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OOC INFORMATION
Name: Nix
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salroka; PM
Other Characters: Lucius the Eternal, Angelica
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Kohaku
Age: 19
Canon: Tsukihime
Canon Point: Hisui Route, True End
Character Information: CW: Child Abuse (Sexual & Physical), Sexual Assault, Medical Abuse, Suicide
Here. As the Type-Moon wiki is frequently poorly written and her article contains some unsourced/inaccurate information, I'll summarize her history and the role she plays in the route she is taken.
Kohaku and her twin sister Hisui were originally born to a lineage of psychics associated with the secretive Demon Hunter Organization in Japan. They had an innate ability as "Synchronizers": individuals capable of strengthening the life force of others, bolstering reserves of physical strength and magical energy with their presence, by connecting with them through the exchange of bodily fluids. However, their mother was said to have broken one of the clan's taboos, leading to the destruction of the branch they had been born to; Kohaku claims she can't even remember her parents' names or faces.
Made orphans, Kohaku and Hisui were adopted by Makihisa Tohno—a man ironically of the very same lineages targeted by the Demon Hunter Organization, being a Mixed Blood with oni ancestry. He had sought to adopt the twins because of their nature as Synchronizers; due to the demonic ancestry of the Tohno bloodline, its bearers suffer the onset of something referred to as the "inversion impulse" with age. While members of the Tohno family possess superhuman ability, it comes at the cost of their sanity as their minds degenerate into those of violent monsters. Seeking to avert this fate for himself, Makihisa hoped to use a Synchronizer's ability to reinforce his mind against the poisonous influence of the Tohno blood, and took in those girls under the guise of raising them as household servants.
Makihisa's sexual abuse of Kohaku began when she was eight years old. "Fluid exchange" could have been achieved by the transfer of blood, but driven by desperation, Makihisa chose the more immediately effective option over the less reprehensible once. Supposedly, Makihisa selected Kohaku over Hisui because Kohaku was the more reserved child between them, and he believed she would be easier to control; nonetheless, at her age, Kohaku's abilities as a Synchronizer were still underdeveloped. When it became apparent that Makihisa intended to extend his abuse to Hisui as well, Kohaku pleaded with him to let her bear everything herself so that her twin could live without experiencing what she had. She got her wish—at the cost of finding herself all but confined to Makihisa's room, Kohaku only permitted to move freely between it and a few others nearby.
At first, Kohaku says she dreamed of escape. She would spend her afternoons staring out at the Tohno manor's gardens through one of its windows, daydreaming up fantasies about how she would run away with Hisui and find somewhere safe. Makihisa's condition continued to worsen, and he grew volatile and physically violent in addition to sexually abusive; the thoughts of escape stopped, as Kohaku began to cope with her abuse through an intense form of depersonalization, coming to view her body as the pieces of a doll rather than as a living part of her. It didn't hurt as much, she says, if she would just pretend it was happening to someone else.
Though Kohaku herself says she lost track of the time that passed, sometime after she had come to accept her confinement, Makihisa adopted another child—again the child of a demon-hunting clan, this time made an orphan by a slaughter carried out under Makihisa's own orders. Finding it an amusing coincidence that his name and the name of his same-aged son were pronounced in the same way, Makihisa took in Shiki Nanaya on a whim. Though initially withdrawn and distrustful following the slaughter of his family by Makihisa, Hisui eventually convinced Shiki to leave his room and play in the gardens with her; Kohaku's predictable afternoon landscape grew to include Shiki as well as Hisui and Makihisa's biological children, Akiha and SHIKI.
And then, one day, Shiki noticed her. He looked up and saw her staring through the window she used to watch the other children play, and he wondered why she was inside alone. To Kohaku, his eyes looked as though they were beckoning her to come outside and join the other children—and, suddenly, she remembered that she had legs that could carry her outside if she simply wished them to. The realization terrified her; if she hadn't been reminded of hope, she says, she could have peacefully turned into a doll and felt nothing else. Kohaku came to resent Shiki and yearn for his acknowledgment in equal measure, but as Shiki lived within a detached side-building while Kohaku was confined to a very limited part of the manor, she could never speak with him.
Two years after Shiki came to the Tohno household, without warning, SHIKI inverted at a prodigiously young age. Kohaku watched from the window as, in the midst of an average afternoon of childhood games, SHIKI turned bestial in both body and mind; he lunged for his younger sister Akiha, and Shiki blocked her body with his own. SHIKI's arm pierced Shiki's chest, killing him; the adults living in the Tohno mansion arrived to a scene of carnage, and as the head of household, Makihisa had a duty to exterminate his son lost to the Tohno blood.
However, in the end, neither Shiki nor SHIKI remained dead. Shiki's death caused Akiha's own Mixed Blood abilities to awaken; with her ability to manipulate the life force within her environment, she revived and stabilized Shiki using a portion of her own. Likewise, SHIKI was able to cling to life using his ability to absorb other people's bodies and life force into his own, having inadvertently connected himself to Shiki's life with the same strike that had killed him. Though both of the boys barely clung to life, they would recover in time—with the catch that SHIKI couldn't be shown to society so long as he remained in his inverted state.
In order to keep up appearances, Makihisa made a decision: SHIKI would be kept hidden, confined alone but for a few trusted servants who could act as caretakers, and Shiki Nanaya would become Shiki Tohno. Publicly, the adopted son was reported dead while Makihisa's son by blood was merely critically injured; the reality, of course, was that Shiki served as a mere substitute until SHIKI could regain his sanity and be quietly returned to the mansion. To complete the illusion, Makihisa went so far as to alter Shiki's memories with supernatural hypnosis, making him believe himself to truly be the son of Makihisa Tohno and forget SHIKI's presence at the mansion entirely. The source of the injury was rewritten to be the result of a car accident, and then Shiki was sent to the hospital.
Once Shiki was well enough to be released, Makihisa "disinherited" him and placed Akiha into the role of heir. More than that, Makihisa chose to have Shiki sent away from the Tohno mansion, placing him into the care of one of the Tohno's branch families. In Makihisa's room, Kohaku overheard him as he made the arrangements to have Shiki taken away later that same day; knowing that this was her last opportunity to speak to that boy she had at once loathed and yearned to meet, she slipped out of Makihisa's room just long enough to tell Shiki to meet her later. They met under a large tree in the manor's garden—but, finally afforded the opportunity, Kohaku could think of nothing to say. In the end, she merely untied the ribbon from her hair, handed it to Shiki, and made him promise that he would return it to her one day.
