A World That Can’t See You: Otherness and disability in Tsukihime

Content Warning: Discussion of suicide, ableism

Spoiler: Light spoilers for Tsukihime

If I was told a few years ago that there was “another world” that I had never known of, I’d wonder just what you were going on about. But after being diagnosed with a rare and complicated genetic disorder, and after watching my world shrink bit by bit with every day, I understood that I was being spirited away to a reality very different from the one my friends and family lived in. It had always been there (as I’d come to learn), but I hadn’t seen it all this time. I wondered, how many people had I brushed off or failed to save because I lived freely while they were in chains? Even after being accustomed to a life of chronic illness and limited opportunities, I still ask myself that question.

But when I can’t find them in reality, I’ve always looked for answers in stories. Their worlds, their characters, and their messages—too powerful to be contained within a book or a screen—are all I need to keep going. In the days after my diagnosis and after a surgery left me bedridden, I watched an anime that would become my favorite: Re:Zero. The suffering its characters endured put my pain into perspective and the meaning they found gave me hope. And even recently, I’ve learnt strength by playing through Dark Souls and realizing that defeat only comes to those who never get back up.

What made me such a believer in the power of stories—and what held the answer to my question—was what remains to be one of my all time favorites: Tsukihime. One of Fate/Stay Night creator Kinoko Nasu’s earlier (and most significant) works, Tsukihime took the supernatural powers and in-depth lore that would define what was to become the Fate series and combined it with vulnerable characters, heartfelt romances, and a fragile world that once seemed otherworldly to me—only to now be the same as mine. But that original adult visual novel remains exclusive to Japan to this day, and for decades, audiences overseas only knew Tsukihime through an infamously lackluster anime, a short but sweet manga, and as that weird cousin of Fate that a dozen people swore was the best thing ever. Or at least, that was until this year, when a safe-for-work remake titled Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- made its way outside Japan, and its story of resilience in the face of “otherness” and social isolation was able to find a new, wider audience.

Living with a curse

Tsukihime is a fusion of many different ideas and genres, but its core identity is about life and death, the worldly and the otherworldly, and the way its characters are forced into the spaces between these perceived binaries. Its protagonist, Tohno Shiki, wakes in a hospital room after a near-fatal accident to find that his eyes perceive the lines of life that hold the world together. Those “cracks” in the air, in the ground, and in people represent the composition of the world and its inhabitants; when traced with a knife or a finger, those lines fade away, erasing their hosts from existence in the process. Realizing that he’s been cursed with the ability to see the inescapable fragility of all that exists—of the oppressive and overwhelming presence of death—Shiki gladly seals his eyes away behind a pair of magic glasses.

Years later, Shiki lives a modest life while strained by the corrupting effect that his eyes have on his body and mind. But when a high-level vampire begins to feed on the town’s residents, Shiki is forced to take off his glasses and use his curse to cut through the lines and fight death with death for the sake of those he cares about. Despite seeing himself as a “monster” who should have never been born, he submits to his eyes, hoping that they grant him the power to do right. Along the way, he bonds with those who share both his pain and his desire for salvation as they fight to fix a world that they know to already be broken.

From that initial shock of finding out that his body doesn’t work as it should to the self-doubt that plagues him later on, Shiki experiences much of what it means to be impaired or chronically ill throughout Tsukihime. Though the story is a dark fantasy and Shiki’s condition a magical plot device, Nasu treats his world as reality and his characters as human beings—Shiki’s anemia could have just been a way to weaken an otherwise overpowered character, but instead it manifests itself into the plot and is a key component of Shiki’s everyday life. With sincerity and compassion, Nasu crafts a narrative that is believable, not because of its Tokyo setting or high-school drama, but rather because of the absurdity it embraces. To anyone unfamiliar, fainting without warning or being ill every day is unthinkable, yet for Shiki, for me, and for others like us, that absurdity isn’t fantasy—it’s reality.

That’s why when revisiting the story through the remake, I was able to step into Shiki’s shoes and relate to him in a way I hadn’t been able to before my diagnosis. When I first read Tsukihime through its manga, I wished to be like Shiki, who was brave even as he wasted countless nights in bed due to illness. Now I know the same struggle that I had glorified for years and understand that my wish came with a price.

I didn’t know before that there was pain bad enough that it would make me wish I was dead. I didn’t know that the systems I believed in could ignore me and what I was going through. I didn’t know that death, as scary as it had always been, was so close to me and to everyone else. I got my wish. I saw the cracks and gaps in the world around me, just like Shiki did; and like him, I have to keep my distance from the normal world, because it doesn’t seem to be compatible with the world I now see.

Shiki’s feeling that nobody understood exactly what he was seeing—that nobody lived in his world—was cathartic to me, and the “home” he would make for himself as the story progressed was inspiring, particularly because the narrative wasn’t afraid to be depressing and brutal if it meant reflecting the conditions that someone like Shiki would live under. But, in another move towards realism, it also sees Shiki learn many lessons through each day he lives, with the biggest of them being that he, in all his “strangeness,” is not alone.

