Qualia the Purple: A Yuri Horror Masterpiece

Qualia the Purple is a scifi yuri novel with a thread of the horrific running through it. There’s a lot of discussion of scientific ideas and concepts about time and person hood, used to push forward the creeping horror of the story: the main character’s obsession with the love interest, to the point of ignoring and erasing the humanity of everyone else, even herself.

There are three sections to the narrative, two major sub stories, and an epilogue. The first story centers on the love interest, Marii Yukari; the second on the protagonist and first person speaker, Hatou Manabu, or “Gaku chan”.

The story starts with a simple, short introduction. The speaker tells us:

To Marii Yukari, all humans look like robots. That is an essential part of her cognition that cannot be changed no matter what. And I am her friend. To the left, we see a photo of a smile girl, with long curling hair, in a school uniform.

It’s a strange opening, leaving us with questions already – what does it mean, that humans look like robots? How did this happen to her, and why does the protagonist know about it? Does the protag actually believe her? These three lines could even be part of the first chapter, but they’re cordoned off, bring heavier focus to them. This is true about Marii, and it cannot be changed. The third fact – our protagonist is her friend. It feels almost defensive placed where it is, after the first two lines; an insistent proclamation to the world despite how perhaps strange Marii Yukari must be.

Each of the chapters of the story tend to be short, contained discussions of a topic or small event related to Yukari, or our protagonist, Manabu. Two or three pages, discussing a conversation, an observation, a school day, usually closing on a topic that then leads into another short section that is related but not exactly the same. It gives the feeling of being a train of conscious thought – as if the speaker, Manabu, was having a conversation with us, going back through her memories and experiences to try and explain her relationship with Yukari. It feels personal, conversational, less like a traditional novel and more like a diary or epistolary novel.

The first section of the novel focuses on Marii Yukari and her strange “cognition” of seeing people as robots. Everyone resembles a type of mech to her, save for herself, meaning she has never seen another existence that resembles her own. Growing up, she had to learn how to express herself – robots don’t emote, so she had never seen another human smile or laugh before. Appliances and machinery seem just as “human” as human beings – everyone is built of the same parts. And though she knows this is abnormal, its hard for her to hide it in her daily life.

A major example of the problems it causes is the first meeting between our two characters. Because Yukari sees people as robots, she cannot tell genders apart – Robots don’t have differing bodily forms after all. Yukari would often use people’s names as a way to guess their gender, but Manabu, our main character, has a gender neutral name. So, Yukari tried to follow Manabu around, to gather clues as to her identity – only to follow to close, and accidentally bump into her – they collide, crash to the floor, and accidentally lock lips. The embarrassing close contact breaks the ice, and the two eventually become friends.

Across multiple chapters, Manabu explains Yukari’s view of the world, the problems it causes, and the possibilities it presents. Why does Yukari see the world this way? It’s not explained – the narrator doesn’t know, and the possible answers are complex, scientific, and impossible to prove. Ultimately, Marii Yukari sees the world with her own eyes, and no one else can see the world the exact way she does.

Of course, that’s true about everyone – a point the novel makes and explores in depth. The story is about the unique perspectives of each human being, the way that those perspectives create the “person” we are; how these perspectives isolate us from each other and also bring us closer together. By creating a situation that is an extreme version of what most people experience – a human who sees people as robots – the writer is able to explore themes of person hood, community, identity, and isolation in a unique way.

Since Yukari has no way of conveying her experience to another person, she can’t prove it; you just have to take her word for it. That’s the situation. Plus, if you’re her friend – and not merely an acquaintance – then you’ve gotta truly, actually believe it. No matter how hard it is to believe, you have to do so unconditionally. But I Think that’s something that probably comes inevitably with being a friend, to some extent.

The theme of person hood isn’t solely related to the “humans as robots” discussion. In the second chapter, we get the first hint of Manabu’s affectionate feelings towards Yukari as she describes the other girl, likening her to a “porcelain doll”, then a “small animal”. Our speaker often betrays this habit of describing others as something a little less than human, a small sign of what’s to come – a character capable of erasing and ignoring the humanity of others for her own desires.