After Shiki left the Tohno household, Makihisa assigned Kohaku to serve as a caretaker to SHIKI while he was interred in an underground cell, finding her suited to the task through a mixture of her Synchronizer abilities and the training in household medicine she had already begun to receive. In his inverted state, like his father, SHIKI would lash out and abuse Kohaku ("take his feelings out on me," in her words); Kohaku states that this is what caused the last of her heart to crumble. If the Tohno blood caused Makihisa and SHIKI to do these things, then their bloodline should disappear. If she wanted to escape—all she had to do was destroy the Tohno family.
Rather than encourage SHIKI to resist the impulse of his blood, Kohaku instead assured him there was nothing wrong with the way he was. She encouraged his violence and allowed him to drink her blood, and the more he fed his bestial impulses, the more inhuman he became. Cut off from all other contact with the outside world, it was easy for Kohaku to take advantage of SHIKI's loneliness and stunted psyche to convince him he had been abandoned—that his father intended to let him rot within this underground cell until he died, and that he had been replaced by Shiki, a person who had everything SHIKI should have. It was also easy to drug him under the guise of medication, Kohaku using chemically induced states of consciousness to further destabilize his mind.
Meanwhile, at the Tohno manor, Makihisa's abuses of Kohaku continued. Four years after Shiki's "accident"—when Kohaku was 15 and Akiha was 12—Kohaku told Akiha to check Makihisa's room around midnight. What Akiha found, of course, was an act of violation; while her father's behavior had long been distant and unkind, it was only in this moment that she discovered his repeated abuses of Kohaku. At the time, Kohaku had meant only to lay the groundwork for future manipulation, weaponizing her own abuse to control Akiha through guilt; however, in the aftermath of the event, the usually-meek Akiha demanded that he release Kohaku from her position. Eventually, he ceded to his daughters repeated demands, assigning Kohaku to serve as Akiha's maid instead.
It was also at this time that Hisui learned of her twin sister's abuse, and the extent to which she had suffered in order to protect her from sharing in the experience. Compounding with the trauma of being a powerless bystander to Shiki's almost-death, Hisui's guilt over having allowed Kohaku to suffer alone caused her to grow quiet and withdrawn where she had once been bright and optimistic. Kohaku, who had always fought to protect Hisui's happiness, began to put up a cheerful front in order to obfuscate her own trauma—effectively trading "roles" with Hisui, with Kohaku planning to drop the act when and only when Hisui was able to return to her former smiling self.
Though she had been granted some measure of freedom, Kohaku's plans did not change. In order to survive her abuse, she had distanced herself from her own sense of personhood, achieving a state of detachment that prevented her from feeling even resentment for her experiences; yet, at the same time, a simple doll cannot move on its own. It requires strings to puppet it—a purpose, and this revenge was all that Kohaku had to fill that void, even as she knew its completion would bring her no happiness. Instead, she used her new freedom to cultivate a small garden of her own, growing plants with toxic and psychotropic qualities that could in turn be used to create new "medicines" for the family she served.
Her new assignment as Akiha's maid served Kohaku's plans in other ways, as well. Because Akiha had attached half her life force to Shiki's body, she suffered health complications of her own; in order to make up for the deficit of energy, she needed to draw energy from the environment using her Mixed Blood abilities. However, the more she used those abilities, the more the scales would tip toward her oni ancestry. Kohaku encouraged this; as a Synchronizer, she could lessen Akiha's pain and form a pseudo-contract with her by feeding Akiha her blood. While reducing Akiha's need to plunder energy in the present, the inhuman act of consuming blood would nonetheless prime her for inversion in the future, all while making Akiha dependent on Kohaku's unique treatment.
Eight years after he had first been confined there, Kohaku released SHIKI from his cell. Spurred on by the delusions Kohaku had implanted in his mind, he began to hunt for Akiha in the nearby Misaki City—the location of the boarding school she had been sent to attend. Over a period of some weeks, he killed and consumed the blood of several young women, based on a misleading description given to him by Kohaku. Fully given over to his monstrous impulses now, he eventually wandered back to the Tohno mansion, and when he encountered Makihisa there, he killed his father for his perceived abandonment. As he still couldn't find Akiha, he again left the house, making himself a lair in town as he continued his search for his sister—and Shiki.
As the only appropriate heir to Makihisa's position, at age 16, Akiha became the head of the Tohno household. Called back from her school, over the next two weeks, she focused on making arrangements—for Makihisa's funeral, and for the Tohno's extended family to be cleared from the mansion, and to ask Shiki to return to the Tohno mansion. Though their relatives were vehemently opposed, Akiha had grown aggressive and bold over the last several years; she overruled them and did as she liked, sending Shiki a letter requesting that he return to the Tohno household now that her father was no longer there to stop her. He accepted, and it was at that point that Kohaku made a little bet with herself: if he remembered their promise—and remembered her well enough to realize she and Hisui had traded places—she would stop before things went any further.
In Hisui's route, Shiki doesn't.
The day after Shiki moves in, the mansion receives a phone call addressed to him. Kohaku passes its message along; Shiki leaves to meet his classmate; he returns late in the night, disheveled and shell-shocked. Kohaku meets him in the manor's lobby upon his return, but he brushes off her attempt to speak with him and returns to his room. Disguised as Hisui, Kohaku follows him shortly thereafter, bringing him what she claims is a sleep medication approved by Shiki's doctor. Of course, in reality, this is one of the same psychotropic drugs she has been using to destabilize SHIKI over the past several years.
The goal behind drugging Shiki is threefold. Most immediately, while Shiki lies in the vulnerable state of consciousness induced by the drug, he is defenseless against suggestion, allowing Kohaku to implant certain ideas into his subconscious. However, beyond that, the lowering of his mental defenses will also deepen the link that exists between Shiki and SHIKI as the result of their connected life force; this will push Akiha into acting against SHIKI as Shiki mentally deteriorates, as the only way to sever this connection is the death of one or the other. Finally, exposure to the violence of SHIKI's mind will also cause Shiki's inborn instincts as a demon hunter to awaken—meaning he will be primed to kill the inhuman Akiha or SHIKI, should one or the other survive their confrontation.
