Fruit of Grisaia is an oddball of a Visual Novel adaptation. It’s unclear who the proper heroine of the show is supposed to be, probably because if anything I’ve been lead to believe is true, it’s actually a hybrid adaptation, incorporating every major route into one Frankenstein’s Monster of a route that lets us see the personal stories of all the girls involved. What is clear, though, is that it really likes making its characters suffer, so strap yourselves in.
The story starts with the arrival of a boy called Yuji Kazami at, by his request, his new school. Sounds basic? Well, there are a few issues. For one, Yuji’s school has a student body of six including himself. The other five are all girls, which makes things a little more awkward. And, lastly, there’s the fact that while all the students of the school have special circumstances in one way or another, Yuji circumstance is that he’s a former black-ops agent, having spent most of his youth as an assassin for a shadowy government agency. He sincerely wants a normal life at this point, being bored and tired with his former paramilitary hitman existence, but of course if he got that we wouldn’t have a story, so we find ourselves here.
Because of its somewhat unique structure, Fruit of Grisaia has an arc-based structure, with each of the girls getting her time in the limelight and the others mostly stepping off stage while that happens. They do interact some, and it’s not entirely a hard-edged patchwork, but that is more or less the general structure. In a lot of senses, you could put these arcs in whatever order after the introduction is finished and it would make sense. You could argue that at least the biggest and boldest was saved for last, but I’m not even sure of that much.
Therefore, it makes sense to introduce you, right away, to the girls of Fruit of Grisaia, our hero’s classmates, dormmates, and potential love interests. In no particular order we have our cast…
Amane Suou is probably the most “Iconic” girl from the show, in that she’s the one you may have seen on all the merchandise, probably because she’s a tall, busty girl with magenta hair who acts outwardly seductive to the point of coming off as an obsessed nymphomaniac at the start, what with stalking our lead, being very interested in his love life out of nowhere, pleasuring herself to the scent of his discarded clothes after invading his room… this sounds really bad, but she calms down a bit after Yuji shoots down her offer to become his girlfriend and takes (however hesitantly) the follow-up offer to be “big sister” instead. Her arc is the last and, on its own, the longest so suffice to say she does get a lot of good growth, enough that I can see why someone would like her for her personality, character, and story… eventually.
In case you were afraid that all the girls were going to be thirsty ladies, I’ll introduce Yumiko Sakaki next. Other than the name she has pretty much nothing in common with the Sakaki I spent so much of last month talking about – rather, she comes off as the conceptual spawn of Hitagi Senjogahara. That is to say she’s the brooding, violent, sharp-tongued loner of a girl with long, dark hair who has a really bad habit of threatening people with everyday objects that might at least charitably be considered stationary. It’s a box cutter for Yumiko, rather than a stapler, which is at least much more conventionally weapon-like, but she does have a lot of the same energy. Again, this probably sounds a little bad, since while Bakemonogatari is not the worst place to steal from, lifting a character as hard to make work as Senjogahara is not a wise move. However, Yumiko gets a lot of spotlight in the early episodes (enough to fool you into thinking she might actually be the main heroine), has her arc fire relatively early, and plays well off our gruff spec ops lead. She’s actually quite watchable, and I think I enjoyed her material more than most.
Makina Irisu is the baby of the group. She’s not actually younger than her peers (though she is on the younger end of their group) but she looks smaller and acts far more childish, calling Amane her big sister and, eventually, Yuji her big brother. Out of all the characters, she seemed most like the one who was there to tick boxes so until we get to her arc there’s fairly little that I can really say about her.
Speaking of deliberately ticking boxes, we have Michiru Matsushima. Michiru pigeonholes herself, in character making herself into a fake Tsundere – styling herself after examples of the archetype, practicing stereotypical lines, and the like. There’s more to her once her arc is engaged, and it’s the first to fire in full, so we’ll catch up with Michiru soon enough.
Last and possibly least we have Sachi Komine, the pink-haired maid who is about as blatantly unwell as Amane, but in a different way, since she seems to basically do whatever she’s told to do like she’s Ella Enchanted or something in here. She doesn’t leave much of an impression on the whole, but I can at least say she’s got a little more going for her than just “being a maid”… but not all that much.