Manabu thinks Yukari is “perfect” – Yukari doesn’t feel the same way about herself. Being the only human being in a world of robots, she feels inadequate, unattractive – her own standards of beauty have been informed by metallic edges and laser sights. Manabu tries to make sure her friend understands sincerely how much she likes Yukari, how much she likes her purple eyes; Yukari, however, seems to at least have mixed feelings about the eyes that see the world so differently.

Manabu has her own inadequacies about her gender; she’s tall, short haired, masculine, with a gender neutral name, and feels she isn’t adequate feminine enough to be part of “normal” world of girls and boys in her school. She avoids people, to avoid being outed as a girl who fails at being girly. Yukari, however, loves her as she is, and tries to tell her so – through the avenue of her name, Manabu, a particularly unfeminine name.

It’s the name that brought them together – Yukari followed Manabu to try and figure out her gender, because her name was so genderless. What makes us unique as people, what creates our blessings and struggles, is what brings us closer together. Manabu may hate her name, but Yukari can’t, because it’s part of the friend she loves.

I truly hope Yukari doesn’t hate them – her pretty purple eyes, I mean. … I like her purple eyes.

“But I wish you’d actually like your name. I like it a lot,” Yukari says.

This theme – that what we feel uncomfortable with about ourselves is often what brings others to us, what creates the bonds we share – runs throughout the book. It’s at the heart of the person hood narrative – that our perspective is what creates our person hood, and its also what causes us problems, makes us feel ashamed and weird and isolated.

“Sometimes I wonder… Why didn’t the god who made me include me in the way I see others? If the human form looks like a robot to me, then you’d think my body would look like a robot too, so why is it just me who doesn’t? Is the way I’m shaped unnatural?”

“No, not at all. You look totally normal to me.” …

“Okay. Thanks. Then I guess what’s weird is not what I see, but what I feel.”

The color ‘purple’ runs through the book, starting with the title. The origin is Yukari herself – her eyes are described as purple, like a “violet flower”; her name, Yukari, means connection in Japanese, but in Chinese it can be read as purple, “after a poem about a plant bringing back memories”.

The slow, conversational pace of the novel takes a turn in chapter nine, when Yukari’s abilities reveal a dark side. The way that Yukari sees people – as robots – reveals something about them that ordinary people can’t see. A character who is a fast runner appears to have rocket boots to Yukari; aspects of their personalities and experiences become visible as robotic parts to Yukari’s eyes only.

This becomes dangerous when a serial killer called the “Tokyo Ripper” appears on the scene. A suspect is caught in the killings, but Yukari sees them on TV and knows they’re not the killer. She calls the police – who believe her, apparently having long been involved with her family and her powers. Suddenly, from the outside perspective of Manabu, we are missing a lot of history and context to Yukari’s life. She’s been helping the police? The government knows about her abilities? The cute perfect “porcelain doll” is a lot more than she seems.

Eventually, this killer takes notice of Yukari and Manabu; she realizes there is someone else in the world with “eyes like mine”, and kidnaps Manabu to use as bait. The slow turn into horror takes a sudden direct left into the nightmarish – Manabu awakens tied down to a table, drugged, staring at the young teenage girl killer. In the killer’s grip is Manabu’s sawed off left arm, but Manabu doesn’t recognize it that way. It’s a mannequin arm to her, with red paint on it, dehumanizing her own body to avoid facing the reality – that her own arm was cut off. This trend – to dehumanize to avoid painful truths – will come back in a nasty way.

Yukari comes to Manabu’s rescue, and faces the Tokyo Ripper. The Ripper has strange eyes, too; she sees human beings as bags of meat.

“Though in my case, I see people not so much as robots but as bags of meat.” … “You see, humans are just tons of meat all clumped together. That’s how it’s been for as long as I can remember. Everyone says life is precious, but I can’t understand how to cherish life, now matter how hard I try. … We might see things differently, but you and I are one and the same, aren’t we?”

