Hanekoma headcanon
Feb. 2nd, 2011 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceiling_cat →MORTAL LIFE←
Sanae was born the eldest son to a large, desperately poor family in 1843 in the slums of Edo. He showed an early interest in art, but with a family that couldn't afford to reliably feed and clothe their kids, much less educate or sponsor them into apprenticeships, it was limited to charcoal drawings on walls and hanging around the printmakers' and painters' shops staring longingly until somebody got annoyed and chased him off with a broom. As he grew older and became jointly responsible for supporting his family -- through begging, odd jobs, theft, and anything else he could manage -- his time spent on art dwindled. In 1855, when Sanae was twelve, a powerful earthquake struck Edo, followed by a fire raging through the city. Sanae, who had been away from home when the earthquake hit, found himself separated from his family; the building where they had rented rooms was destroyed, their survival uncertain. He spent months returning to the place where their home had been whenever he could, but he never saw any of them again; from that point on, he was forced to survive on his own.
This involved picking the smallest, dingiest print shop that still displayed good work, camping on the back doorstep, and begging the owner to take him in until he'd worn the man down.
His manners and appearance were too awful for him to act as a salesman even in a cheap shop, so the shop owner set him to running errands, cleaning, pulling prints and -- eventually, as he noticed the way Sanae filled up every bit of wastepaper with drawings and designs -- began to train him in the techniques of cutting his own blocks. Sanae's work soon began to outsell his master's, and everything seemed to be going well until, when he was sixteen, his master caught a winter fever that turned into pneumonia and left him dead, his shop and tools sold by his family to pay off his debts, and Sanae -- talented, half trained and without any kind of certification or recommendation -- tossed back out onto the streets.
With the advantages of training and his significantly improved manners and language, he might have been able to land a place with a better shop, but he was too stubborn and proud of his own talent to accept working his way back up from shop-boy to artist a second time. Instead, he reverted to the lifestyle of his childhood to beg, borrow and steal enough money for carving tools, ink and paper. He started to eke out a living making his own prints from a tumbledown room he rented to sleep in, living on barley and turning out whatever sold. Romantic heroes, posters for the theater, beautiful women, even pornographic drawings; Sanae might be too proud to turn out rehashes of a master's artwork for a salary, but he was not too proud to turn his own creativity to any subject that would fill his pockets.
As he grew older, he was swept up in the growing anti-bakufu spirit. The resentment that he'd built up toward an establishment that kept him nameless, spurned and starving despite his talent flowered into a desire for outright rebellion. The borders that had been opened for the first time less than a decade ago were allowing new ideas in and spurring intellectual ferment; Sanae's imagination was fired by the potential for change. He fell in with a pro-democracy group and began turning out print posters for them, despite warnings from the police, and in 1866, at the age of twenty-three, his public opposition to the rule of the shogun and even of the Emperor finally got him arrested for sedition. He might well have been executed, or perhaps freed in the turmoil that followed the resignation of the Tokugawa shogun and the war against his last supporters, but Sanae didn't last that long: already malnourished, he swiftly succumbed to jail fever.
→FROM ARTIST TO ANGEL←
Freshly deceased, Sanae found himself in the Reapers' Game. He quickly discovered he had a knack for psychs and a killer instinct: getting to the end of the game with his partner was a cinch, but he found the taste of power and control intoxicating. Rather than return to life -- or ascend immediately to become an Angel -- he chose to remain in the UG as a Reaper.
On the RG, he continued producing his commercial and political prints, taking advantage of his new ability to escape onto the UG to avoid any further run-ins with the law. The Shogun resigned; his supporters fought a rearguard action from Kyoto, all the way up through Edo, and escaped briefly to Hokkaido before their final defeat; Edo was renamed Tokyo and declared the capital of Japan; and the new Emperor set in motion a rapid campaign of modernization and industrialization. Sanae - now using the surname Hanekoma as a reference to the winged lion that was his Noise form - worked his way up the ranks in the Shibuya District, spending a few years as a brilliant young officer before launching a coup against the Composer. Through a combination of native talent, surprise, and the Composer's fatigue after seeing his district undergo such devastating changes in such a short period, Sanae succeeded.
His tenure as Composer mellowed the anger and ferocity that had once ruled him; becoming aware of the higher purpose of the Game and the endless layers of order and enlightenment stretching out beyond the edges of his perception humbled him. Hanekoma came to understand the Game as an endless wheel of refinement, casting the not-yet-perfected souls down into Noise and wiping away their individuality, leaving the raw matter of their Soul to be re-formed and refined through other lives while the more powerful, more creative, more purely individual Players survive and ascend through layer after layer of selection and refinement.
