#kanau

Synopsis

On the eve of his tenth birthday, Rakuo Kumode undergoes his family’s “initiation rite.” When he bucks against his family traditions, he has an encounter that will change the course of his life forever…in good and bad ways. 

A story about two broken children finding each other.

Features!

📖12k words (~1 hour playtime) 💃Animated 🎨Storybook format, told entirely with unique illustrations 🎙️Fully voiced! ☀️13 CGs and 18 mini CGs 💀Yandere origin story (just like the comics???) ✨Suffering

WARNING

The story starts out with a college boy named Carter who is lost in the woods. While walking, he meets a young boy named Raku who promises to help him out of the woods. The two of them talk to each other for a bit, with Carter asking him why he's in the woods in the first place. Raku seems hesitant, but talks about how he wants to get away from his family, how his mother is especially harsh to him, how she favors his sister and how he really doesn't want to partake in the family traditions that he now has to accept. Carter listens and offers him advice on how he should set boundaries with his parents, even giving a story about how he would fight with his dad sometimes when he was Raku's age. He talks about how he has to pick up his 17 year old sister later and how he spent two months of his paycheck to get his dad something expensive. Raku seems to have a change of heart and tries to lead Carter elsewhere before being suddenly confronted by his mother. His mother expresses great disappointment in him, lamenting at the fact that he was trying to let his prey escape. Raku tries to set his boundaries as Carter had advised them, but to no avail. Raku attempts to protect Carter from his mother, but ultimately fails as she knocks Raku out and drags Carter back with them.

Upon waking up, Raku finds himself in the basement, with his mother watching him over a the dead body of Carter. His mother has prepared his meal, breaking open Carter's ribcage and takes out his liver for him to eat. Raku refuses despite how delicious looking it looks, still traumatized by the once alive Carter, dead on the floor. His mother talks about how she expected better of him, that she shouldn't have kept him alive if he would act like this. We learn that his family or species, I suppose, only really care about the females in the family, with them mating with a random human only to eat them if they need to reproduce. As such, males are generally killed after they are born. However, his mother states because she loved him so much, she kept him alive, even at the expense of having the other families shun her. When Raku continues to refuse, his mother basically rips out almost all of his monster spider arms and locks him in the basement, forcing him to eat before he can leave. Raku knows that if he eats he could very easily heal from his wounds, but when he tries, he vomits it back up after seeing Carter's face.

After a couple of days, Raku's little sister, Mayu tries to look for him in the basement. After hearing that his mother said he was being bad and not eating, she decides to bring some of the halloween candy that he got for her, despite their mother not wanting them to eat it as it's tainted by humans. She is able to sneak in and give him the candy, allowing him to at least restore his wounds. After she leaves, Raku is able to sneak out of the basement by turning into as spider and runs away from home. After a couple of days of running, he becomes so tired that he can only maintain his spider form. He ends up in someone's yard and almost gets killed by a cat, batted inside the house. There he meets a young girl named Nelli. Nelli is kind to him, noticing his missing legs and puts him in a jar to take care of him, giving him dead insects. For a while, Raku is taken care of by Nelli who watches his health every day and feeds him. Nelli also recounts how she used to have a cat, but was scared that her father might do something to her and ended up giving it away to a friend, and wished that in the future she could become a vet.

We get to know more about Nelli's home life, with her mother constantly at work and her father being a deadbeat. Nelli likes playing games, not only as a hobby but as a way to avoid dealing with her father. As time goes on, Raku notices that Nelli often seems less lively, with screaming and yelling becoming more of a constant in her household. She comes home crying one day and talks to Raku, about how she witnessed one of her friends and her dad's relationship and that she wished that she had parents like that, as neither of her parents came to the parent teacher conference. She later hides in the bathroom later to avoid her father who seems to be trying to find a reason to punish her, quietly playing her favorite game while Raku watches. Things get even worse one day when Raku witnesses her father come into her room to look for something to blame her with, only to find Raku. When Nelli gets home, her father scolds her for bringing a disgusting spider into the house, smashing the jar on the floor. He tells her to kill Raku or else before stomping off. Here Nelli prays that someone will kill her father, as she never wants to see him again. Raku, hearing her wishes and being mostly healed, turns back into his human form to confront her father. There he kills him without hesitation.

He is able to bring his body back into the woods, eating it to gain substance before finally returning home to gift his mother. His mother is overjoyed that he was finally able to kill and devour someone, before he finally is able to return to his room.

A couple of years later, in college, Raku while waiting in line notices the keychain of the game that Nelli plays, and finds that the two are in the same high school. They end up greeting each other and this is how the game ends.

I think I've said this before, but I really liked Karamu and this game is just so great. I like the artstyle a lot in this game, the way the sprites animate to look left or right in the beginning, the backgrounds, framing and all of that. It's absolutely gorgeous and I like how the picture book style story is connected in game as well, despite being coded in a new engine for the creator. The story in this one is pretty solid as well, and I think I like it more than Karamu in this regard since we get to see a lot more about Raku and Nelli's childhood- how they both do have pretty rough childhoods though in different ways and how Raku at least meets Nelli. The idea of Raku's species being more matriarchal and how males of their species are basically nonexistent is so interesting, it makes me genuinely wonder what his mother saw in him to keep him alive. While it's still horrible, I can see why Raku's mother pushes Raku so hard into eating humans, given her own biases against humans and the fact that she kept him alive despite the fact that she should have killed him, he just wanted him to be worth keeping. Nelli on the other hand lives in an abusive household, with parents that either seem to ignore her or outright abuse her, so it's no wonder she clung so hard onto Raku as a spider, as she wanted to take care of something. The fact that Nelli's father is already extremely terrifying to the viewer makes you feel sorry for Nelli who is even younger at the time. Both Raku's mother and Nelli's father are fairly terrifying in their own way and all the voice actors did a really good job in conveying that feeling.

Raku as a yandere is really built up here as his reluctance to fulfill his family traditions is eventually overtaken by his desire to protect Nelli. It's no wonder Raku falls for Nelli so hard considering that she basically not only saves him but nurses him back to health. The two of them are very similar in many ways and Raku really does seem to want to want to protect and take care of Nelli just as much as she takes care of him. We can really see why Raku ends up being so protective over Nelli as he actually lives through part of Nelli's life and sees just what kind of life she lives and how difficult it is for a lot of it. It's no wonder later on Raku is so willingly to literally eat and hide the evidence in Karamu and how he seems so very protective over her. I do think perhaps its a bit strange that Raku didn't come to look for Nelli later on down the line (or maybe he did and then gave up), but I do think that them meeting up is very poetic.