The killer’s purpose is to ask Yukari a question – which view of the world is correct, her own, or everyone else’s. She asks Yukari if she sees a difference between humans and robots who are not human – ie, between a person and an appliance, a car, a machine. Yukari admits: she doesn’t. However, she doesn’t take that the way the killer does. Where the killer devalues human life to bags of meat, Yukari humanizes robots. To her, everything robotic is alive and has a person hood, including people and machines.

Where the killer insists that humans are soulless meat bags, Yukari fights back – she argues that everything has a soul, a life, and then seems to be able to prove it with something fantastical and not fully explained. To this point, the story has been purely realistic, possibly even explained away as a mental difference rather than a physical reality. But now, we get hints that Yukari is actually capable of fantastical things because of her strange vision – an arm of small robots show up to help her pin down and defeat the killer.

The horror takes center stage: Manabu, bleeding out and armless, is repaired by Yukari, using her ability to understand robots. The killer, too, is “fixed” – while the girl is pinned down, screaming NO, Yukari seems to “fix the bug” in her system. Suddenly what was a slow, softly paced story about relationships and two teenage girls takes on a fully scifi horror bent when we realize that Yukari can do more than see people as robots – she can functionally treat them like robots, replacing parts, repairing limbs, changing them physically.

Yukari uses Manabu’s cell phone as spare parts to fix her damaged arm. Manabu looks normal – but in the evening, she finds her hand still functions as a phone, with a screen lighting up in her palm. The surreal moment makes real what seemed like a nightmare before – she really was kidnapped, tortured, and then “repaired” like a piece of machinery. She confronts Yukari about it, who explains that yes, she can repair human beings – she’s done it before, on a previous friend, which went poorly and has led to Yukari growing afraid of losing friendships due to her powers.

Manabu, however, isn’t concerned. She doesn’t understand, she says, many times. The whole scenario is so surreal and otherworldly she still can’t wrap her head around it. She’s never fully believed Yukari really sees the world as robots – but she never allowed that disbelief to damage their friendship, nor did she try to undermine how Yukari feels. She just wasn’t capable of fully buying into it.

Now, she really doesn’t have a choice, but her mind just cannot process what is so strange and so contrary to her own experiences. Here is the crux of the narrative’s point – that everyone is a separate experience from everyone else. Manabu sees here proof that Yukari’s point of view is truly very different, that it gives her a way of interacting with the world that Manabu will never have, and will never understand. Yukari can’t explain it, and Manabu cannot see it. So what does that mean for their friendship?

I can’t picture what it would look like to Yukari. Likewise, she has no clue what it would look like to me. We’re living in different worlds, unable to enter one another’s. No matter what, I can’t see what Yukari sees, and Yukari can’t see what I see. We’re parallel lines that continue forever, never intersecting.

Manabu realizes that it is precisely these differences that pull people together – that being separate lines in separate worlds, people have to reach out in order to not be alone. They have to grasp each other’s hands, to communicate, to learn about each other, in order to grow closer. This is what it means to be friends.

We’re like parallel lines; left to our own devices, we’ll go on forever and ever without ever intersecting. But that’s what leads us to reach out to each other and try to pull ourselves closer to one another. … that was why we must take the initiative to reach out, why we want to connect, why we each wanted the other to reach out. … Even if we don’t see the same things, we can have the same feelings.

This section of the novel ends with a chapter called “conclusion” which mirrors the opening “introduction”: To Marii Yukari, all humans look like robots. That is an essential part of her cognition that cannot be changed no matter what. And I am still her friend.

The closing seems warm and uplifting, in spite of the horrors we’ve seen and the dangers the characters of faced. Its a solid conclusion, but it’s actually just the beginning; only 90 pages of the 260 have been read. The second portion, Kiss Over One Billion, begins a new story with a separate theme that develops into even darker and stranger corners of the scifi/horror universe.