---
→CANON FOR ADSTRINGENDUM←
Some time after his death, Sanae, still a Harrier, was approached by a young mortal man, Yoshiya Kiryu, who -- to his shock -- was capable of spotting him on the UG. Yoshiya, who had been able to see onto the UG all his life, had a few questions; Sanae, surprised and intrigued by Yoshiya's unusual abilities, answered them for him, and the two struck up an odd friendship that lasted through Yoshiya's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1868.
Yoshiya and Hanekoma swiftly rose through the ranks together. Hanekoma, still driven by the angry idealism of his mortal self, made a bid for the Composer's position and succeeded, promptly installing his trusted friend Yoshiya as his new Conductor. After four decades as the Composer of Shibuya, Hanekoma realized that he was beginning to stagnate in his position, the lack of human interaction and challenge beginning to grate on him. He resigned his position in Yoshiya's favor, trusting the younger man's abilities and judgment... trusting them above his own, in fact, for the ways in which Sanae had matured over the course of his tenure as Composer had left him increasingly ill-suited for the role. He couldn't truly focus on his District when his insatiable curiosity had him always looking upward and outward for greater understanding. Still, his deep affection for Shibuya, and his friendship with its new Composer, drew him back. In 1912, as soon as he had settled sufficiently into the increased knowledge and power of an Angel, Hanekoma went to Shibuya's Producer and managed to wheedle him into allowing Hanekoma to take over his position.
Since then, he and Joshua have overseen the District together. Hanekoma mostly manages to remember his place as the facilitator of Joshua's vision for Shibuya, although his own powerful attachment to a place where he was Conductor for decades does occasionally get in the way. Joshua proved his own skill as Composer -- and his stubbornness, which far exceeds Hanekoma's -- by lasting almost a century and counting in the role; however, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Joshua's Shibuya, too, began to fall prey to stagnation and decaying levels of interaction. Hanekoma found himself in the position of choosing between his oldest friend and the hundreds of thousands of souls dependent on the District he loved.
At this point, the events of The World Ends with You begin.
→MODERN LIFE/EVENTS OF TWEWY←
As the Producer, he's deeply woven into the life of his district: his small coffee shop seems ageless, and his artistic work as CAT is massively popular (it helps that he's so prolific that people speculate 'CAT's' anonymity hides a whole design studio.) He enforces the rules of the Game, which are set by the Composer; he provides the Reaper officers with whatever supernatural technology they need to keep their plans running smoothly; he makes daily reports to the higher angelic hierarchy; and he feeds the Players coffee, soup, donuts and information while monitoring the whole district of Shibuya. It's implied from his plot with Sho that Hanekoma is not above putting his thumb on the scales to make sure Shibuya remains healthy, prosperous and creative. In fact, he'd probably regard it as a part of his job – a job he's held for decades at least, if not more than a century.
The events of The World Ends with You begin when Joshua Kiryu, the Composer of Shibuya, decides that his district is becoming so poisoned and stagnant that it runs the risk of infecting other areas of the UG with apathy, and that the only solution is to destroy Shibuya – erase it completely. His Conductor, Megumi Kitaniji, argues desperately in favor of allowing the District to remain, and Joshua proposes a Game: Kitaniji has one month to remake Shibuya and heal its flaws. If he fails, he will be destroyed with the District. If he succeeds, he will have won its survival.
Joshua, as the Composer of Shibuya, has far too much power to fairly compete against his subordinate, and so he chooses a proxy to represent him during the Game: Neku Sakuraba, a young man who represents everything that is poisoned about his District. Neku fears and hates human contact, shutting the world around him out with his headphones... and he is also a young man of incredible Imagination and potential, someone truly worthy of representing the Composer in a game against the most seasoned and powerful Reaper in the UG.
Before Joshua identifies his proxy, Hanekoma clues the voraciously ambitious Reaper officer Sho Minamimoto into Joshua's identity, spurring Sho to try and shoot Joshua when he went to the RG, or Realground – the world of mortal humans – in order to collect Neku. Sho, who doesn't realize that Joshua is capable of using a limited array of powers even on the RG, fails in his assassination attempt and flees. Joshua shoots and kills Neku. Kitaniji, meanwhile, plots to revolutionize the minds of Shibuya's people by forcing them all into a mind-meld under his control. He asks Hanekoma for a pin with the design of a red skull that will take over the mind and spirit of anyone wearing it, allowing Kitaniji to control them utterly.