As per their connected lives, when Shiki sleeps, he sees the world from SHIKI's perspective and becomes a first-person voyeur to his nightly murders; thanks to Kohaku's subliminal suggestions, Shiki is quick to conclude that his dreams are reality—and not from the perspective of another person. Rather, Shiki comes to believe that they are his own memories, and that he possesses a split personality responsible for the vampire serial killings that have plagued the Misaki area. Kohaku continues to slip Shiki drugs over the preceding week; Shiki, driven by paranoia, seeks through the mansion for information Akiha has withheld for him, and even searches for the killer himself, bringing his repressed murderous impulses to the forefront of his mind.
During this time, Kohaku also visits SHIKI in the lair he has made for himself. She continues to encourage his behavior and feeds him information to keep him occupied, as well as allow him to strengthen himself through the use of her Synchronizer abilities.
Eight days after Shiki's return to the Tohno mansion, Kohaku leads Shiki into the wooded clearing where he had been nearly killed as a child. As with so many other things, Makihisa's hypnosis suppressed the place from Shiki's memory; however, as Shiki steps into that clearing, its effects to begin to unravel. Memories—from both SHIKI's perspective and his own—flood his mind, and overwhelmed, he collapses. Several hours pass before he awakens again—the worst "fit" he has experienced since he was a child.
Though Shiki at first assumes strength will return to his body after a night of sleep, the next morning, he finds the opposite is true. Though he is in no physical pain, he is barely able to move his limbs. With his condition deteriorating, as the family's nurse, Kohaku has unfettered access to Shiki; she alone feeds him, supplies him medication, and even bathes and dresses him throughout the day. In the unquestioned, unchaperoned time she spends with Shiki, she mentions that Shiki had received his near-fatal wound on the grounds of the Tohno mansion. As he tries to recall where the supposed car accident happened, Shiki realizes he can't remember anything about the accident itself, further destabilizing his constructed memories.
By the next day, Shiki is almost completely overwhelmed by the strength of his connection to SHIKI. When he is awake, SHIKI's thoughts overwhelm his until he fears that his own mind will be erased; when he sleeps, he experiences every sensation of SHIKI's body—including the grievous self-harm he carries out against himself, spurred on by a desire to harm Shiki through their connection and his own body's ability to survive wounds that would be lethal to a normal human. Trapped in a state of continuous torture, over the next days, Shiki weakens to the point that his lungs are barely capable of drawing air.
Of course, Kohaku's plans will be thrown off if Shiki dies now. To keep Shiki alive long enough to fulfill his role, Kohaku uses her Synchronizer abilities to boost his strength. Disguised as Hisui, she gives Shiki a medicine that leaves him paralyzed; while Shiki lies unable to move, Kohaku speaks to him about her past as the girl in the window—in one breath laughing that she's happy they're finally able to talk, and in the next, speaking of her resentment. She then sexually assaults him For His Own Good, because she's extremely normal (or, more seriously, because she has long forced herself to regard these things as a mere transaction rather than a violation).
In any case, Shiki loses consciousness afterwards. Though he awakens with some strength restored to his body, his unraveling mind remains unstable; in a haze, he recognizes that his bedroom actually belongs to SHIKI and follows his long-repressed memories to the detached building that contains his actual childhood bedroom. This is, not entirely coincidentally, also where Akiha meets Kohaku to receive her blood. By sheer luck, Shiki finds Akiha in the midst of one such feeding—and in the midst of a discussion of Akiha's responsibility to kill SHIKI. Shiki, still unaware of SHIKI's name, believes the pair are discussing him; he retreats to his bedroom and locks himself inside.
When Akiha comes to his room later that night, asking to see him, Shiki immediately begins to rave at her that he won't allow her to kill him. When Akiha tries to question why he thinks she would want to do that, Shiki just yells that he isn't a killer. It's at this point that Akiha realizes that Shiki and SHIKI's minds have become connected, as well; in the face of Shiki's condition, Akiha decides SHIKI can't be allowed to live any longer and must be killed immediately—just as Kohaku had intended.
The next day, Akiha leaves to confront SHIKI—with Kohaku at her side, strengthening her Mixed Blood abilities through their Synchronizer pact. Though Kohaku could, of course, lead her straight to SHIKI's lair, she doesn't reveal that, and the two of them don't reach him until after sundown. By then, Shiki has had enough time to form a pact of his own with Hisui; not wanting to allow Akiha to face SHIKI alone, he uses the scenery he had seen through SHIKI's own eyes to find his lair himself. By the time he arrives, however, the fight is close to over: Akiha has SHIKI cornered, her power overwhelming his in part thanks to Kohaku's presence.
With Shiki's arrival, however, Kohaku sees an opportunity. She calls out to him in apparent surprise, and that is all that is needed to distract Akiha from her battle with SHIKI. She turns, and SHIKI lunges—not for Akiha, but for Kohaku, knowing she is the source of the disparity between his ability and Akiha's. Shiki is too far to reach them, and SHIKI is too near for Akiha to counterattack; instead, just as Shiki had done for her when they were children, Akiha throws herself in front of SHIKI's strike, suffering a lethal wound in order to protect Kohaku's life.
When SHIKI realizes what he has done, he panics; fleeing from the sight of his little sister slaughtered by his own hand, he scrambles to the building's roof. Shiki, Hisui, and Kohaku remain with Akiha until she succumbs to the wound, at which point Kohaku comments on where SHIKI has gone. Shiki leaves to finish what Akiha had begun, and Kohaku's revenge is fulfilled—though not before SHIKI lets one last piece of information slip, noting that Shiki looked nothing like what he had been told.
It's this small comment that leads Shiki to realize further discrepancies. He realizes that SHIKI believed he had been abandoned, even though the journal he had found in Makihisa's room expressed only a desire to bring his son back to the Tohno mansion as soon as possible. He realizes that he had, one night, dreamed of Kohaku through SHIKI's eyes. He leaves a note in Kohaku's room, asking to speak with her, and the two of them meet under the very same tree where Kohaku had given Shiki her ribbon eight years ago.
