this feels like you came up to me in the corner of a coffee shop where i was absently having my 4pm pistachio latte and declared this with the polite confidence of someone pointedly not eyeing my two murai-themed tattoos (one accidental, in my defence) just in case i might want an escape from the conversation—

—which is very kind, but i will never ✨want ✨ an escape ✨ from any opportunity to talk about murai yakumo ✨ he’s soul-bonded to me and i to him. you can poke me awake at any point in the night and give me a murai prompt and the words will march forward on their own. i think of him every time i open my writing journal and see “isn’t it better if it’s fun?” engraved in a corner. i can’t celebrate my own birthday without blankly thinking that his is in exactly eight days. i pour too much ketchup into a plate and i think wow murai would beat me up if i wasted this. i’ve been painting again recently for the first time since probably high school and every time i think oh my i could never do a canvas as big as murai tends to prefer. he’s always in the back of my mind, both as a character and as a philosophy. i once made a since privated youtube video purely bc of his existence in the blp narrative. he is like if someone created a fictional character purely to be both your wake-up call and manic pixie dream girl. very fascinating guy. there are very few characters i know simultaneously more (bc i l*ve him) and less (bc i l*ve him); he is too comfortably entwined with how i see the world and live my life that i often forget these days that he’s not an abstract concept and an actual character that’s ironically more tangible than a philosophy 🙂‍↕️

all to say !! i’d hardly consider it very late at all when i know i envy the murai lover who fell into this life after the sanada arc has released. there was probably a good two or three years where i must have looked genuinely delusional and hallucinatory grasping at patterns and straws and chapter raws while insisting on (and writing) a murai yet to properly materialize in the manga and i know i would have had more closure and catharsis for my fixation if his ~backstory had been revealed already back then.

not that any of it came as a surprise… i truly think he arrived a character with grief and a difficult history with sex and desirability already written on him; it just wasn’t made concrete until we learned about his childhood and teenage years. he said a lot of things loudly and proudly in the way that sleight of hand directs your attention away from silence, and i l*ved him the moment he was introduced. murai lives in spite, and without asking for permission, and in the process has discovered he loves what he’s been allowed to keep enough to keep him going past the grief of what he’s had to lose/never got to experience, if not over it completely. i also love that his arc was not about letting it go! not this taurus. he will not let it go. he will not allow himself to be loved just bc he has acknowledged the weight of his grief. but it is acknowledged, and it has been witnessed. sometimes, that’s all there is.

honestly, though, if you asked me back then if i ever thought he’d get the kind of in-depth arc that he did i would have been so shocked to learn that this was even possible lol it didn’t feel necessary to the overarching story and even now i think it had less to do with art and more the containing variable of believing artmaking can always be catharsis. which to be fair is a recurring theme of blp. art might not save you, but it is tantamount to death to stop making it.

so. yeah. i suppose if i had to really distill murai into his character throughline, it’s that death and life are synonymous, respectively, with not making art and making art. he has to keep living bc he has to keep making art and he has to keep making art bc he has to keep living. a true enneagram type 8 for the books. you live bc you have no other choice; you make art bc you have no other choice. blue period 49, you will always be famous ｡°(°.◜ᯅ◝°)°｡ absolutely life-changing in like two pages, and leading to still one of my favourite ending spreads in blp. i wonder if yamaguchi knew how much that would rock readers’ worlds.