The price to enter the Reaper's Game is whatever is most important to you: if you win, you have the chance to return to life and have your entry fee returned. If you lose, you move on to true death. Neku's most important thing is himself, his own identity, and so his fee is all of his memories. He begins the game a complete amnesiac, unable to even remember that he's dead. A young woman, Shiki Misaki, quickly forms a pact with him in order to fight the mindless scraps of souls - “Noise” - that threaten them; as Neku's partner, Shiki strives to draw him out of his cast-iron shell. Everything nearly fails on the second day, when a Reaper convinces Neku that he can only survive by killing Shiki: Hanekoma swiftly intervenes, sends the Reaper packing, and tells Neku to open up and trust his partner. Here, he plants the seeds of a mindset that will help Neku to change profoundly over the course of the next few weeks, recognizing his own potential and putting aside his protective isolation.
As Shiki's partner, Neku fights through to the final days of his week-long Game. During the game, as he learns how to manipulate the trends and whims of living people in order to accomplish his goals, Kitaniji was using the Players to achieve his own goal of putting a Red Skull pin on every living human in Shibuya. On Day 4, their friend Rhyme Bitou is erased by Noise; her partner and older brother Beat is in danger of disappearing, but Hanekoma quickly intervenes and rescues Beat, trapping Rhyme's soul in a pin and letting Beat make a pact with the pin to keep himself in existence. He justifies his actions by claiming in a Report that it was a token of respect for Beat's determination – and this likely played some part in it, but it's also likely that Hanekoma is keeping Beat around just in case he needs to sneak an extra piece onto the board later in the Game. Unfortunately, Beat decides to take matters into his own hands and charges off on Day 7 in order to find a way to return Rhyme to her normal self. Kitaniji offers him a chance to become a Reaper and learn how to save his sister, and Beat takes them up on the offer.
Meanwhile, Shiki and Neku defeat the Game Master Higashizawa and are separated in a blinding light. Shiki wins the Game, and she becomes Neku's entry fee for his second week... because Neku, unlike Shiki, has not conquered his own flaws, and he therefore can't be returned to life.
More practically, Neku is Joshua's proxy in the larger Game, and as such, he cannot be freed from the UG until the match between Joshua and Kitaniji is resolved.
During the second week, Joshua chooses to pose as a Player and become Neku's partner himself. He spent the first week closely observing Neku and maintaining limited communication with Hanekoma; during the second week, he drags Neku further into it, hinting at the true cause of his proxy's death while giving Neku the clues he'd need to find the UG's throne room and play out his role against Kitaniji. Hanekoma upgrades their phones to search for Kitaniji's psychic signal, but the proliferation of the Red Skull pins means that Kitaniji's psyche is slowly being spread throughout the city, amplifying the signal into meaninglessness.
The Game Master this week is Sho Minamimoto, who continues to plan for Joshua's destruction; Joshua being a Player incites him to ramp up the level of difficulty exponentially by flooding Shibuya with Taboo Noise. (Most likely, Hanekoma trained him to refine Taboo Noise during the events of Week 1, between the point when Sho initially failed to assassinate Joshua and his ascension to GM.) The Taboo Noise begin to wreak havoc on the UG, attacking and erasing Players and Reapers indiscriminately. Joshua and Neku discover Sho drawing an elaborate Taboo Noise refinery sigil in Udagawa on day 4, and Joshua hints that he recognizes the mark. By the final day, only Joshua and Neku are left in the Game, and they find themselves fighting Sho directly. Sho uses a level i wave – a joke on a Final Fantasy attack, which does massive damage to anyone whose level is divisible by the level of the wave. Since any integer is evenly divisible by i, Sho's attack is implied to be inescapable.
Joshua throws himself in front of his proxy to take the blow, leaving Neku to believe, based on his fractured memory of his death, that Sho shot him and Joshua had sacrificed himself to save Neku's life. The power of the attack obliterates Sho, but he has a backup plan... that sigil in Udagawa is meant to refine his own soul into Taboo Noise, resurrecting him with even greater power. Meanwhile, Joshua escapes destruction by hopping to a closely related parallel Shibuya where everything revolves around the Tin Pin minigame. Neku, left behind, finds himself once more at Scramble Crossing at the beginning of a week-long Game.
