I finished Amane’s route in The Fruit of Grisaia tonight, bringing my time with this absolutely incredible visual novel to a close, and frankly I’m a bit of an emotional wreck right now, but I will do my best to try and collect my thoughts and post something reasonably meaningful.
One thing I will say before I jump into spoiler territory after the “More” tag is that I’m really glad I saved Amane’s route for last. Not just because she was immediately my favourite girl — and still is after playing through her route — but because her route acts as a rather wonderful way to wrap up the entire experience. Her good ending is particularly “conclusive”, and as the last thing I saw in the whole work, it feels like I’ve had a great sense of closure — although, as always with this sort of thing, I’m going to miss these characters very much. At least I have two more games in the series to look forward to!
All right. Let’s get spoilery.
I liked Amane the moment I “met” her. There were numerous reasons for this: she was the character I found most physically attractive, for one — I have a thing for long hair, big tits and womanly curves, although seeing that written down it doesn’t sound like a particularly unusual thing to “have a thing” for — but also there was something about her personality that I immediately latched onto and liked very much.
I wasn’t sure what it was immediately. I thought it might be her “big sister” act that she immediately starts laying on pretty thick with Yuuji as soon as they start to get to know one another. Or perhaps her aggressive sexuality and rather “handsy” nature. Or maybe it was the fact she just seemed like an overwhelmingly nice person, and among a cast of misfits she was by far the most “normal”-seeming out of the bunch.
I knew from my experiences with the other routes, however, that one’s first impressions of these characters never ended up being entirely accurate. Amane is a nice person, of course, but her reasons for being the way she is don’t come to light until later in her route after she and Yuuji have established their relationship. Prior to this, however, Yuuji has her pegged pretty quickly after he dramatically calls her bluff after she comes into his room demanding a kiss; “she puts up a consistently strong front,” he says, “but when push comes to shove it seems Amane’s a pretty timid woman.”
Amane’s timidness initially appears to manifest itself as neediness. She wants to be the perfect girlfriend to Yuuji, but she’s also anxious about the secret life he leads. She doesn’t want to pry into the details of it — and indeed keeps her promise that she won’t bug him for details right up until the end of her story — but that doesn’t stop her feeling uneasy.
“I’m kind of… anxious, you know…?” she explains to him. “In your case, it really does feel like you might vanish into thin air all of a sudden.”
This concern is nothing new for the Grisaia heroines, with most of the other members of the cast having suffered some form of “loss” at one point or another, but something feels a little different about Amane’s situation. Yuuji notices this after a short while dating her, though he writes it off with his own lack of self-esteem.
“Honestly, she’s too convenient,” he says. “The whole thing gives me an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach at times. But then again, that’s just the sort of person I am — the sweeter the deal, the more uneasy I become.”
This continually weighs on his mind, though, and his thoughts turn to Amane’s oddly servile nature when he has free, peaceful moments.
“There are some people out there who find joy in serving others, making them happy, and being necessary to them,” he ponders. “I consider them masochists. There’s no guarantee that such devotion will ever be rewarded. In fact, I think it’s safe to say the opposite is more often true. Maintaining such fruitless devotion for its own sake doesn’t make any sense. There’s got to be some other motive underneath it all… or so I instinctively suspect.”
Indeed, Amane does indeed seem to have her own motivations for being continually kind to Yuuji, though it initially appears to be a simple lack of self-confidence in her own ability to keep him from straying.
“I may not get all the details,” she comments to Yumiko after discussing a teen girl magazine article about the importance of blowjobs to maintaining spice in a relationship, “but the main lesson is clear enough, you know? Men get bored of pretty girls in three days flat, so you better suck ’em off before then! Am I right?” Yumiko, naturally, claims not to have any strong thoughts on the matter, but as we learn in the other routes, she does have something of an interest in all things sexual, though at this point chooses not to share her more secret thoughts.
Amane’s worries grow; she starts to believe that the other pretty girls around her will eventually prove too much of a temptation for Yuuji, and becomes somewhat desperate.
“So what sets me apart from the other girls…?” she asks herself. “Something I have, but the others don’t… my ginormous tits, I guess?”
And so it comes to pass that Yuuji emerges from the school principal’s office only to find Amane kneeling in the corridor offering tit-fucks for 100 yen — a somewhat bastardised form of a joke Makina had made to Amane earlier in the day. Yuuji, displaying admirable self-control, is having none of this.
