This is a really funny opening, but I read the rest of the story (’Magical Girl Saki’, from Vol 3 of The Chronicles of the Clueless Age by Furuya Usamaru and Otsuichi) and it is heart breaking.
After this funny opening, the story focuses on Kaori, the other little girl from the opening, now an actual high school student, who has only just met up with Saki again after ten years. Saki is pretty and popular, despite her odd habit of carrying around a Poropon wand. Kaori, on the other hand, is lumped in with the unpopular kids, led by the bully Yasuko, who resents Saki’s odd habits.
When Saki and Kaori walk home together, Saki uses the wand to “change them both back to a 6 year old”, at which point Kaori realizes that Saki is living in an elaborate delusion; she really thinks that she’s Poropon, and can turn from a 6 year old to a 16 year old at will. Every night, when she gets home, she even calls her mom at the hospital, talking cheerfully into an empty phone line.
Kaori’s friends pressure her into leading Saki to the roof of the school, where Saki excitedly tells Kaori of Poropon’s final episode, where Poropon uses the magic wand to save a little boy from drowning. During all of this, the other girls steal Saki’s wand from her back, snap it in half, and toss it into the woods.
Saki is distraught, spending the entire day looking for her wand, and panicking about how she can’t go back. Meanwhile, Kaori is stricken with guilt, eventually running into Saki’s father. Saki’s dad reveals that the reason for her delusions is due to a sexual assault from a teacher when she was just a middle schooler, which led to her having an abortion.
Meanwhile, Saki is shown walking home in a deep depression, wistfully a pair of small children playing with their mother until she’s interrupted by the pain of menstrual cramps.
That night, Saki receives a call from Kaori, asking her to come to the forest behind the school. There, a dirt covered and scratched up Kaori, still in her uniform, holds up the broken pieces of the wand, confessing to her role in the crime.
The pair travels to a 7-11 to buy duct tape to repair the wand, but the ‘magic spell’ doesn’t work, with Saki lamenting her inability to change back.
Just then, Yasuko rides by on her scooter, berating Kaori for giving Saki back her wand, and accusing Saki of using it to ‘get off’. This enrages Kaori, who punches Yasuko in the face.
The ensuing brawl is broken up by Saki leaping off of a vending machine, and revealing the true ending of the Poporon anime; When Poporon saved the drowning boy, her wand snapped, and she resolved to live on without its magic. Saki’s strange behavior scares Yasuko away.
A grief-stricken Saki then drops the Poporon wand in the trash, before using the payphone to make one last call to her mother as a tearful Kaori watches.
From that moment on, Saki and Kaori were best friends again.
She can’t actually transform, she’s just super disassociating because she’s a rape victim.
Her mom is absolutely dead and has been for a decade.
She eventually learns to let go of her delusion with the help of her friend in the end.
snowghoul
vaporwave
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
jacobvanloon