Hanekoma's move to save Beat pays off in the third week. Desperate to eliminate the Composer's proxy, Kitaniji collected all the other players as Neku's entry fee in the third week's Game... and without a partner, Neku can't fight against the Noise that's flooding Shibuya. Beat, unable to let Neku die helpless, betrays the Reapers and makes a pact with Neku. Meanwhile, Hanekoma finds Sho's Taboo Noise refinery sigil and realizes that Sho made too many mistakes drawing it for it to function. He corrects the errors, allowing Sho to return in Taboo form, and then heads to the alternate Shibuya to find Joshua and bring him back home – Angels, with the ability to raise their personal frequency to power levels far beyond even the Composer, can switch worlds with ease, while the Composer, once away from his home world and his district, is unable to exert the power necessary to return. Joshua seems oblivious to Hanekoma's betrayal, and Hanekoma is sufficiently guilt-ridden over his actions to write out what amounts to a full confession and leave it concealed in the shop belonging to the Tin Pin world's version of him – also an Angel, and therefore fully capable of reporting him as the Fallen Angel they're hunting down.
Beat, meanwhile, tells Neku that he wants to become the Composer in order to restore Rhyme's life and her dreams – which were her entry fee. As a Reaper, he's learned how to release her from the pin, but only in the form of Noise. Neku agrees to help him, and the two of them try and fail to break into the Shibuya River. The next day, they're found by Kitanjii's assistant and this week's Game Master, Konishi, who steals the Noise that was Rhyme as Beat's entry fee and imprisons her in a pin. She informs them that she'll move to a hiding place and remain there for the next six days, and their only mission during the Game is to find and defeat her... but Beat only has five days left to exist, since as a Reaper he wasn't able to rack up any points defeating Players (the only way for a Reaper to prolong their existence.) Konishi disappears to her hiding place: Beat's shadow, where she observes them invisibly for the remainder of the Game. Meanwhile, she passes Rhyme's pin off to Uzuki and Kariya, two Reapers who fight Neku and Beat on days 3 and 4 respectively.
Kitaniji declares a state of emergency, mandates that all Reapers wear the Red Skull pins (which he tells them will magnify their powers), and orders them to destroy Neku and Beat at any cost. The Red Skull pins are proliferating through the RG too, blocking Neku and Beat's ability to use Player Pins to read and influence the minds of the living. Beat points out that they're a CAT design... and that they're almost identical to the Player Pins, so CAT must have designed the Player Pins as well. Neku begins to suspect that Hanekoma is the Composer.
At the end of the fourth day, the Red Skull pins are activated, instantly brainwashing every Reaper and living human in Shibuya. At the same time, Sho finally resurrects, and heads to Hanekoma's shop to attack him – having failed twice to kill Joshua despite Hanekoma's help, he now rightly suspected that he was no more than a cat's paw in Hanekoma's larger game. Hanekoma had already left for the Tin Pin world, and so Sho destroys his shop in revenge, leaving the ruins for Neku and Beat to find when they try to contact Hanekoma for help finding a keypin to enter the Shibuya River.
Hanekoma has left a keypin concealed in the shop, though, in a safe that Sho failed to find with a letter telling Neku to “enjoy the moment with all his might”; the two take the keypin and head for the Shibuya River, only to find another day passing without their notice. By the time they make their final move, it's the seventh day.
Sho, in his Taboo form, waits for the two of them to defeat Konishi and recover Rhyme; then he hurries ahead, only to end up crushed to death when he attacks Joshua. Neku and Beat battle Kitaniji, who fails to take over Neku's mind because of the extra Player Pin Joshua gave him at the moment he was killed. Kitaniji, in desperation, tries to take over Joshua and use his powers against Neku, but even with the power boost, fails to defeat him. Joshua declares his victory, hands Neku a gun, and tells him the whole story, proposing one final Game: either Neku shoots Joshua and takes his place as Composer, or Joshua shoots Neku and does as he chooses with Shibuya. Despite the threat to the whole city, Neku isn't able to kill Joshua, and Joshua shoots him... then returns him to life in a Shibuya that seems to have been miraculously reborn. Neku's ability to change over the course of the game proved to Joshua that his city – and he himself – were not irredeemable: his influence on Joshua has induced Shibuya to transform from a District on the verge of destruction to the literal best of all possible worlds.
Hanekoma and Joshua, meanwhile, are left with a mess to clean up (Hanekoma warns that there will be repercussions “upstairs,” which given that he's written a report detailing his involvement suggests that he'll be facing punishment for his use of Taboo Noise to destabilize the Game)... but their mess at least begins from the best possible place.