It's there that Shiki lays out the conclusions he has come to. Kohaku confirms them, and then begins to speak on her motivations in more depth, revealing more than she had even while in the disguise of Hisui. She speaks of Makihisa's abuse of her, and she tells Shiki of the way she sees herself as nothing more than an empty doll. In the end, she draws a knife; saying that with her revenge complete, there is nothing left for her to do but disappear, she drives it into her own heart. She dies held in Shiki's arms, murmuring that it hurts after all.
Personality:
Kohaku is a character only capable of being understood through her trauma. A victim of severe and continuous abuse, Kohaku survived Makihisa Tohno's violence only by discarding her own sense of personhood. Rather than a living, breathing child, she would pretend to be a doll—an object incapable of feeling pain when struck, and one unable to feel sadness or despair in the face of torment. Through this sense of dissociation, her pain grew more and more distant, until it was something she was no longer able to feel at all.
However, while a doll doesn't feel sorrow, it can't feel happiness, either. In Kohaku's own words, the more she retreated behind this defense mechanism, the more "broken" she became. Rather than a mask she could slip in and out of, she sealed herself behind a wall she could no longer lower; Kohaku became a girl disconnected from her own emotions and personality, able to wear whatever character or preferences suited the moment but lacking a genuine self.
That is precisely why, to the outside observer, Kohaku would appear as anything but an emotionless doll. The face Kohaku presents to the world instead is all smiles, with a manner as bright and inviting as sunshine. As they meet again for the first time in eight years, the first descriptor that comes to Shiki's mind is something motherly; she laughs often, and even in the face of hardship, her smile doesn't falter. In fact, that becomes something of a tell all its own; in Hisui's true end, Shiki notes that while the seemingly-emotionless Hisui truly emoted in dozens of tiny ways, Kohaku's expression would never change, no matter what happened or what she must have felt.
That surface persona also has a noticeable playful streak. Perhaps it's Kohaku's natural slyness combined with bubbly appearance she has adopted, but throughout Akiha and Hisui's routes, the other residents of the Tohno mansion all note her predilection for teasing others, with Akiha and Shiki agreeing they'll have to hide their relationship to avoid it (while agreeing that Kohaku has probably already figured it out), or Hisui making Shiki promise to never mention that she had fallen asleep in his bed for the same reason. Shiki also describes Kohaku as mischievous when she talks about sneakily spending time together where Akiha can't notice, and on top of that, she's shown to allow her apparent enthusiasm to carry her away even during household tasks such as cleaning—to such an extent that Hisui has to scold her for making more of a mess than had to be cleaned in the first place.
Beyond those at-a-glance mannerisms, though, one begins to catch a glimpse of what might be called the true Kohaku. As befits a nurse, she behaves with nurturing care toward others—but, unlike the silly and bright face she wears, that is a trait that has been present in her since childhood. She did, after all, take immeasurable pain onto her own shoulders to protect her sister's happiness. Even now, she shows concern where it serves no purpose other than kindness, such as by noticing Shiki's downcast mood and suggesting a party to clear it, or scolding him when he seems to have gotten into a fight (with the warning that it's just as painful to hurt others as it is to be hurt). She is also conscientious of the needs and preferences of others, typically meeting them without being told, be that in the food she prepares or in balancing the interests of many people as she arranges a winter trip.
After all, while Kohaku sees herself as an emotionless doll beneath an illusory exterior, the story of Tsukihime suggests that Kohaku isn't as hollow as she believes herself to be. Largely, this is demonstrated through her relationship with Akiha; even in Hisui's true end, after Kohaku's plan to kill Akiha has succeeded, she continues to bring tea to her room every morning without understanding the sentiment that drives her. Other endings have her sabotage her own plan in its final moments by pushing Akiha away from SHIKI's claws, or stopping a rampaging, inverted Akiha from committing suicide on Shiki's knife. Rather than unfeeling, Kohaku might be better understood as detached, instead; having rendered herself numb, she simply cannot tell where the line between artifice and sincerity lies within her herself.
Another place where Kohaku's real personality shows through—more than Kohaku realizes herself—is the logic she uses to navigate the world. Detached from her feelings as she is, she makes judgments unfettered by bias and unclouded by emotion; even as she maintains her usual smiling and upbeat mannerisms, the conclusions she draws are ruthless. This can be seen as early as Tsukihime's first in-game day: if Shiki watches television with Kohaku, they discuss the recent serial killings that have taken place in Misaki town, with Kohaku coldly analyzing Shiki's conclusions and picking out their holes. It helps that her detachment allows her to remain calm even in extreme circumstances, as well; in Akiha's route, she shrugs off Shiki physically lashing out at her as no big deal, and while still covered in Akiha's blood in Hisui's, she calmly comments that SHIKI still needs to be killed.
This collected and analytical way of thinking also lends her considerable skill in manipulating others. Even in interactions with significantly lower stakes than her revenge on the Tohno family, Kohaku will often use her observations of others to get what she wants. She plays Shiki and Hisui against one another for something as simple as finalizing a family vacation, knowing she can get them both to agree by convincing them the other won't go without them. Perhaps she has been playing the mastermind for so long that she simply pulls strings by reflex, now; her behavior throughout Tsukihime is certainly underhanded above all else, with Kohaku never once revealing her intentions until her revenge has already come to pass. She plays the children of Makihisa Tohno against one another, "accidentally" allows the right information to slip at the right time, and even impersonates her dear twin sister to slip poison and drugs to Shiki at night—all while maintaining a facade of innocence and affability that goes unquestioned.
In the end, though, even the face of the conniving and sly mastermind is one Kohaku doubts the authenticity of. Her revenge is something she regards as hollow—a mere stopgap measure to keep her breathing. After all, a doll can't move on its own. It requires some mechanism to drive its limbs—and for Kohaku, that mechanism was the purpose she supposed a person in her position should have wanted. Without it, she is a puppet with its strings cut, lacking any reason to persist beneath the weight of her trauma; to the end, Kohaku remains a girl unable to find her own heart.