We do spend at least a couple episodes getting Yuji settled into his new school before things start to really go off, the biggest opposition to which is Yumiko very much not wanting him to be there, clearly intimidated and making objections based on him being a man added to what was, in practice if not on paper, an all-girls school until his arrival. This clears up some when he rather effortlessly deflects her box cutter assassination attempt, but uses the vast gulf in their relative hand to hand skill to not hurt her in the process, instead insisting that he wants to be her friend. Somewhere between the intimidation and the diplomacy, she softens up a bit, enough to stop trying to have him removed from school and to not try to stab him again.
As we move on from there, Michiru comes into focus, as we see her play with and semi-adopt an adorable stray cat. She tries to name it Nyaneko (“meowkitty” in the subs), Yuji suggests Rommel (rather insistently, as a source of comedy), and Nyamel (Mewomel) is what sticks. Shortly after this, it becomes noticed that Michiru is acting funny, seeming to lapse in and out of her normal behaviors, and seeming to have gaps in her memories as well.
This situation leads to Michiru getting stressed out by Other Michiru’s deeds and running off, spooking the cat at the same time. Yuji finds her looking for the cat, and unfortunately after an attempt to keep her from noticing, they both find it. The little thing has been hit by a car, and while a cab is called to rush them to the vet, the kitten expires on Michiru’s lap.
For some reason, this scene hits much harder than the pet-killing in Elfen Lied and Magical Girl Site, probably because it’s not the fault of an over-the-top heartless sicko that we kind of get and rationalize as unreal. Even summarizing this moment, I kind of had to turn away for a bit. Out of all the awful things that happen to people in this show, and there is a lot of it ranging from the local and real to the extremes of horror, that little cat biting the dust has the biggest impact.
For Haruhi’s sake, keep your pets indoors!
Anyway, that horribleness drives Michiru into the pit of depression. She tries to overdose, or at least make the hurting stop, and ends up laid up in the infirmary. While she’s out, Yuji learns from her diary that she developed Dissociative Identity Disorder after a heart transplant, and that one of her personalities spends most of her time hidden away due to trying to escape some horrible trauma. When she comes to, Yuji confronts Michiru Original, and finds that she’s suicidal.
In a very odd sequence, Yuji agrees to help her, and seals her in a coffin to be buried alive on the bluffs where she so recently played with that cat. Trapped in a tiny dark box without food or water, Michiru starts to lose it even more, giving us her backstory. Apparently she was suicidal before, made a friend, that friend committed suicide, and then Michiru’s heart gave out. She got the transplant, causing her to basically be possessed by the ghost of the heart’s original owner, and the rest is history.
Now, this is something that struck me as a bit odd. Fruit of Grisaia isn’t otherwise a fantasy, science fiction, or supernatural horror story. While a realistic show can get away with an unrealistic idea just based on how well the narrative sells it, there are limits to that. If you say something about an obscure topic with confidence and it’s not contradicted, it doesn’t particularly matter if it’s true or possible, because most viewers won’t know that there’s a contradiction and most who do will probably be more tolerant of failures in a specific field.
For instance, if you were to write a story set in the near future of space exploration and you happened to make some mistakes with existing tech, like having a character control throttle on a solid rocket booster, some people would surely know that’s not a thing you can normally do, but most people would just take it in stride even if they did know, because most people probably don’t know a whole lot about how different rocket launch mechanisms work.
On the other hand, if you go beyond the pale on something that people probably have a decent sense of, it’s not going to fly. For instance, if you’re writing a grounded, real-world mystery and it’s a critical point in your story that the body isn’t found until the detective has an ah-ha weeks later on realizing that the mannequin in an active store is in fact a dressed-up corpse, I think most people are going to reject that because most people know both that store mannequins don’t usually look like corpses and that corpses should tend to rot sooner than a couple of weeks, meaning that someone in a busy store should have caught on.
In Fruit of Grisaia, we are given a “scientific” explanation for Michiru’s double personality, that the first heart owner’s personality was in essence fully encoded, with thoughts and personalities and memories, in her meat heart, meaning that it was all there for Michiru to even be able to go so far as to communicate with the Other. I think most people know that the brain is the organ that does the thinking, and while I’m sure there’s a Hallmark movie about feelings being carried on through a heart transplant because it sounds like the right kind of sappy, a fully-functioning ego is far too much.
At the same time, I’m not sure this isn’t an element that wouldn’t have played better in its home culture. Japan has a problem finding organ donors, so there’s probably a little less “that’s just a thing that happens” expectation, and Japanese culture tends to have less of a sharp line dividing the scientifically understood world and what a Westerner would call supernatural – certain elements that seem a little “out there” to Americans can be taken in stride. I don’t know specifically if the idea of a person’s self being contained in an admittedly major body part is one of those topics in particular, but I could see it at least being closer to the line between plausible bull and rejected nonsense than it’s likely to be for Western viewers.