Sanae was born the eldest son to a large, desperately poor family in 1843 in the slums of Edo. He showed an early interest in art, but with a family that couldn't afford to reliably feed and clothe their kids, much less educate or sponsor them into apprenticeships, it was limited to charcoal drawings on walls and hanging around the printmakers' and painters' shops staring longingly until somebody got annoyed and chased him off with a broom. As he grew older and became jointly responsible for supporting his family -- through begging, odd jobs, theft, and anything else he could manage -- his time spent on art dwindled. In 1855, when Sanae was twelve, a powerful earthquake struck Edo, followed by a fire raging through the city. Sanae, who had been away from home when the earthquake hit, found himself separated from his family; the building where they had rented rooms was destroyed, their survival uncertain. He spent months returning to the place where their home had been whenever he could, but he never saw any of them again; from that point on, he was forced to survive on his own.
This involved picking the smallest, dingiest print shop that still displayed good work, camping on the back doorstep, and begging the owner to take him in until he'd worn the man down.
His manners and appearance were too awful for him to act as a salesman even in a cheap shop, so the shop owner set him to running errands, cleaning, pulling prints and -- eventually, as he noticed the way Sanae filled up every bit of wastepaper with drawings and designs -- began to train him in the techniques of cutting his own blocks. Sanae's work soon began to outsell his master's, and everything seemed to be going well until, when he was sixteen, his master caught a winter fever that turned into pneumonia and left him dead, his shop and tools sold by his family to pay off his debts, and Sanae -- talented, half trained and without any kind of certification or recommendation -- tossed back out onto the streets.
With the advantages of training and his significantly improved manners and language, he might have been able to land a place with a better shop, but he was too stubborn and proud of his own talent to accept working his way back up from shop-boy to artist a second time. Instead, he reverted to the lifestyle of his childhood to beg, borrow and steal enough money for carving tools, ink and paper. He started to eke out a living making his own prints from a tumbledown room he rented to sleep in, living on barley and turning out whatever sold. Romantic heroes, posters for the theater, beautiful women, even pornographic drawings; Sanae might be too proud to turn out rehashes of a master's artwork for a salary, but he was not too proud to turn his own creativity to any subject that would fill his pockets.
As he grew older, he was swept up in the growing anti-bakufu spirit. The resentment that he'd built up toward an establishment that kept him nameless, spurned and starving despite his talent flowered into a desire for outright rebellion. The borders that had been opened for the first time less than a decade ago were allowing new ideas in and spurring intellectual ferment; Sanae's imagination was fired by the potential for change. He fell in with a pro-democracy group and began turning out print posters for them, despite warnings from the police, and in 1866, at the age of twenty-three, his public opposition to the rule of the shogun and even of the Emperor finally got him arrested for sedition. He might well have been executed, or perhaps freed in the turmoil that followed the resignation of the Tokugawa shogun and the war against his last supporters, but Sanae didn't last that long: already malnourished, he swiftly succumbed to jail fever.
→FROM ARTIST TO ANGEL←
Freshly deceased, Sanae found himself in the Reapers' Game. He quickly discovered he had a knack for psychs and a killer instinct: getting to the end of the game with his partner was a cinch, but he found the taste of power and control intoxicating. Rather than return to life -- or ascend immediately to become an Angel -- he chose to remain in the UG as a Reaper.
On the RG, he continued producing his commercial and political prints, taking advantage of his new ability to escape onto the UG to avoid any further run-ins with the law. The Shogun resigned; his supporters fought a rearguard action from Kyoto, all the way up through Edo, and escaped briefly to Hokkaido before their final defeat; Edo was renamed Tokyo and declared the capital of Japan; and the new Emperor set in motion a rapid campaign of modernization and industrialization. Sanae - now using the surname Hanekoma as a reference to the winged lion that was his Noise form - worked his way up the ranks in the Shibuya District, spending a few years as a brilliant young officer before launching a coup against the Composer. Through a combination of native talent, surprise, and the Composer's fatigue after seeing his district undergo such devastating changes in such a short period, Sanae succeeded.
His tenure as Composer mellowed the anger and ferocity that had once ruled him; becoming aware of the higher purpose of the Game and the endless layers of order and enlightenment stretching out beyond the edges of his perception humbled him. Hanekoma came to understand the Game as an endless wheel of refinement, casting the not-yet-perfected souls down into Noise and wiping away their individuality, leaving the raw matter of their Soul to be re-formed and refined through other lives while the more powerful, more creative, more purely individual Players survive and ascend through layer after layer of selection and refinement.