Connecting through trauma

The first to teach him that lesson is Tsukihime‘s main heroine, the titular “Moon Princess” Arcueid Brunestud—a vampire princess tasked with executing those of her kin who have gone rogue. Arcueid, with powers fearsome and planetary in scale, ironically lives a fragile existence, always being on the edge of fading away once she’s fulfilled her purpose. But when she crosses paths with Shiki, they both realize that the one most capable of understanding them stands right across from them. As a monster with human fragility and a human with monstrous ability intertwine, two worlds distant yet close become one, and the anxiety, loneliness, and sadness that had defined both Shiki and Arcueid’s lives is replaced by hope and happiness, along with the regret that they weren’t able to meet sooner.

But that’s only one of many routes that the story can go down. All of its characters are one in their struggles and abnormalities. Ciel, Shiki’s beloved senpai who always puts on a smile, has a death wish buried deep within her heart. Akiha, Shiki’s strict but secretly loving sister, carries the Tohno family’s curse within her veins. Hisui and Kohaku, the twin maids tasked with taking care of Shiki, hide a history of abuse they suffered at the hands of Shiki’s father. And even the accursed monsters of the night hide anguish behind their eyes as they watch their humanity fade away with every passing second. The cast is composed of people whose pain—whether that be physical illness or emotional trauma—is invisible to society, each of them made “monstrous” and marginalized because of it. 

Yet in one city, in one small corner of an infinite universe, these lost souls find each other when they need warmth the most. Despite having been cordoned off into their own little bubbles so that others can live in ignorance, their bubbles gravitate together, creating a whole new world—a space where those deemed “abnormal” can live freely and without guilt, connected by a mutual understanding of the forces that estrange them from mainstream society. The irony and the absurdity of it doesn’t go unnoticed by them, but, if you’ve lived a life like any of them, you’ll know well enough that it’s all just par for the course. 

I too have met those from this world, who see themselves as “defects,” “undesirables,” or maybe even “monsters” after being branded as such by outsiders. When I was in middle school, I attempted to take my life—some out there would pounce at the thought of labeling such an act as “monstrous.” And now, as a visually-impaired, chronically ill, and panic-prone person, I have had people stop short of saying those other words, of saying what they really feel and what they see me as—as someone “not right” and “not normal.” After all, if you can’t be normal, then it must be your problem, right? I know that to be wrong, but for others, that line of thought forms their entire understanding of society.

You’ve no doubt heard it before: “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Especially in the US, personal responsibility extends to every part of one’s life, even to things that aren’t in one’s control. It’s as if the unique struggles of each person are invisible to everyone else, and each person is expected to make it on their own while trapped in a bubble of someone else’s making. But Tsukihime acknowledges the insidious nature of such beliefs through the loneliness its characters feel, while making their trauma, pain, and illness visible to an audience that is invited to sympathize with them and see them as heroes. Because, like with Shiki’s power or Arcueid’s vampirism, the conditions that people live under are hard to see even to those who want to see them. 

Part of that comes down to just how uncontrollable one’s symptoms can be. I spent January to April this year in constant discomfort and immobility as I fought off a barrage of various ailments, only to have now spent the rest of the year illness-free. Because of that unpredictability, it’s easy to feel like a fraud telling others that you’re struggling even when you’re not actually sick or vulnerable. Shiki’s eyes, a burden at some times and a gift at others, act as a representation of how people may appear to be in control when you see them one day, but troubled the next. The invisibility of this kind of suffering is a key point in Tsukihime; many of its characters aren’t immediately recognizable as being hurt until they meet others who recognize their shared experience in ways people with privilege cannot. But though the boundary between these groups may seem impossible to cross, Nasu’s writing rejects this notion, too.

Arihiko and Yumizuka, Shiki’s two best friends and classmates—the class delinquent and class president respectively—stand by his side even when he has to stay home or miss out on hangouts because of his frailty. They never ask the why or what, they just wish him well. Not everyone is that lucky, but sometimes all it takes is having allies like that around to keep on living. It’s a minor yet distinctively human detail in a story about magic, vampires, and the undead, but Nasu’s conscious decision to include Shiki’s friends reminds the audience that all people are deserving of love and capable of maintaining deep relationships, regardless of who they are or what they may be going through. Shiki’s bonds with his fellow outcasts are stronger than steel and of a kind that can only emerge between the marginalized, but the closeness he shares with his classmates serves as proof that the barriers separating the “normal” and the “abnormal” aren’t as insurmountable as they seem.

Making ourselves seen

When thinking of “disability representation” a dark urban fantasy and a former eroge like Tsukihime may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but its unfiltered depictions of Shiki’s experience with his curse, and its overall themes of otherness, isolation, and perspective speak profoundly to the marginalized experience. Until I became one of them, I had ignored so many others who struggled while I lived freely. But after revisiting Tsukihime with a perspective that I had always been missing, I know the mistakes I’ve made and what I have to do to make up for them.

It’s undeniable that life can be especially cruel to certain people, but for me, I think of my illness as a kind of superpower: the ability to see all the cracks in the world, to see life at the worst as it can be, yet keep living and searching for a way to reduce suffering in the world. It’s a thin silver lining, maybe even a form of toxic positivity, but if being one of the unprivileged few means having what it takes to face the world head on, then anyone who is marginalized, isolated, or “different” can dispel myths, tear down walls, and build up a better, more accommodating world that keeps those like them in mind. And so, even if I was offered the chance to go back to a life of false peace and ugly privilege, I’d reject it over and over again because I’ve found a home for myself and a family to protect.