If the first section is Marii Yukari’s story – from Manabu’s point of view – the second story is Manabu’s, from her own perspective. It says something about the two characters and their humanity – we learn a lot about how Manabu feels about Yukari, but we don’t get Yukari’s perspective, we don’t know her full story, don’t see how she sees the world. In part two, she becomes even more distant, as she in fact dies off screen. The fact of her death is foreshadowed in the introduction, as Manabu tells us she was forewarned of the danger, and its clear that though she’s no longer the center of hte narrative, Yukari is just as important here as she was before. All of Manabu’s actions and desires are centered on Yukari, on how Manabu sees her.

Since this is Manabu’s story, this part of the narrative fleshes out details about her that were touched upon before but not fully explored. Chapter One opens with a detailed exploration of her youth, her feelings of inadequacy surrounding her gender, and her isolation from others.

I kept my distance from everyone and never made an effort to be part of the class. I was socially awkward and my macho attitude just made it worse. From the start of the new term, I got a reputation as an aloof girl… There were always invisible lines between me and others. That was fine by me.

Manabu explains her first meeting with Yukari, something that was already explained but wasn’t explored in detail. The fact of Manabu’s gender neutral name, Yukari’s inability to tell her gender, the fall and the kiss. Manabu tells the story of this memory and describes Yukari as “similar to a small animal” again. The kiss is light and quick, but the feelings and experience are not – though the lips touch for only a moment, Manabu feels the warmth of the other girl’s body on hers, feels her heartbeat rushing, the weight of another person. She “forgot to breathe”, her mind “spinning”, and notices quickly the uniqueness of her purple eyes.

The strange situation leads to their friendship, and to the revelation of Yukari’s unique view of the world. This is the same as it was in part one, but now, we’re hearing the story again with the horrible truth hovering over us – that something is going to happen to Yukari, that she’s already doomed by the narrative. What happened? Why? And does it relate to her purple eyes?

Chapter two is dedicated to exploring a phenomenon that is the center of the whole novel, but hasn’t really been “defined” until now. The topic is “qualia”, a term used to refer to the “subjective experiences produced by our senses”, in the words of the book. It’s the title of the book – Qualia the Purple – and now that we know what the term means, we can understand the title: this is the story of the author’s personal, subjective experience of the color “purple”, purple of course being Yukari’s name and eyes. It’s the story of her experience with Yukari.

The same colors might be perceived differently by different people or in different situations. That kind of feeling is called qualia, as I understand it.

Because Yukari doesn’t see the world the way others do, her qualia are very different from others. She can’t see human expressions the way we can, so her experience of smiles or laughter are different from others. While the narrator focuses on how different Yukari is, we cannot forget that qualia apply to everyone – and in fact, our first person protagonist has her own unique qualia that make her different from others. That she, too, has things she cannot perceive or fully understand, and these things may be the making of a terrible end for her.

The story begins to get deeper into scientific ideas here, trying to explain in a general, high school sense complex theories about reality and the world. What the author is building towards is an idea of multiverses, of parallel worlds, and our protagonist’s ability to navigate them. As Manabu discusses theories of probability and quanta and whether or not the world is determined, what we are seeing is foreshadowing of the protagonist’s world being revealed to be flexible, even malleable.

The first hint of this is a strange tangent Manabu goes on about another character, Nanami, and how there was a “world” in which they actually grew up together. She starts telling teh story of a life she has not lived, and does not explain why she’s doing this or how she knows it. Suddenly, the floor beneath the reader feels unsteady – reality is unraveling a little. The narrative is no longer as solid as before, because now we’re discussing possible histories, alternate realities, rather than the life Manabu has actually lived. How has she come to know this? Does it relate to Yukari’s death? Pieces of the puzzle are coming together and the picture it paints is haunting.

The changes begin with the arrival of a foreign exchange student named Alice Foyle. She’s much younger than the other characters at eleven years old, and she’s a genius for her age. Her youth, western origins, and long blonde hair make clear that her name is meant to refer to Alice in Wonderland – a part of the theme of the novel, of young girls thrown into strange, surreal situations and forced to survive on their own. It’s also a part that Alice picks for herself; we later learn she chose the name, and died her hair blonde.

