Somewhere out there is a fan community that decided the unnamed protagonist of Narcissu deserved a name anyway, and settled on Yuu Atou, since the original story never once gives him one. That anonymity is the whole point. Kataoka wrote him as a stand-in, a blank space the reader is meant to occupy rather than watch from the outside, and that choice sets the tone for everything else about how deliberately this story withholds.
He’s twenty, terminally ill, and has spent long enough on the seventh floor to have stopped expecting much from the days ahead of him when he meets Setsumi Sakura, another patient there who reads as standoffish bordering on hostile in a way the story never rushes to soften. There’s an expectation baked into most fiction about illness that a character like Setsumi exists to slowly open up until the real story can begin, and Narcissu refuses that expectation outright. She stays closed off in ways that never fully resolve, and understanding her means paying attention to what she does rather than waiting for a speech that explains her. The two of them eventually leave the hospital together, chasing down a field of narcissus flowers Setsumi wants to see before her illness takes that choice away from her entirely, and that drive makes up the bulk of the story’s runtime. It’s a small, contained journey by most road trip standards, but the weight it carries has nothing to do with distance covered.
Side 2nd, released years later as a prequel, hands the perspective over to Himeko Shinohara, a former seventh floor volunteer whose own diagnosis puts her on the receiving end of a kindness she used to offer other people. Her path crosses with a much younger Setsumi, years before the events of the original, and what unfolds between them gives Setsumi’s guardedness in the first story a foundation the original never explicitly provides. It’s a rare prequel that manages to deepen its predecessor without spelling out mysteries the earlier work depended on staying unspoken, and Side 2nd threads that needle carefully, adding real emotional context around Setsumi’s fixation on cars, maps, and her own eventual choices, without ever reducing her to something fully explained.
Both stories run on the same minimalist engine, backgrounds standing in for most scenes with character art appearing only sparingly, sometimes replaced entirely by empty space that asks the reader to picture the rest. It’s a strange choice on paper for a medium built around visual presentation, and yet it works specifically because it refuses to spell out how these characters look in their most vulnerable moments, leaving that work to the reader instead of doing it for them. The soundtrack across both stories stays gentle and piano driven, never swelling to underline a moment more than the writing already has, and the handful of vocal tracks that do appear land with outsized impact for how sparingly they’re used. Voice acting exists as an optional layer on both stories, though Kataoka has been explicit that he prefers the unvoiced experience, and having played it that way myself, the silence does more work than a voice cast possibly could here.
What ties the whole package together, beyond Setsumi herself, is a refusal to treat terminal illness as a tidy narrative device. Nobody here gets a redemptive arc that makes their death feel like a lesson delivered on schedule. Choices get made that are messy, occasionally difficult to watch, and the writing trusts the reader to sit with that discomfort rather than resolving it into something more comfortable. By the time the original story’s own quiet ending arrives, the restraint both games have practiced throughout pays off precisely because it never once reaches for a bigger emotional gesture than the material has actually earned.
Verdict
Narcissu and its prequel Side 2nd succeed by refusing every easy convention terminal illness stories usually lean on, using minimalist presentation and a deliberately anonymous protagonist to put the reader inside the discomfort rather than watching it from a safe distance. Side 2nd’s willingness to deepen Setsumi without ever fully explaining her is a rare feat for a prequel, and the shared commitment to unresolved, messy choices over tidy lessons gives both stories real staying power well past their short runtimes.