---
→CANON FOR ADSTRINGENDUM←
Some time after his death, Sanae, still a Harrier, was approached by a young mortal man, Yoshiya Kiryu, who -- to his shock -- was capable of spotting him on the UG. Yoshiya, who had been able to see onto the UG all his life, had a few questions; Sanae, surprised and intrigued by Yoshiya's unusual abilities, answered them for him, and the two struck up an odd friendship that lasted through Yoshiya's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1868.
Yoshiya and Hanekoma swiftly rose through the ranks together. Hanekoma, still driven by the angry idealism of his mortal self, made a bid for the Composer's position and succeeded, promptly installing his trusted friend Yoshiya as his new Conductor. After four decades as the Composer of Shibuya, Hanekoma realized that he was beginning to stagnate in his position, the lack of human interaction and challenge beginning to grate on him. He resigned his position in Yoshiya's favor, trusting the younger man's abilities and judgment... trusting them above his own, in fact, for the ways in which Sanae had matured over the course of his tenure as Composer had left him increasingly ill-suited for the role. He couldn't truly focus on his District when his insatiable curiosity had him always looking upward and outward for greater understanding. Still, his deep affection for Shibuya, and his friendship with its new Composer, drew him back. In 1912, as soon as he had settled sufficiently into the increased knowledge and power of an Angel, Hanekoma went to Shibuya's Producer and managed to wheedle him into allowing Hanekoma to take over his position.
Since then, he and Joshua have overseen the District together. Hanekoma mostly manages to remember his place as the facilitator of Joshua's vision for Shibuya, although his own powerful attachment to a place where he was Conductor for decades does occasionally get in the way. Joshua proved his own skill as Composer -- and his stubbornness, which far exceeds Hanekoma's -- by lasting almost a century and counting in the role; however, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Joshua's Shibuya, too, began to fall prey to stagnation and decaying levels of interaction. Hanekoma found himself in the position of choosing between his oldest friend and the hundreds of thousands of souls dependent on the District he loved.
At this point, the events of The World Ends with You begin.
→MODERN LIFE/EVENTS OF TWEWY←
As the Producer, he's deeply woven into the life of his district: his small coffee shop seems ageless, and his artistic work as CAT is massively popular (it helps that he's so prolific that people speculate 'CAT's' anonymity hides a whole design studio.) He enforces the rules of the Game, which are set by the Composer; he provides the Reaper officers with whatever supernatural technology they need to keep their plans running smoothly; he makes daily reports to the higher angelic hierarchy; and he feeds the Players coffee, soup, donuts and information while monitoring the whole district of Shibuya. It's implied from his plot with Sho that Hanekoma is not above putting his thumb on the scales to make sure Shibuya remains healthy, prosperous and creative. In fact, he'd probably regard it as a part of his job – a job he's held for decades at least, if not more than a century.
The events of The World Ends with You begin when Joshua Kiryu, the Composer of Shibuya, decides that his district is becoming so poisoned and stagnant that it runs the risk of infecting other areas of the UG with apathy, and that the only solution is to destroy Shibuya – erase it completely. His Conductor, Megumi Kitaniji, argues desperately in favor of allowing the District to remain, and Joshua proposes a Game: Kitaniji has one month to remake Shibuya and heal its flaws. If he fails, he will be destroyed with the District. If he succeeds, he will have won its survival.
Joshua, as the Composer of Shibuya, has far too much power to fairly compete against his subordinate, and so he chooses a proxy to represent him during the Game: Neku Sakuraba, a young man who represents everything that is poisoned about his District. Neku fears and hates human contact, shutting the world around him out with his headphones... and he is also a young man of incredible Imagination and potential, someone truly worthy of representing the Composer in a game against the most seasoned and powerful Reaper in the UG.
Before Joshua identifies his proxy, Hanekoma clues the voraciously ambitious Reaper officer Sho Minamimoto into Joshua's identity, spurring Sho to try and shoot Joshua when he went to the RG, or Realground – the world of mortal humans – in order to collect Neku. Sho, who doesn't realize that Joshua is capable of using a limited array of powers even on the RG, fails in his assassination attempt and flees. Joshua shoots and kills Neku. Kitaniji, meanwhile, plots to revolutionize the minds of Shibuya's people by forcing them all into a mind-meld under his control. He asks Hanekoma for a pin with the design of a red skull that will take over the mind and spirit of anyone wearing it, allowing Kitaniji to control them utterly.