5-10 Key Character Traits: Cheerful, Impish, Caring, Artificial, Detached, Underhanded, Manipulative, Collected, Objective
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Name: Nix
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Other Characters: Lucius the Eternal, Angelica
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Kohaku
Age: 19
Canon: Tsukihime
Canon Point: Hisui Route, True End
Character Information: CW: Child Abuse (Sexual & Physical), Sexual Assault, Medical Abuse, Suicide
Here. As the Type-Moon wiki is frequently poorly written and her article contains some unsourced/inaccurate information, I'll summarize her history and the role she plays in the route she is taken.
Kohaku and her twin sister Hisui were originally born to a lineage of psychics associated with the secretive Demon Hunter Organization in Japan. They had an innate ability as "Synchronizers": individuals capable of strengthening the life force of others, bolstering reserves of physical strength and magical energy with their presence, by connecting with them through the exchange of bodily fluids. However, their mother was said to have broken one of the clan's taboos, leading to the destruction of the branch they had been born to; Kohaku claims she can't even remember her parents' names or faces.
Made orphans, Kohaku and Hisui were adopted by Makihisa Tohno—a man ironically of the very same lineages targeted by the Demon Hunter Organization, being a Mixed Blood with oni ancestry. He had sought to adopt the twins because of their nature as Synchronizers; due to the demonic ancestry of the Tohno bloodline, its bearers suffer the onset of something referred to as the "inversion impulse" with age. While members of the Tohno family possess superhuman ability, it comes at the cost of their sanity as their minds degenerate into those of violent monsters. Seeking to avert this fate for himself, Makihisa hoped to use a Synchronizer's ability to reinforce his mind against the poisonous influence of the Tohno blood, and took in those girls under the guise of raising them as household servants.
Makihisa's sexual abuse of Kohaku began when she was eight years old. "Fluid exchange" could have been achieved by the transfer of blood, but driven by desperation, Makihisa chose the more immediately effective option over the less reprehensible once. Supposedly, Makihisa selected Kohaku over Hisui because Kohaku was the more reserved child between them, and he believed she would be easier to control; nonetheless, at her age, Kohaku's abilities as a Synchronizer were still underdeveloped. When it became apparent that Makihisa intended to extend his abuse to Hisui as well, Kohaku pleaded with him to let her bear everything herself so that her twin could live without experiencing what she had. She got her wish—at the cost of finding herself all but confined to Makihisa's room, Kohaku only permitted to move freely between it and a few others nearby.
At first, Kohaku says she dreamed of escape. She would spend her afternoons staring out at the Tohno manor's gardens through one of its windows, daydreaming up fantasies about how she would run away with Hisui and find somewhere safe. Makihisa's condition continued to worsen, and he grew volatile and physically violent in addition to sexually abusive; the thoughts of escape stopped, as Kohaku began to cope with her abuse through an intense form of depersonalization, coming to view her body as the pieces of a doll rather than as a living part of her. It didn't hurt as much, she says, if she would just pretend it was happening to someone else.
Though Kohaku herself says she lost track of the time that passed, sometime after she had come to accept her confinement, Makihisa adopted another child—again the child of a demon-hunting clan, this time made an orphan by a slaughter carried out under Makihisa's own orders. Finding it an amusing coincidence that his name and the name of his same-aged son were pronounced in the same way, Makihisa took in Shiki Nanaya on a whim. Though initially withdrawn and distrustful following the slaughter of his family by Makihisa, Hisui eventually convinced Shiki to leave his room and play in the gardens with her; Kohaku's predictable afternoon landscape grew to include Shiki as well as Hisui and Makihisa's biological children, Akiha and SHIKI.
And then, one day, Shiki noticed her. He looked up and saw her staring through the window she used to watch the other children play, and he wondered why she was inside alone. To Kohaku, his eyes looked as though they were beckoning her to come outside and join the other children—and, suddenly, she remembered that she had legs that could carry her outside if she simply wished them to. The realization terrified her; if she hadn't been reminded of hope, she says, she could have peacefully turned into a doll and felt nothing else. Kohaku came to resent Shiki and yearn for his acknowledgment in equal measure, but as Shiki lived within a detached side-building while Kohaku was confined to a very limited part of the manor, she could never speak with him.
Two years after Shiki came to the Tohno household, without warning, SHIKI inverted at a prodigiously young age. Kohaku watched from the window as, in the midst of an average afternoon of childhood games, SHIKI turned bestial in both body and mind; he lunged for his younger sister Akiha, and Shiki blocked her body with his own. SHIKI's arm pierced Shiki's chest, killing him; the adults living in the Tohno mansion arrived to a scene of carnage, and as the head of household, Makihisa had a duty to exterminate his son lost to the Tohno blood.
However, in the end, neither Shiki nor SHIKI remained dead. Shiki's death caused Akiha's own Mixed Blood abilities to awaken; with her ability to manipulate the life force within her environment, she revived and stabilized Shiki using a portion of her own. Likewise, SHIKI was able to cling to life using his ability to absorb other people's bodies and life force into his own, having inadvertently connected himself to Shiki's life with the same strike that had killed him. Though both of the boys barely clung to life, they would recover in time—with the catch that SHIKI couldn't be shown to society so long as he remained in his inverted state.
In order to keep up appearances, Makihisa made a decision: SHIKI would be kept hidden, confined alone but for a few trusted servants who could act as caretakers, and Shiki Nanaya would become Shiki Tohno. Publicly, the adopted son was reported dead while Makihisa's son by blood was merely critically injured; the reality, of course, was that Shiki served as a mere substitute until SHIKI could regain his sanity and be quietly returned to the mansion. To complete the illusion, Makihisa went so far as to alter Shiki's memories with supernatural hypnosis, making him believe himself to truly be the son of Makihisa Tohno and forget SHIKI's presence at the mansion entirely. The source of the injury was rewritten to be the result of a car accident, and then Shiki was sent to the hospital.
Once Shiki was well enough to be released, Makihisa "disinherited" him and placed Akiha into the role of heir. More than that, Makihisa chose to have Shiki sent away from the Tohno mansion, placing him into the care of one of the Tohno's branch families. In Makihisa's room, Kohaku overheard him as he made the arrangements to have Shiki taken away later that same day; knowing that this was her last opportunity to speak to that boy she had at once loathed and yearned to meet, she slipped out of Makihisa's room just long enough to tell Shiki to meet her later. They met under a large tree in the manor's garden—but, finally afforded the opportunity, Kohaku could think of nothing to say. In the end, she merely untied the ribbon from her hair, handed it to Shiki, and made him promise that he would return it to her one day.