In any case, eventually the extreme trauma of being buried alive, combined with her flashbacks, drives Michiru to not want to die any more, and she starts to fight to escape the coffin, at which point Yuji (who has been waiting alongside the unburied coffin for the couple of days it took) goes ahead and opens it up, letting Michiru step out with a new perspective and a new lease on life.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don’t get therapy from a semi-retired teenage government hitman rather than a licensed professional. I suppose it does at least work, as Michiru (both of her) seems a lot happier as her arc ends and she slips into the background of the show for the rest of its run.
Next up is Yumiko. Her big problem is that she has an extremely controlling and manipulative father who wants to mold her into being heiress to his financial conglomerate owing the deaths of her half-siblings, while she herself is tormented by the pressure brought on her by being a bastard daughter of such an illustrious line and wants no part in the scheming, political business world. His first plan to do this involves Yuji, going through Yuji’s handler to give him a mission.
The idea is that Yuji will deliberately fail as Yumiko’s bodyguard, allowing her to be kidnapped in a controlled scenario calculated to frighten her into coming to heel. Yuji, however, decides to say screw that, protects Yumiko, and then has to face up to the confrontation between her and her father at the school.
This goes so far as to turn into a shootout between dad’s goons and a shockingly well-armed Yumiko, at the conclusion of which she dramatically falls on a grenade and blows herself to smithereens… or so it seems, as apparently she and Yuji schemed together to fake her death, and his government contacts have given her a new identity on paper so that Yumiko the heiress can be dead and Yumiko the actual girl can go back to being enrolled in the weird special school with all her friends.
This sequence is much shorter than Michiru’s (filling all of one episode rather than two and change) but for investment in Yumiko, I think that’s actually alright, since she got the most focus and play in the opening arc. The emotions certainly run high, which some half-decent action-based tension as well as enough focus on Yumiko’s inner torment to understand why she would want to defy her father and deny her name, without being as bleak and miserable as most of the other character arcs in Fruit of Grisaia. I’d go so far as to say that Yumiko’s arc (including both this bit and her earlier run in the opening) is my favorite arc in the show and Yumiko herself my favorite of the girls. I guess cribbing Senjogahara’s notes and then mixing up some of the pages with Kaguya Shinomiya’s still produces a winner.
I think part of why Yumiko’s story resonated so well is that it went big, but spy thriller big rather than dementia horror big, when our lead character really belongs in a spy thriller sort of scenario. Yuji was in his element here, dealing with covert plots and bad guys with guns, rather than playing a psychiatrist/undertaker combo pack that seemed rather off.
Sadly, as with Michiru, Yumiko will hereafter be banished to the background zone, never to have relevance or get a dynamite scene that shows how she really feels with a new life ahead of her. I guess because her re-enrollment probably would have been the ending or even epilogue of her route there wasn’t follow-up material to adapt, but the way this show drops its girls is one of the more subtle troubles of how it chose to adapt the material.
From there, we launch into Sachi’s story. Like Yumiko’s story with her father it’s done in one episode, but unlike Yumiko, Sachi never got much focus in the early parts of the show, so she’s pretty darn forgettable. Basically, her gimmick as seen loudly here is that she tries to complete any order, no matter how insane or even if it shouldn’t be taken literally. Unfortunately, this maid taking things literally is less Amelia Bedelia and more “Tries to blow up the school with improvised explosives because the childlike friend told her to make a test go away.”
That particular incident is defused by Yuji – literally, he messed with the detonators so her bombs don’t go off –, though only after she throws herself on the explosives when her friends won’t vacate the area. Yuji then reveals he’s remembered her true identity as his long-lost childhood friend. We quite briefly (since this is only done in one episode) learn her background, as having taken up her new persona because her parents were killed/rendered comatose in an accident and she blames herself for not being a good girl who’d listen to them. Yuji tells her it’s okay to be a little selfish sometimes, covers up the whole bomb incident, and they move forward with Sachi a little bit happier and presumably more able to not go to insane extremes.