Alice, too, has a unique viewpoint: she sees all mathematical equations as pictures. Because of this, she can solve problems and mathematical formulas that most find impossible, to the point that she may be capable of coming up with solutions to questions the world has been trying to solve forever.

Simply put, the way she saw the world meant she could manage equations intuitively. She didn’t calculate. She inferred. … That was completely outside the range of possibility for normal people and had the potential to create a paradigm shift in the world of math and change the world. That was what made her a genius. And it reminded me of a certain someone.

Alice is from an organization called Jaunt, named for a teleportation device from a science fiction novel. They are focused on using geniuses and unique perspectives to improve their understanding of science and the world – so Alice says. The young girl is very defensive of “geniuses”, and looks down on normal people, particularly Manabu. Yukari, however, is a fellow genius, and Alice wants to convince her to go to America and join Jaunt.

Manabu, of course, doesn’t want her to go; however, she doesn’t say so to Yukari. She argues with Alice about Yukari – argues that Yukari’s happiness is more important than the possible benefits she might give the world – but she doesn’t directly communicate with Yukari herself. In truth, Manabu does worry that she’s holding her friend back. Yukari is unique, and after saving Manabu from the serial killer, her abilities are in the limelight more and more. What if someone nefarious tries to capture or hurt her? What if she can change the world, and staying with Manabu is holding her back? In the end, Manabu leaves the choice to Yukari, who eventually decides to join Jaunt.

What truly makes her decide to let Yukari go without a fight is a strange phone call she receives – a call that comes in on her “hand”, the cellular device that Yukari created to repair Manabu’s damaged arm. The call is surreal, coming from someone Manabu knows, who she recognizes before the other even begins to speak.

I don’t know how, but I knew it. I knew the call was coming. … That wasn’t all – I knew who it was before they opened their mouth. … My body froze in the shock of getting a call from someone so impossible. Who knew whether the person on the other end knew this as they croaked as if crying alone: “Please… Yukari will die if you don’t do something.”

The voice on the other end of the hand phone is Manabu herself. She doesn’t know how or why, but she knows its true – a version of herself called herself to warn her of Yukari’s death. This convinces her of the need to let Yukari go; to allow her to leave in order to protect her. She tells Yukari she should go, which is what convinces the girl to finally join Jaunt. The outcome is revealed in a simple, short sentence that ends the chapter:

It was less than half a year later that I learned that Yukari had died.

The next chapter does not reveal more about her death; it doesn’t even deal with it directly. Manabu takes a veering left turn into another scientific discussion: Mary’s Room. The idea explores what perception means to individuals.

Mary the brilliant scientist has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. There are no windows, and the TV is black andwhite. She’s never seen any proper colors. Nonetheless, she is a genius, and her powerful brain knows all the scientific information there is to know about color. … she’s only ever experienced the black-and-white room and never actually seen colors for herself. Then, when she’s released from the black-and-white room and steps into the outside world bursting with color, is there nothing left for her to learn, or if not, what is this new thing that she learns?

The subject is exploring the idea of knowledge and experience. Mary knows, scientifically, what color is, but has never experienced it. When she finally experiences color, is she learning something new or not? Is experience a part of knowledge, or does knowledge convey experience? Can you ‘experience’ something you’ve only ever known intellectually?

This idea, like so many others in the novel, is pulling on threads of our main character Manabu without directly pointing them out to us. So many of the topics the book explores point out flaws and problems in Manabu’s character. Manabu, too, is someone inside of a room who can only learn, not experience, certain things. We are trapped with her, because we are trapped in her perspective, only able to see this world from her eyes. She does not understand certain concepts, she “knows” them but does not experience or understand them fully, and it’s going to lead to problems.