After Shiki left the Tohno household, Makihisa assigned Kohaku to serve as a caretaker to SHIKI while he was interred in an underground cell, finding her suited to the task through a mixture of her Synchronizer abilities and the training in household medicine she had already begun to receive. In his inverted state, like his father, SHIKI would lash out and abuse Kohaku ("take his feelings out on me," in her words); Kohaku states that this is what caused the last of her heart to crumble. If the Tohno blood caused Makihisa and SHIKI to do these things, then their bloodline should disappear. If she wanted to escape—all she had to do was destroy the Tohno family.
Rather than encourage SHIKI to resist the impulse of his blood, Kohaku instead assured him there was nothing wrong with the way he was. She encouraged his violence and allowed him to drink her blood, and the more he fed his bestial impulses, the more inhuman he became. Cut off from all other contact with the outside world, it was easy for Kohaku to take advantage of SHIKI's loneliness and stunted psyche to convince him he had been abandoned—that his father intended to let him rot within this underground cell until he died, and that he had been replaced by Shiki, a person who had everything SHIKI should have. It was also easy to drug him under the guise of medication, Kohaku using chemically induced states of consciousness to further destabilize his mind.
Meanwhile, at the Tohno manor, Makihisa's abuses of Kohaku continued. Four years after Shiki's "accident"—when Kohaku was 15 and Akiha was 12—Kohaku told Akiha to check Makihisa's room around midnight. What Akiha found, of course, was an act of violation; while her father's behavior had long been distant and unkind, it was only in this moment that she discovered his repeated abuses of Kohaku. At the time, Kohaku had meant only to lay the groundwork for future manipulation, weaponizing her own abuse to control Akiha through guilt; however, in the aftermath of the event, the usually-meek Akiha demanded that he release Kohaku from her position. Eventually, he ceded to his daughters repeated demands, assigning Kohaku to serve as Akiha's maid instead.
It was also at this time that Hisui learned of her twin sister's abuse, and the extent to which she had suffered in order to protect her from sharing in the experience. Compounding with the trauma of being a powerless bystander to Shiki's almost-death, Hisui's guilt over having allowed Kohaku to suffer alone caused her to grow quiet and withdrawn where she had once been bright and optimistic. Kohaku, who had always fought to protect Hisui's happiness, began to put up a cheerful front in order to obfuscate her own trauma—effectively trading "roles" with Hisui, with Kohaku planning to drop the act when and only when Hisui was able to return to her former smiling self.
Though she had been granted some measure of freedom, Kohaku's plans did not change. In order to survive her abuse, she had distanced herself from her own sense of personhood, achieving a state of detachment that prevented her from feeling even resentment for her experiences; yet, at the same time, a simple doll cannot move on its own. It requires strings to puppet it—a purpose, and this revenge was all that Kohaku had to fill that void, even as she knew its completion would bring her no happiness. Instead, she used her new freedom to cultivate a small garden of her own, growing plants with toxic and psychotropic qualities that could in turn be used to create new "medicines" for the family she served.
Her new assignment as Akiha's maid served Kohaku's plans in other ways, as well. Because Akiha had attached half her life force to Shiki's body, she suffered health complications of her own; in order to make up for the deficit of energy, she needed to draw energy from the environment using her Mixed Blood abilities. However, the more she used those abilities, the more the scales would tip toward her oni ancestry. Kohaku encouraged this; as a Synchronizer, she could lessen Akiha's pain and form a pseudo-contract with her by feeding Akiha her blood. While reducing Akiha's need to plunder energy in the present, the inhuman act of consuming blood would nonetheless prime her for inversion in the future, all while making Akiha dependent on Kohaku's unique treatment.
Eight years after he had first been confined there, Kohaku released SHIKI from his cell. Spurred on by the delusions Kohaku had implanted in his mind, he began to hunt for Akiha in the nearby Misaki City—the location of the boarding school she had been sent to attend. Over a period of some weeks, he killed and consumed the blood of several young women, based on a misleading description given to him by Kohaku. Fully given over to his monstrous impulses now, he eventually wandered back to the Tohno mansion, and when he encountered Makihisa there, he killed his father for his perceived abandonment. As he still couldn't find Akiha, he again left the house, making himself a lair in town as he continued his search for his sister—and Shiki.
As the only appropriate heir to Makihisa's position, at age 16, Akiha became the head of the Tohno household. Called back from her school, over the next two weeks, she focused on making arrangements—for Makihisa's funeral, and for the Tohno's extended family to be cleared from the mansion, and to ask Shiki to return to the Tohno mansion. Though their relatives were vehemently opposed, Akiha had grown aggressive and bold over the last several years; she overruled them and did as she liked, sending Shiki a letter requesting that he return to the Tohno household now that her father was no longer there to stop her. He accepted, and it was at that point that Kohaku made a little bet with herself: if he remembered their promise—and remembered her well enough to realize she and Hisui had traded places—she would stop before things went any further.
In Hisui's route, Shiki doesn't.
The day after Shiki moves in, the mansion receives a phone call addressed to him. Kohaku passes its message along; Shiki leaves to meet his classmate; he returns late in the night, disheveled and shell-shocked. Kohaku meets him in the manor's lobby upon his return, but he brushes off her attempt to speak with him and returns to his room. Disguised as Hisui, Kohaku follows him shortly thereafter, bringing him what she claims is a sleep medication approved by Shiki's doctor. Of course, in reality, this is one of the same psychotropic drugs she has been using to destabilize SHIKI over the past several years.
The goal behind drugging Shiki is threefold. Most immediately, while Shiki lies in the vulnerable state of consciousness induced by the drug, he is defenseless against suggestion, allowing Kohaku to implant certain ideas into his subconscious. However, beyond that, the lowering of his mental defenses will also deepen the link that exists between Shiki and SHIKI as the result of their connected life force; this will push Akiha into acting against SHIKI as Shiki mentally deteriorates, as the only way to sever this connection is the death of one or the other. Finally, exposure to the violence of SHIKI's mind will also cause Shiki's inborn instincts as a demon hunter to awaken—meaning he will be primed to kill the inhuman Akiha or SHIKI, should one or the other survive their confrontation.