Out of all the arcs, this is really the one that falls flat. It doesn’t have the action and drama of Yumiko’s Arc or Makina’s upcoming arc, and it doesn’t have the psychotic misery of Michiru or Amane’s arcs. It’s short, contained, and easily forgotten even though the whole thing about these two characters having a past should be, if not huge because it was a long time ago, at least something. Unfortunately, Yuji does most of his cleaning up off screen and Sachi’s issues don’t quite have the stakes or drama of the other girls. Oh well, on to Makina.
Makina gets a little more time and focus. Recall, she’s technically a high school student, but she doesn’t look or act it in the least; you could be forgiven for thinking that she’s ten, especially mentally. At the start of her arc she decides to upgrade Yuji’s status from “big brother” to “papa”. A 70 million yen inheritance to spend on his retainer says Yuji takes the title and starts to look after her, more or less. They take a vacation during a school break, visiting where Yuji used to live, and even happen to see Makina’s little sister in the town nearby… briefly, before her car explodes. Little sister, who Makina has no congress with but is still worried sick for, survives, but a new job comes through Yuji’s shadowy government agency contacts: a hit on Makina.
Yuji “takes the job” fully intending to breach contract, goes on the run with Makina, and bests every thug and killer sent after her along the way. While they’re moving, Yuji learns more about Makina’s past, that her father learned about their family’s corruption and tried to put a stop to it, which resulted in his wife (Makina’s mother) having him slaughtered in front of her. The trauma from that incident is what’s resulted in her stunted mental growth, which eventually saw her passed over for the heir slot in favor of her non-broken little sister.
Now it seems that mom is out for more blood, since Makina has enough wits and evidence to threaten to topple her corrupt business empire and has threatened to do exactly that if little sister isn’t kept safe. Apparently having one child killed is more important to that woman than making sure the other one is out of harm’s way, hence the plot.
Eventually, Makina does end up getting shot – not fatally, but it is a close call. Mom shows up at the hospital and goes too far even for Yuji’s boss when she starts asking after the state of Makina’s organs, hoping to have a donor for the injured little sister. Yuji takes matters into his own hands and in an unfortunately brief sequence tracks Makina’s mom back to her lair, shoots her dead, and steals enough incriminating documents to ensure that, with no one left to pay for the hit and more sources of damning evidence to remove the motive, Makina will be safe to return to school.
This arc, honestly, plays out a lot like Yumiko’s arc. It’s all about corruption, family drama, assassins, gun fights, and the like, which is where Yuji is most comfortable. It’s weaker in that its leading lady comes off as a weaker and more contrived character, but then it also gets two episodes to try to make up for the fact that Makina didn’t have the kind of introduction Yumiko did. It, quite frankly, works well enough. If Fruit of Grisaia was more bent towards this material, which has psychological play but knows it’s stronger as effectively a spy thriller, I think it would have been a stronger overall production… though perhaps not as memorable a production, as we’ve yet to get into the last arc, Amane’s.
Amane’s arc is four episodes long, with the middle two being an extended flashback to her particular dark and troubled past. Essentially, after she’s particularly aggressively seductive towards Yuji, he finally manages to press her for an answer better than obvious deflection about “love at first sight” why she’s so set on him, and she invokes the name of his sister (his real older sister, who is presumed dead) and leaves him with her journal to tell the full story.
That story involves the fact that Amane and Yuji’s sister were friends and on their school basketball team. Their team bus crashed in the mountains, stranding a bunch of schoolgirls, some injured, and few chaperones in a survival situation. The situation for the crash survivors kept going from bad to worse, but all through it, Yuji’s sister took care of Amane. We see a good deal of the sister in this story, and she seems both sweet and oddly threatening, for instance demonstrating a “magic trick” by which ten items could be made to appear to be eleven, as long as a signifying part (the “head”) is not revealed.
The sister’s insight into the worsening situation, along with her well-preserved health and stamina, prove to be important assets. Eventually, one of the teachers claims to have brought down a deer, providing meat for the group, but the sister declines and convinces Amane to do the same, setting up for the reveal of the horrible truth that the group has resorted to cannibalism. After the discovery, the situation rapidly becomes much more demented, with the art style shifting to show the girls and chaperons as monsters, hideous ghouls that begin to actively hunt our last two sane girls who would dare stand apart from their cannibal orgy. The pair flee, but ultimately, at the suggesting of Yuji’s sister, part ways, with the sister staying behind to act as rear guard.
