Sickness Unto Death [Manga]

The manga’s story is told partially through the flashbacks of Kazuma, a psychologist. He is at the ruins of a stately mansion, where he begins to tell one of his students about his very first patient: Emiru. The two had met by chance while Kazuma was still in school, as Emiru had passed out on the sidewalk. He is surprised when he later discovers that she is the owner of the mansion he will be boarding at. Kazuma finds that Emiru is wasting away from an unknown mental illness that caused her hair to turn white and for her to go from a formerly peppy high school girl into a shell of her former self. He vows to help cure her and initially begins to do so with the help of his college professor, who is aware of Emiru’s case. As he helps treat Emiru, the two fall in love and begin a romantic and sexual relationship. This initially worries Kazuma, but he comes to terms with the idea of sleeping with someone he was originally seeing as a patient and instead plans to support Emiru as a lover rather than a doctor.

As the series progresses, Kazuma finds that Emiru’s parents both died when she was about four years old. Kazuma also discovers that the reason for her mental illness is that Emiru witnessed her father commit suicide in despair over his wife’s passing. Unaware of what suicide actually meant, Emiru tried to hang herself with a jump rope in an attempt to see her parents, but failed. This caused the young child to fall into a depression and eventually create a split personality because she could not deal with the idea that she was still alive and that her parents were not. Realizing this, Kazuma is stricken because he knows that curing Emiru would result in bringing back the “original” Emiru, who is shown to have the mentality of her four year old self. There is a strong chance that the “Emiru” he knew would no longer exist or would end up integrated into the personality of the original Emiru. As her original personality begins to emerge more, Kazuma tries to make th