As per their connected lives, when Shiki sleeps, he sees the world from SHIKI's perspective and becomes a first-person voyeur to his nightly murders; thanks to Kohaku's subliminal suggestions, Shiki is quick to conclude that his dreams are reality—and not from the perspective of another person. Rather, Shiki comes to believe that they are his own memories, and that he possesses a split personality responsible for the vampire serial killings that have plagued the Misaki area. Kohaku continues to slip Shiki drugs over the preceding week; Shiki, driven by paranoia, seeks through the mansion for information Akiha has withheld for him, and even searches for the killer himself, bringing his repressed murderous impulses to the forefront of his mind.
During this time, Kohaku also visits SHIKI in the lair he has made for himself. She continues to encourage his behavior and feeds him information to keep him occupied, as well as allow him to strengthen himself through the use of her Synchronizer abilities.
Eight days after Shiki's return to the Tohno mansion, Kohaku leads Shiki into the wooded clearing where he had been nearly killed as a child. As with so many other things, Makihisa's hypnosis suppressed the place from Shiki's memory; however, as Shiki steps into that clearing, its effects to begin to unravel. Memories—from both SHIKI's perspective and his own—flood his mind, and overwhelmed, he collapses. Several hours pass before he awakens again—the worst "fit" he has experienced since he was a child.
Though Shiki at first assumes strength will return to his body after a night of sleep, the next morning, he finds the opposite is true. Though he is in no physical pain, he is barely able to move his limbs. With his condition deteriorating, as the family's nurse, Kohaku has unfettered access to Shiki; she alone feeds him, supplies him medication, and even bathes and dresses him throughout the day. In the unquestioned, unchaperoned time she spends with Shiki, she mentions that Shiki had received his near-fatal wound on the grounds of the Tohno mansion. As he tries to recall where the supposed car accident happened, Shiki realizes he can't remember anything about the accident itself, further destabilizing his constructed memories.
By the next day, Shiki is almost completely overwhelmed by the strength of his connection to SHIKI. When he is awake, SHIKI's thoughts overwhelm his until he fears that his own mind will be erased; when he sleeps, he experiences every sensation of SHIKI's body—including the grievous self-harm he carries out against himself, spurred on by a desire to harm Shiki through their connection and his own body's ability to survive wounds that would be lethal to a normal human. Trapped in a state of continuous torture, over the next days, Shiki weakens to the point that his lungs are barely capable of drawing air.
Of course, Kohaku's plans will be thrown off if Shiki dies now. To keep Shiki alive long enough to fulfill his role, Kohaku uses her Synchronizer abilities to boost his strength. Disguised as Hisui, she gives Shiki a medicine that leaves him paralyzed; while Shiki lies unable to move, Kohaku speaks to him about her past as the girl in the window—in one breath laughing that she's happy they're finally able to talk, and in the next, speaking of her resentment. She then sexually assaults him For His Own Good, because she's extremely normal (or, more seriously, because she has long forced herself to regard these things as a mere transaction rather than a violation).
In any case, Shiki loses consciousness afterwards. Though he awakens with some strength restored to his body, his unraveling mind remains unstable; in a haze, he recognizes that his bedroom actually belongs to SHIKI and follows his long-repressed memories to the detached building that contains his actual childhood bedroom. This is, not entirely coincidentally, also where Akiha meets Kohaku to receive her blood. By sheer luck, Shiki finds Akiha in the midst of one such feeding—and in the midst of a discussion of Akiha's responsibility to kill SHIKI. Shiki, still unaware of SHIKI's name, believes the pair are discussing him; he retreats to his bedroom and locks himself inside.
When Akiha comes to his room later that night, asking to see him, Shiki immediately begins to rave at her that he won't allow her to kill him. When Akiha tries to question why he thinks she would want to do that, Shiki just yells that he isn't a killer. It's at this point that Akiha realizes that Shiki and SHIKI's minds have become connected, as well; in the face of Shiki's condition, Akiha decides SHIKI can't be allowed to live any longer and must be killed immediately—just as Kohaku had intended.
The next day, Akiha leaves to confront SHIKI—with Kohaku at her side, strengthening her Mixed Blood abilities through their Synchronizer pact. Though Kohaku could, of course, lead her straight to SHIKI's lair, she doesn't reveal that, and the two of them don't reach him until after sundown. By then, Shiki has had enough time to form a pact of his own with Hisui; not wanting to allow Akiha to face SHIKI alone, he uses the scenery he had seen through SHIKI's own eyes to find his lair himself. By the time he arrives, however, the fight is close to over: Akiha has SHIKI cornered, her power overwhelming his in part thanks to Kohaku's presence.
With Shiki's arrival, however, Kohaku sees an opportunity. She calls out to him in apparent surprise, and that is all that is needed to distract Akiha from her battle with SHIKI. She turns, and SHIKI lunges—not for Akiha, but for Kohaku, knowing she is the source of the disparity between his ability and Akiha's. Shiki is too far to reach them, and SHIKI is too near for Akiha to counterattack; instead, just as Shiki had done for her when they were children, Akiha throws herself in front of SHIKI's strike, suffering a lethal wound in order to protect Kohaku's life.
When SHIKI realizes what he has done, he panics; fleeing from the sight of his little sister slaughtered by his own hand, he scrambles to the building's roof. Shiki, Hisui, and Kohaku remain with Akiha until she succumbs to the wound, at which point Kohaku comments on where SHIKI has gone. Shiki leaves to finish what Akiha had begun, and Kohaku's revenge is fulfilled—though not before SHIKI lets one last piece of information slip, noting that Shiki looked nothing like what he had been told.
It's this small comment that leads Shiki to realize further discrepancies. He realizes that SHIKI believed he had been abandoned, even though the journal he had found in Makihisa's room expressed only a desire to bring his son back to the Tohno mansion as soon as possible. He realizes that he had, one night, dreamed of Kohaku through SHIKI's eyes. He leaves a note in Kohaku's room, asking to speak with her, and the two of them meet under the very same tree where Kohaku had given Shiki her ribbon eight years ago.