Amane manages to find civilization in her blind flight, but when search and rescue teams locate the crash site, everyone is dead and the place as an abattoir, with Amane recorder as the only survivor (though, at least for the audience, the state of the corpses and the fact that they never found several of the heads suggests that his sister had the strength to take down the dying cannibals and then, for some reason, pulled her ‘magic trick’ with their corpses to make it appear as though she died).
Though at first hailed as a miracle, questions about how and why Amane alone survived soon cropped up, and she began to find herself hated and stigmatized, resulting in her carrying a massive burden of guilt. Thus, the reason for her pursuit of Yuji and at least temporary satisfaction with “Big Sister” is a matter of her seeking absolution, hoping that by giving herself to him one way or another, she’ll be doing something like atoning for being the one who lived, seeing Yuji as the person who has the greatest right to punish her. With all the nastiness out in the open, she goes a little farther and begs for death, but this time rather than putting her in a coffin Yuji tells her that living is going to be her punishment, with the hope that she’ll eventually get over her grief. Together, they visit the site, and even investigate a message that Yuji’s sister left behind, indicating even more that she’s not actually dead, thus setting Amane on the path towards mental wellness…
Just kidding! It’s not over yet, as the father of one of the other girls who died takes note of their little visit, and bears a deep ill will towards Amane for surviving when his daughter didn’t, steps onto the stage. He takes the school and the other girls hostage while Yuji and Amane are out (somehow not eating box cutter in the process) and makes demands of Amane. Ultimately, she exchanges herself for her hostage friends, but not before Yuji could come up with at least the start of a plan. The man considers killing Amane for daring to survive and live a normal(ish) life, but decides that she wouldn’t suffer enough that way so might as well get with the rape first. During the confrontation there, Yuji is close to a kilometer away, setting up his sniper rifle, ultimately making a pretty insane shot through a ten centimeter window gap (a figure I remember because it’s focused on, to the point of being the title of the episode ‘Ten Centimeter Field of Fire’) to take the man out before he can claim Amane’s body or her life. Yuji reunites with the girls and the show just sort of… stops. There’s a random stinger involving some other action, but it doesn’t connect to anything we’ve seen before, so I guess we’re to assume that a new story’s starting (maybe something about the sister who faked her death, which is otherwise never followed up on) and our previous story just… sort of worked out. I guess we don’t really want to see what happened to poor Amane’s psyche after that incident. On the mend or no, it can’t have been good.
So, that’s Fruit of Grisaia, the stories of five very broken girls and their kind of broken love interest trying to put them back together, delving into extreme psychological torment and occasional action. As I’ve said before, it’s stronger with the latter. Yuji always has to be pitched relative softballs or given some sort of “cheat” when it comes to the psychological stuff, since while he’s not strictly bad in that arena, he’s not notably insightful or empathetic when it comes to other people. Other than the weird coffin therapy with Michiru he handles it well enough, but he’s at his best when he’s handling other things instead, like armed thugs.
The all-routes nature of Fruit of Grisaia is both its strength and its greatest weakness. On one side, we get to see a bit of everything, and going through five climaxes instead of one lets the show keep the high-tension stuff rolling. I’d hate to have nine episodes of school puttering capped off with Amane’s horrible time. At least in the show as-is, it doesn’t totally come out of nowhere. On the other, we get truncated and lopsided portrayals. Yumiko and Amane are decent (ultimately. I really didn’t like Amane’s screen time until we hit her arc), but Makina is a little uncomfortable to watch and Michiru and especially Sachi don’t exactly get the time they need to make themselves good characters. I’ve seen worse, where shows do less with more time, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a weakness here.
And, perhaps it would have been better to have only one, longer, descent into the dark stuff. We go from quirky school life, where the worst threat is Yumiko, admittedly with a box cutter but also with noodle arms and no hand-to-hand skill, and that fairly easily defused, to death and torment in excess. And then we go back to school. And then back to torment. The tonal yo-yo could have been handled a lot worse, but I do think it creates a somewhat jarring experience even if it keeps the show moving.
All in all, this is a B- show to me. There’s nothing exactly wrong with it, but at the same time the light stuff has really nothing to recommend it and the dark stuff is so heavy and so dark that even when it’s well-executed it’s I can’t say that I’d want to revisit it. I am curious as to what the VN is like, but as for the anime? Well, I suppose I could say it was worth my time, but it’s not something I would advise getting into unless you’re in the mood for cute girls and suicidal depression. At the very least it’s worlds better than other shows that promise that mix, like Magical Girl Site or Elfen Lied, but given how those shows sorted out, that’s not saying much.