The price to enter the Reaper's Game is whatever is most important to you: if you win, you have the chance to return to life and have your entry fee returned. If you lose, you move on to true death. Neku's most important thing is himself, his own identity, and so his fee is all of his memories. He begins the game a complete amnesiac, unable to even remember that he's dead. A young woman, Shiki Misaki, quickly forms a pact with him in order to fight the mindless scraps of souls - “Noise” - that threaten them; as Neku's partner, Shiki strives to draw him out of his cast-iron shell. Everything nearly fails on the second day, when a Reaper convinces Neku that he can only survive by killing Shiki: Hanekoma swiftly intervenes, sends the Reaper packing, and tells Neku to open up and trust his partner. Here, he plants the seeds of a mindset that will help Neku to change profoundly over the course of the next few weeks, recognizing his own potential and putting aside his protective isolation.
As Shiki's partner, Neku fights through to the final days of his week-long Game. During the game, as he learns how to manipulate the trends and whims of living people in order to accomplish his goals, Kitaniji was using the Players to achieve his own goal of putting a Red Skull pin on every living human in Shibuya. On Day 4, their friend Rhyme Bitou is erased by Noise; her partner and older brother Beat is in danger of disappearing, but Hanekoma quickly intervenes and rescues Beat, trapping Rhyme's soul in a pin and letting Beat make a pact with the pin to keep himself in existence. He justifies his actions by claiming in a Report that it was a token of respect for Beat's determination – and this likely played some part in it, but it's also likely that Hanekoma is keeping Beat around just in case he needs to sneak an extra piece onto the board later in the Game. Unfortunately, Beat decides to take matters into his own hands and charges off on Day 7 in order to find a way to return Rhyme to her normal self. Kitaniji offers him a chance to become a Reaper and learn how to save his sister, and Beat takes them up on the offer.
Meanwhile, Shiki and Neku defeat the Game Master Higashizawa and are separated in a blinding light. Shiki wins the Game, and she becomes Neku's entry fee for his second week... because Neku, unlike Shiki, has not conquered his own flaws, and he therefore can't be returned to life.
More practically, Neku is Joshua's proxy in the larger Game, and as such, he cannot be freed from the UG until the match between Joshua and Kitaniji is resolved.
During the second week, Joshua chooses to pose as a Player and become Neku's partner himself. He spent the first week closely observing Neku and maintaining limited communication with Hanekoma; during the second week, he drags Neku further into it, hinting at the true cause of his proxy's death while giving Neku the clues he'd need to find the UG's throne room and play out his role against Kitaniji. Hanekoma upgrades their phones to search for Kitaniji's psychic signal, but the proliferation of the Red Skull pins means that Kitaniji's psyche is slowly being spread throughout the city, amplifying the signal into meaninglessness.
The Game Master this week is Sho Minamimoto, who continues to plan for Joshua's destruction; Joshua being a Player incites him to ramp up the level of difficulty exponentially by flooding Shibuya with Taboo Noise. (Most likely, Hanekoma trained him to refine Taboo Noise during the events of Week 1, between the point when Sho initially failed to assassinate Joshua and his ascension to GM.) The Taboo Noise begin to wreak havoc on the UG, attacking and erasing Players and Reapers indiscriminately. Joshua and Neku discover Sho drawing an elaborate Taboo Noise refinery sigil in Udagawa on day 4, and Joshua hints that he recognizes the mark. By the final day, only Joshua and Neku are left in the Game, and they find themselves fighting Sho directly. Sho uses a level i wave – a joke on a Final Fantasy attack, which does massive damage to anyone whose level is divisible by the level of the wave. Since any integer is evenly divisible by i, Sho's attack is implied to be inescapable.
Joshua throws himself in front of his proxy to take the blow, leaving Neku to believe, based on his fractured memory of his death, that Sho shot him and Joshua had sacrificed himself to save Neku's life. The power of the attack obliterates Sho, but he has a backup plan... that sigil in Udagawa is meant to refine his own soul into Taboo Noise, resurrecting him with even greater power. Meanwhile, Joshua escapes destruction by hopping to a closely related parallel Shibuya where everything revolves around the Tin Pin minigame. Neku, left behind, finds himself once more at Scramble Crossing at the beginning of a week-long Game.