It's there that Shiki lays out the conclusions he has come to. Kohaku confirms them, and then begins to speak on her motivations in more depth, revealing more than she had even while in the disguise of Hisui. She speaks of Makihisa's abuse of her, and she tells Shiki of the way she sees herself as nothing more than an empty doll. In the end, she draws a knife; saying that with her revenge complete, there is nothing left for her to do but disappear, she drives it into her own heart. She dies held in Shiki's arms, murmuring that it hurts after all.
Personality:
Kohaku is a character only capable of being understood through her trauma. A victim of severe and continuous abuse, Kohaku survived Makihisa Tohno's violence only by discarding her own sense of personhood. Rather than a living, breathing child, she would pretend to be a doll—an object incapable of feeling pain when struck, and one unable to feel sadness or despair in the face of torment. Through this sense of dissociation, her pain grew more and more distant, until it was something she was no longer able to feel at all.
However, while a doll doesn't feel sorrow, it can't feel happiness, either. In Kohaku's own words, the more she retreated behind this defense mechanism, the more "broken" she became. Rather than a mask she could slip in and out of, she sealed herself behind a wall she could no longer lower; Kohaku became a girl disconnected from her own emotions and personality, able to wear whatever character or preferences suited the moment but lacking a genuine self.
That is precisely why, to the outside observer, Kohaku would appear as anything but an emotionless doll. The face Kohaku presents to the world instead is all smiles, with a manner as bright and inviting as sunshine. As they meet again for the first time in eight years, the first descriptor that comes to Shiki's mind is something motherly; she laughs often, and even in the face of hardship, her smile doesn't falter. In fact, that becomes something of a tell all its own; in Hisui's true end, Shiki notes that while the seemingly-emotionless Hisui truly emoted in dozens of tiny ways, Kohaku's expression would never change, no matter what happened or what she must have felt.
That surface persona also has a noticeable playful streak. Perhaps it's Kohaku's natural slyness combined with bubbly appearance she has adopted, but throughout Akiha and Hisui's routes, the other residents of the Tohno mansion all note her predilection for teasing others, with Akiha and Shiki agreeing they'll have to hide their relationship to avoid it (while agreeing that Kohaku has probably already figured it out), or Hisui making Shiki promise to never mention that she had fallen asleep in his bed for the same reason. Shiki also describes Kohaku as mischievous when she talks about sneakily spending time together where Akiha can't notice, and on top of that, she's shown to allow her apparent enthusiasm to carry her away even during household tasks such as cleaning—to such an extent that Hisui has to scold her for making more of a mess than had to be cleaned in the first place.
Beyond those at-a-glance mannerisms, though, one begins to catch a glimpse of what might be called the true Kohaku. As befits a nurse, she behaves with nurturing care toward others—but, unlike the silly and bright face she wears, that is a trait that has been present in her since childhood. She did, after all, take immeasurable pain onto her own shoulders to protect her sister's happiness. Even now, she shows concern where it serves no purpose other than kindness, such as by noticing Shiki's downcast mood and suggesting a party to clear it, or scolding him when he seems to have gotten into a fight (with the warning that it's just as painful to hurt others as it is to be hurt). She is also conscientious of the needs and preferences of others, typically meeting them without being told, be that in the food she prepares or in balancing the interests of many people as she arranges a winter trip.
After all, while Kohaku sees herself as an emotionless doll beneath an illusory exterior, the story of Tsukihime suggests that Kohaku isn't as hollow as she believes herself to be. Largely, this is demonstrated through her relationship with Akiha; even in Hisui's true end, after Kohaku's plan to kill Akiha has succeeded, she continues to bring tea to her room every morning without understanding the sentiment that drives her. Other endings have her sabotage her own plan in its final moments by pushing Akiha away from SHIKI's claws, or stopping a rampaging, inverted Akiha from committing suicide on Shiki's knife. Rather than unfeeling, Kohaku might be better understood as detached, instead; having rendered herself numb, she simply cannot tell where the line between artifice and sincerity lies within her herself.
Another place where Kohaku's real personality shows through—more than Kohaku realizes herself—is the logic she uses to navigate the world. Detached from her feelings as she is, she makes judgments unfettered by bias and unclouded by emotion; even as she maintains her usual smiling and upbeat mannerisms, the conclusions she draws are ruthless. This can be seen as early as Tsukihime's first in-game day: if Shiki watches television with Kohaku, they discuss the recent serial killings that have taken place in Misaki town, with Kohaku coldly analyzing Shiki's conclusions and picking out their holes. It helps that her detachment allows her to remain calm even in extreme circumstances, as well; in Akiha's route, she shrugs off Shiki physically lashing out at her as no big deal, and while still covered in Akiha's blood in Hisui's, she calmly comments that SHIKI still needs to be killed.
This collected and analytical way of thinking also lends her considerable skill in manipulating others. Even in interactions with significantly lower stakes than her revenge on the Tohno family, Kohaku will often use her observations of others to get what she wants. She plays Shiki and Hisui against one another for something as simple as finalizing a family vacation, knowing she can get them both to agree by convincing them the other won't go without them. Perhaps she has been playing the mastermind for so long that she simply pulls strings by reflex, now; her behavior throughout Tsukihime is certainly underhanded above all else, with Kohaku never once revealing her intentions until her revenge has already come to pass. She plays the children of Makihisa Tohno against one another, "accidentally" allows the right information to slip at the right time, and even impersonates her dear twin sister to slip poison and drugs to Shiki at night—all while maintaining a facade of innocence and affability that goes unquestioned.
In the end, though, even the face of the conniving and sly mastermind is one Kohaku doubts the authenticity of. Her revenge is something she regards as hollow—a mere stopgap measure to keep her breathing. After all, a doll can't move on its own. It requires some mechanism to drive its limbs—and for Kohaku, that mechanism was the purpose she supposed a person in her position should have wanted. Without it, she is a puppet with its strings cut, lacking any reason to persist beneath the weight of her trauma; to the end, Kohaku remains a girl unable to find her own heart.
5-10 Key Character Traits: Cheerful, Impish, Caring, Artificial, Detached, Underhanded, Manipulative, Collected, Objective
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