Narcissu

Narcissu is a free Visual novel-formatted drama by the Dojin soft group stage-nana, telling the story of a Terminal illness young man and woman.

The work was originally written in Japanese language, and subsequently translated into English language by fans. Unlike most fan translations, this was an authorised work and can be considered a semi-official localisation.

Narcissu is an experimental work: it uses minimalist graphics in a very narrow window, and includes two full scripts, one of which is accompanied by a voice track, while the other has been adapted to work without voices. In the English translation, different translators translated each version, to provide multiple perspectives on the story.

The original game uses the NScripter engine; for the English version, the open-source software clone ONScripter was used instead, as this has been modified to support English.

=Synopsis=

The anonymous protagonist is diagnosed with an unspecified terminal illness shortly after his twentieth birthday, and is admitted to hospice care at a hospital in Mito, Ibaraki. There he meets Setsumi, a woman a few years his senior, who is also terminally ill. Finding that they both reject the expectation that they will wish to die either in hospital or with their families, they run away together in a stolen Honda Integra (Japan).

They travel west across Japan, taking the famous narcissus fields of southern Awaji Island as a somewhat arbitrary destination. When eventually they reach this goal, Setsumi s condition begins to deteriorate rapidly, and in a final act of self-determination she takes her own life.

=Influences=

Narcissu is both stylistically and thematically similar to the opening chapter of Gin iro, a commercial title by the same writer, Tomo Kataoka; he himself describes it as essentially a modern-day version of his earlier work ( Gin iro begins in medieval Japan).

On a level more familiar to Western audiences, the work has much in common with road movies; the screen layout is even intended to evoke a cinema screen. Many of the scenes and events of the story are road-movie clichés, and the ending, in which the physical journey itself is explicitly linked with the metaphorical journeys the characters have undergone (their lives, their self-discovery), is typical of the movie genre.

=Links=

*[http://stage-nana.sakura.ne.jp/ stage-nana] (official Japanese site) *[http://narcissu.insani.org English translation site] (includes commentary)