she feels like she’s finally achieved something — to be with the one that she loves.

It’s at this point she starts to let go of her already tenuous grip on life. She gets a fever, and her health starts to decline more rapidly. Like the pair’s aunt Sumako, however, whom they watched die from cancer with few regrets, Kana is accepting of the fact that she does not have much time left. Instead of bawling hysterically like in an earlier scene, she faces death with quiet contemplation.

It transpires that it was the pair’s trip to see the ocean and their subsequent confessions of love to one another that caused Kana to feel fulfilled. She wasn’t giving up, she felt she had achieved everything she wanted to. She faced her fate happily and without fear.

“Today I saw the ocean,” she writes in her diary. “I’m not afraid any more.”

Taka doesn’t discover this page in her diary — the very last entry — until some time after she has breathed her last. Following her death, Taka found himself unable to cry for her, wondering what was wrong with him to stop him crying when he “should” or “needed” to. This entry, this simple statement of her acceptance of her fate, and her feelings of fulfilment with her short life, causes him to snap and finally let out the emotions he’s been bottling up. He breaks down in tears and is inconsolable for some time, but finally he understands Kana — including her reasons for wanting to donate her organs to Taka’s cousin after her death.

As time passes, Taka heals and finds direction in his life. Kana lived her life with no regrets, he understands, and died knowing that she had fulfilled that which she wanted to achieve. He gets Kana’s diaries published as a book, which helps Yumi understand the pain and suffering that both he and Kana were enduring and allows her to forgive him; throws himself into his studies; and aims to do the best he can with the time he has left.

Kana’s diary notes that she believes no-one should live forever because by several hundred years in the future, the world will have changed to such a degree that humans will have had to evolve to keep up with it. She believed it better for people to live in their own generation, and to live a full a life as they can in their own circumstances. That way, there’s no looking back at the end and thinking “What if…”

It’s a good philosophy to take, and one which Taka takes to heart as he looks forward to the rest of his life, knowing that his little sister has forever changed his outlook for the better.

So that’s one route through Kana Little Sister. There are several others, which I believe are significantly different. I’ll be interested to see what they involve.

If you’re wondering whether the game itself is actually worth playing, the answer is “yes”, with a few provisos. It’s a visual novel, so you will be spending 95% of your time reading text and looking at anime pictures. It’s also a visual novel translated from Japanese, which brings up its own set of considerations. The text is rather slow-paced, descriptive and occasionally repetitive, and there are a whole bunch of spelling and grammatical errors throughout (including one memorable sequence that repeatedly uses the word “apolozige”).

But it’s testament to Kana Little Sister‘s strong story and well-defined characters that even with these linguistic idiosyncracies, it’s still not something you will want to put down easily once you’re engaged with it. It’s a rather different beast to Katawa Shoujo in that it’s not a “dating sim” type of game and thus you’re not outright trying to woo a specific girl. Instead, it focuses on the complex, intimate feelings between two people as they speed through life towards a conclusion that they both know is not going to end well. It’s by turns touching, heartwarming and tragic — or, to put it another way, Here Be Feels.