“I, Kazami Yuuji, am not the composed, cool and confident man you apparently think I am,” he says to her. “To be perfectly honest, I was just moments ago worrying myself fairly seriously over my future with you, and what path I should pursue in life. In other words, I was earnestly pondering the possibility of forming a family with you. I’ve pulled you into my life for my own selfish satisfaction, so I feel obligated to give you something more than sadness and regret. I’m not sure what to do yet, but I’ve been thinking it over. When the time comes, I want you to look back and think ‘I was right to choose this man.’ I want you to be happy we were together. I’m reconsidering my very way of life in the hope I can make that happen… and then I get ‘titty-fuck, 100 yen!’ in the hallway. Can you perhaps imagine what I experienced upon reading this?”
Yuuji does eventually relent and acquiesce to Amane’s increasingly demanding sexual appetite, but he still finds himself reflecting on the situation, pondering exactly why Amane is the way she is.
“Slut,” he ponders, considering the description Amane habitually applies to herself. “Women are a bit too complex to fit neatly inside the frame of that simplistic concept. Sometimes they want to forget something painful. Sometimes they’re simply lonely. And maybe sometimes, it’s no one easily defined emotion; maybe it’s all of the above and more, an overwhelming jumble of hopelessly tangled emotions. Under such circumstances, women throw themselves at men. Any man will do; sometimes, even someone they despise from the bottom of their heart. Sex is a moment of forgetfulness for them, a band-aid on a wound. Men refer to such women as ‘sluts’. Amane confidently refers to herself as such on a regular basis. But however urgent her sexual demands, she’s far from indiscriminate. Her target has always been restricted to me and me alone. Almost as if she’s decided I’m the only band-aid that can cover up her particular wound.”
Yuuji has hit the nail on the head, as he so frequently does, though it’s an unfortunate coincidence that kicks off a chain of events that results in him discovering exactly what traumatic event in Amane’s past led her to Mihama Academy: he overhears some girls referring to Amane as “cockroach”, and later, he decides to ask her about it, as painful as it might be for her to remember the past — though he notes that since she hasn’t asked about his secrets, she doesn’t have to share them if she doesn’t want to, either.
Amane, however, having grown to trust Yuuji implicitly for reasons that become very apparent in her story, explains the situation without hesitation: six years ago, she was on a bus that crashed into a ravine along with a number of her friends and acquaintances from the school basketball club. One of her fellow survivors was a young girl named Kazami Kazuki: Yuuji’s sister, whose apparent death following the accident Amane describes was the catalyst for the breakup of his family, which eventually resulted in his father being killed and his mother committing suicide. (We learn in the other routes that Yuuji believes he is the one that caused his father’s death, but in fact this was not the case; the exact circumstances are never completely revealed, so I assume this is something that is tackled in the second and third games.)
Amane shows Yuuji her diary, an exhaustive account she kept of the survivors’ struggle to keep things together and escape from the situation in which they found themselves. Amane was ultimately the only survivor of the incident, with the others having turned into what she and Kazuki referred to as “ghouls”; driven mad by a combination of malnutrition, illness from eating infected meat — which turned out to be the flesh of one of their fallen comrades — and sheer despair at the terrible situation from which they were unable to escape. “When the world grows warped around you,” Amane wrote, “those who can’t bend simply break.”
Kazuki apparently sacrificed herself to allow Amane to escape, though we never get completely conclusive proof of her death, and indeed by the end of Amane’s route there are still significant questions as to whether or not she’s still alive. Since Amane is the only one who made it back to society, though, she was the one regarded as the “cockroach”, after the theory that if you put a bunch of cockroaches in a sealed jar together with no food, they’ll eventually turn on each other and the strongest one will survive.
“I’m the cockroach that got out of that jar alive,” Amane muses after Yuuji finished reading her story. “The most durable, most disgusting cockroach of all.”
Finally, we start to get to the root of Amane’s problem; crippling guilt at being the “only” survivor, Kazuki’s uncertain status aside. After suffering hounding from the media, the public and her former friends, she became unable to function normally in society.
“Until I had suffered more than those who had died,” she explains, “no-one would approve of my continued existence. If I could live my life entirely for someone else’s sake, maybe someday I’d be forgiven. But for that role, I needed someone who would punish me for the sin of surviving. So that when moments of happiness found me, when I laughed, I could simply offer a silent apology to the dead. I needed someone who would give me an excuse for when the voices whispered in my ear. I needed an answer to their resentful curses. ‘See? I’m getting exactly what I deserve.'”
Amane admits to Yuuji that initially, despite telling him that she’d fallen in love with him at first sight, she didn’t really love him — at least not initially. She threw herself at him in the hope that he would become the person she craved to “punish” her.
