Difference between revisions of "Izo Imaizumi"

This information is strictly for OOC consumption, unless learned IC!

Born on October 29, 1991 to Yuuta and Eiko Imaizumi in the capital of Tokyo prefecture -- specifically a small section of Shinjuku called 'Golden Gai' -- Izo began life as the third son of a family which had already grown too large for the cramped, above-bar alley flat it called home.

Izo's older brothers -- Taka and Hide -- were teenagers, already practically grown at the time of his conception. Their mother, Yuuta's first wife -- a schoolteacher -- died from a staph infection not long after the birth of her youngest son. When Yuuta retired, defeated and sad, a handful of years later from his position at a prominent but unremarkable leasing firm at the age of fifty-five, the last thing that his family expected was a young woman -- a socialite! -- to appear and cultivate new romance in those bereaved and fallow fields. That woman was Eiko, and Izo is the product of those heady days of his father's resurgent vitality and, shall we say, lust for life.

Izo carried on his shoulders from the very beginning a complicated web of familial pressures. Loved by his father for the way in which he symbolized the closing of a chapter of grief and loss, and the beginning of some new, fresh adventure, his older brothers resented Eiko's sudden usurpation of their mother's place of primacy in the family, and lost no love on the young, precocious get of their father's new union. That enmity, combined with the enormous gulf of years between eldest sons and third son, guaranteed that the siblings would never be close.

The birth of a younger sister --Kazue -- when Izo was nine placed too much weight upon the already fractured family, which creaked, groaned, wobbled, and finally toppled, splintering. Two years of open fighting between father, surrogate mother, and eldest sons led to Taka and Hide leaving for good, refuting bonds of family, and their absence would hang like a pall over the Imaizumi household for all of the rest of the years to come. Yuuta's occasional defense of his sons' anger to his new wife did no little damage to his relationship with her, too, and with time their passions cooled to something more like hardened diffidence.

As the bonds of family slowly disintegrated around them, Izo and Kazue found companionship in one another. They were already close when marital discord and the loss of their father's eldest sons and drove him to tighten his grip on the children that remained to him, becoming an overbearing presence in both of their lives. Paranoia and fear -- fear born of love, true, but no less dangerous for all that -- began to edge toward genuine psychosis. He drank. He accused. Sometimes, he hit. He could not bear the thought of losing anyone else...but as is so often the case, that very same desperate clutching for control is what drove his children to resent and rebel against him.

Izo swore to Kazue -- as brothers do -- that he would make a better life for the both of them. He'd find a way to dig them out of the twisted, smoldering wreckage of past bitternesses, leaving it behind. In the meantime, they escaped by breaking the rules in small ways, scrounging up scraps of freedom in minor rebellions: there were under-quilt readings of comic books, snacks smuggled after bedtime hours, change snuck from the purse on the counter, epithets hissed in immitation of adulthood. They stayed out late, defied calls to dinner. They left messes. Their greatest offense was building a world together, of which their father could not ever hope to be a part.

One night, they even ran hand-in-hand around the room, playing a silly game that his sister had heard would summon some sort of magical guardian -- one that she imagined could rescue them. If they needed anything, she reasoned, they needed /that/: help, of the powerful kind. He felt ridiculous, but -- loving her -- humored her request, and that night, he dreamed.

He maintained excellent grades in school, devoted to education as a means to surpass his father's authority, but that mattered very little. Small acts of independence threw his father into fits. The more Izo strayed, the more tightly wound his father's leashes became. The more tightly wound, the further Izo felt he needed to go to escape.

In this way, he started down the path that would eventually lead to his present day, estranged and living in self-imposed isolation from the very person he wished most to protect. What began as a desire for greater autonomy evolved into outright rebelliousness with the onset of adolescence, leading -- in time, and with the sharpening of his instincts, his knowledge, his desire, and his anger -- to an affiliation with the Yamaguchi-gumi's fledgeling clans in Tokyo.

Yakuza.

Fearsome men who fear nothing, like oni, like demons, like mythic figures with beautiful ink-stained skins. He was fascinated with them -- both academically, as an appreciator of the history that gave rise to them, and also on some more personal level. They resonated with his building rage and teenaged desire to lay claim to authority of his own, caught awkwardly between childhood and manhood, with his father still doing all that he could to frustrate the alchemy that would transmute Izo from one state to the other.

He was virtually nobody to them, but it didn't matter. They were his tribe. His way out. He was starstruck.

Determination and quick wits were enough to get him noticed by the Yamaguchi-gumi. He spent a summer carrying inconsequential messages from place to place, standing watch outside of a string of seedy bars, fetching whatever was wanted for whomever asked, no matter how lowly. Those same qualities saw him elevated slowly but surely, earning the notice of men he now tentatively considered his peers -- and when a few different incidents demonstrated his ability to think on his feet and make sound judgements at a moment's notice, his star began to rise in earnest.

All of that promise imploded suddenly. On a still-brisk April day in 2011, he was standing outside of a sake bar, acting as a doorman and bouncer for the family, puffing hot air into his chilly hands and trying not to drowse off near the end of his shift. When he was roughly jostled by a figure leaving the bar, he assumed it was an accident -- a drunk patron, unable to stand. He couldn't have been more wrong.

The Yamaguchi-gumi and Sumiyoshi-kai were not strangers to skirmishes in the streets. Ostensible peace between the two families did not mean utter peace, and in the present day, in Tokyo, with the Yamaguchi-gumi increasingly encroaching on what was not traditionally their territory, violence is virtually inevitable.

His first indication of how wrong his assumption had been was the sensation of a knife sliding into the crease of muscle between hipbone and stomach, a gout of hot blood traced like a laser down his chill-numbled thigh. Astonished, he gripped his attacker's hand in the blue-grey gritty light of dusk, gaping and staring. Black bodies moved frantically in the dingy night. Someone he knew passingly -- someone from his yakuza family, a brother, a familiar face -- fell to the alley pavement in front of him, throat a grisly smile in red. The man choked, sputtered, and drowned in his own blood, his eyes white with fear, black with defiance.

They were going to die, he thought, in that lightning-quick moment, a thought that was too swift to be a thought.

What happened next he would never be able to clearly recall. Like many encounters with raw intuition, one can remember the /feeling/ of something, but may have difficulty giving that feeling a name; one remembers a pervasive sense, a guiding force. Along the seam where instinct and knowledge are joined, Izo fell into his Arcana, and met his persona.