Hanekoma's move to save Beat pays off in the third week. Desperate to eliminate the Composer's proxy, Kitaniji collected all the other players as Neku's entry fee in the third week's Game... and without a partner, Neku can't fight against the Noise that's flooding Shibuya. Beat, unable to let Neku die helpless, betrays the Reapers and makes a pact with Neku. Meanwhile, Hanekoma finds Sho's Taboo Noise refinery sigil and realizes that Sho made too many mistakes drawing it for it to function. He corrects the errors, allowing Sho to return in Taboo form, and then heads to the alternate Shibuya to find Joshua and bring him back home – Angels, with the ability to raise their personal frequency to power levels far beyond even the Composer, can switch worlds with ease, while the Composer, once away from his home world and his district, is unable to exert the power necessary to return. Joshua seems oblivious to Hanekoma's betrayal, and Hanekoma is sufficiently guilt-ridden over his actions to write out what amounts to a full confession and leave it concealed in the shop belonging to the Tin Pin world's version of him – also an Angel, and therefore fully capable of reporting him as the Fallen Angel they're hunting down.
Beat, meanwhile, tells Neku that he wants to become the Composer in order to restore Rhyme's life and her dreams – which were her entry fee. As a Reaper, he's learned how to release her from the pin, but only in the form of Noise. Neku agrees to help him, and the two of them try and fail to break into the Shibuya River. The next day, they're found by Kitanjii's assistant and this week's Game Master, Konishi, who steals the Noise that was Rhyme as Beat's entry fee and imprisons her in a pin. She informs them that she'll move to a hiding place and remain there for the next six days, and their only mission during the Game is to find and defeat her... but Beat only has five days left to exist, since as a Reaper he wasn't able to rack up any points defeating Players (the only way for a Reaper to prolong their existence.) Konishi disappears to her hiding place: Beat's shadow, where she observes them invisibly for the remainder of the Game. Meanwhile, she passes Rhyme's pin off to Uzuki and Kariya, two Reapers who fight Neku and Beat on days 3 and 4 respectively.
Kitaniji declares a state of emergency, mandates that all Reapers wear the Red Skull pins (which he tells them will magnify their powers), and orders them to destroy Neku and Beat at any cost. The Red Skull pins are proliferating through the RG too, blocking Neku and Beat's ability to use Player Pins to read and influence the minds of the living. Beat points out that they're a CAT design... and that they're almost identical to the Player Pins, so CAT must have designed the Player Pins as well. Neku begins to suspect that Hanekoma is the Composer.
At the end of the fourth day, the Red Skull pins are activated, instantly brainwashing every Reaper and living human in Shibuya. At the same time, Sho finally resurrects, and heads to Hanekoma's shop to attack him – having failed twice to kill Joshua despite Hanekoma's help, he now rightly suspected that he was no more than a cat's paw in Hanekoma's larger game. Hanekoma had already left for the Tin Pin world, and so Sho destroys his shop in revenge, leaving the ruins for Neku and Beat to find when they try to contact Hanekoma for help finding a keypin to enter the Shibuya River.
Hanekoma has left a keypin concealed in the shop, though, in a safe that Sho failed to find with a letter telling Neku to “enjoy the moment with all his might”; the two take the keypin and head for the Shibuya River, only to find another day passing without their notice. By the time they make their final move, it's the seventh day.
Sho, in his Taboo form, waits for the two of them to defeat Konishi and recover Rhyme; then he hurries ahead, only to end up crushed to death when he attacks Joshua. Neku and Beat battle Kitaniji, who fails to take over Neku's mind because of the extra Player Pin Joshua gave him at the moment he was killed. Kitaniji, in desperation, tries to take over Joshua and use his powers against Neku, but even with the power boost, fails to defeat him. Joshua declares his victory, hands Neku a gun, and tells him the whole story, proposing one final Game: either Neku shoots Joshua and takes his place as Composer, or Joshua shoots Neku and does as he chooses with Shibuya. Despite the threat to the whole city, Neku isn't able to kill Joshua, and Joshua shoots him... then returns him to life in a Shibuya that seems to have been miraculously reborn. Neku's ability to change over the course of the game proved to Joshua that his city – and he himself – were not irredeemable: his influence on Joshua has induced Shibuya to transform from a District on the verge of destruction to the literal best of all possible worlds.
Hanekoma and Joshua, meanwhile, are left with a mess to clean up (Hanekoma warns that there will be repercussions “upstairs,” which given that he's written a report detailing his involvement suggests that he'll be facing punishment for his use of Taboo Noise to destabilize the Game)... but their mess at least begins from the best possible place.