“When I first met you, I decided… since I’d stolen your sister from you… I could at least become a stand-in for Kazuki… That was all I could think of,” she says. “Since I’m not your real sister, I thought I’d compensate by doing things she couldn’t do for you. I wanted… a more dramatic ‘punishment,’ so I started pushing you into those sex marathons, doing all sorts of extreme things… but at some point, before I knew it… being with you, making love to you started to make me really happy. That’s… no good at all. It’s hardly a punishment if I love you. All of a sudden, the nightmares, the hallucinations, the voices started coming back… they’re all cursing me. ‘You’re taking all the happiness for yourself yet again!'”
Ultimately, Amane asks Yuuji if he will kill her, since she came to the conclusion that killing herself would have been the coward’s way out, but having someone else kill her would be an effective punishment for her “crime” of surviving. Yuuji, of course, refuses, having fallen in love with her himself by this point, but does accept the role of the one to punish her.
“There’s only one way I can save this woman,” he muses to himself. “And it’s not by trying to break the curse of her past. I’ll simply accept everything. Knowing her past, knowing her trauma, I’ll accept it all. I’ll provide her with the ‘punishment’ she needs. There’s no other way. Someday, Amane will surely come to understand. The only person she needs to ask for forgiveness is herself. Until then, I’ll be a burden for her to bear. I’ll ease her guilt. I’ll be her punishment. I’ll offer her forgiveness. Even if no-one else in the world does.”
And indeed, it seems there are people in the world who are unwilling to forgive Amane: specifically, one Sakashita, the father of one of the girls who died in the accident. Sakashita has gone completely mad with grief and anger in the intervening six years, and, following the schoolgirls’ chance encounter with Amane some time ago — the same incident that prompted Yuuji to investigate her past — spotted an opportunity to exact what he saw as “retribution” for Amane’s “murder” of his daughter. Cornering them in the valley where the bus crashed as Amane and Yuuji return to the scene to investigate any clues Kazuki might have left behind, Sakashita, an experienced hunter, offers them the opportunity to escape, but there is clear bloodlust on his mind, and indeed he injures Yuuji before the pair have the opportunity to get away.
In Amane’s bad ending, she and Yuuji decide to split up in an attempt to divert his attention; Yuuji, mirroring his sister’s behaviour six years earlier, decides to act as a decoy to draw Sakashita’s attention, hopefully allowing Amane to escape. Unfortunately, Amane chooses this moment to stand up for herself and, after discovering Kazuki’s “treasure” — actually a kitchen knife and a note apparently all but predicting the exact circumstances in which she and Yuuji now find themselves — resolves not to run away any more, and instead to protect Yuuji with her life, as Kazuki once did for her. Things… do not end well for anyone involved, let’s just say.
In Amane’s good ending, meanwhile, Yuuji opts to escape with Amane and cooperate in a plan to foil Sakashita. They are ultimately successful, and this leaves them free to live out the rest of their lives in peace. And the ending literally depicts that: we see Amane and Yuuji graduate, marry and grow old together, Yuuji eventually succumbing to cancer in his twilight years and Amane following a while after. Before Amane dies, though, surrounded by her family and feeling at peace with the world, she realises that it has taken her whole life, but she is finally truly and utterly happy; she has forgiven herself, and believes that she’s finally ready to move on and be reunited with her beloved. It’s a truly beautiful moment, and a fitting end for her story.
Amane’s route prompted many powerful emotions, for sure, but one thing that struck me as I started to learn more about her was that I related to her even more than the other members of the cast, and I came to the conclusion that this was one of the things that attracted me to her in the first place.
While I haven’t been through anything nearly as traumatic as she went through, her feelings of being unworthy of happiness and a desire to “serve” others are all too familiar to me. I recognised her anxiety, uneasiness and guilt at being happy or content, and I empathised with her situation greatly. I’ve felt many of the same things before — for different reasons, yes, and not anything to do with survivor’s guilt in my case — and so I felt particularly close to her through the things we had “shared”.
Her bad ending was utterly horrifying — by far the most unpleasant (and effective!) of the bad endings in the whole VN — but her good ending brought me to tears for a different reason; she had endured so much throughout her life, toiled so tirelessly for redemption and suffered so much pain that it was a delight to see her finally happy at the end, though it was somewhat bittersweet that her moment of true happiness came as the flame of her life went out. I couldn’t help thinking, having related to the way she felt so closely throughout her route, that I hoped my life didn’t quite follow the same course as hers.
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