What is it she doesn’t understand? If you look between the lines you see her problem: its in the way she describes other characters, how she “sees” them. Most of the characters she knows are young girls like herself. Rarely, a male classmate is mentioned, or a detective in the police force, or an employee of Jaunt. But primarily, Manabu interacts with other young girls. When she describes them for the audience, she rarely uses humanizing terms. Yukari is a “doll” or a “small animal”. When she first describes Alice, Manabu says she’s a “rose” with sharp thorns, beautiful only from far away. Another classmate, Tenjou, is described as reminding Manabu as a “little kid” while at the same time her appearance “stole my breath away”. None of these descriptions are of mature, self controlling human beings, but of objects and animals and kids who are in some way vulnerable or subject to the older, more mature Manabu’s control.

In her descriptions, Manabu is always heavily focused on the beauty and attractiveness of the girls she’s with, particularly of Yukari. But she’s not the only one – there is a romantic and even sexual tension with Manabu and all the female characters, including the serial killer who took her arm. Manabu describes the killer treating her arm in a “sexual” way.

What Manabu feels isn’t fully described until much later, when she learns another female character has romantic feelings for her. She reacts with shock, still not realizing how much of her own life is informed by her same sex feelings for others. She hasn’t fully realized her own heart, yet, and she also hasn’t realized how the way she treats her affections is in fact infantilizing of the girls and later, women, that she loves. Her attraction is itself the skewed point of view that damages her relationships.

She doesn’t fully respect the humanity of others – in Chapter 11 of part one, she describes herself as “a bit of a stalker” because she often stands on a certain hill outside Yukari’s house to watch her, without the girl knowing. When she sees a classmate of theirs on her hill, she grows angry, feeling possessive not just of her friendship of Yukari but of her ability to spy on her.

To dehumanize someone does not mean you literally don’t see their value or their humanity. It can be far more subtle than that – and in Manabu’s character, we see the subtleties in how she makes decisions for other characters. She decides its best if Yukari joins Jaunt – she doesn’t ask if that’s what Yukari wants. Other people – other girls – are in need of her direction and protection, and she doesn’t consider whether their own thoughts and feelings might differ from her own.

This starts to become obvious in the aftermath of Yukari’s death, when Manabu begins to use her hand phone to call herself in alternate realities. She is trying to come to terms with her grief with the only person who understands her perspective – herself. She eventually realizes through this connection to alternate realities that she has the ability to manipulate reality herself. She can alter the future – and later, she learns she can alter the past. Using a specific moment of her life as as starting point, she can live, take certain actions, die, and restart, over and over again, messing with the future and past in an attempt to discover what happened to Yukari, and how to either avenge or prevent it.

A conversation during this portion of the story discusses the idea of a “philosophical zombie”. This is person who knows, intellectually, what a concept is, but cannot understand it.

… when they see an apple, they say it’s so red and it looks delicious. But the thing is, they don’t actually perceive it as red or delicious at all. Why? Because they have no concrete, sensory concept of redness or deliciousness … when we see something delicious, we drool. Why? Because it’s delicious, which we know from firsthand experience. But a philosophical zombie drools because it understands deliciousness from knowledge. … they know how to react.

The idea isn’t far removed from the example of Mary’s room, and it’s clear the concept is being built around Manabu; though the conversation first uses Yukari as an example of someone who cannot fully understand humans, its Manabu who we will soon see doesn’t understand people. She does not fully comprehend the humanity of them – because she begins to treat them as tools, as props, in her traveling through time. She will seduce, manipulate, kill, betray, do anything she has to in an attempt to achieve her goals, treating friends and enemies with the same indifference. She sees nothing wrong with this, she even claims to love certain characters even as she kills, tortures, abandons them. Alice in particular, as someone associated with Yukari’s disappearance and death, suffers terribly at the hands of a girl who claims to care for her.

We cannot forget that the narrative has set up Manabu as a “masculine” character. The girls around her are all more traditionally beautiful and feminine, and I don’t think it’s a mistake that part of the “role” that Manabu says she’s accepted – a role she feels her classmates and society forced on her because she couldn’t be properly feminine – is part of how she sees the world. Her control and dismissive attitude towards the girls comes in part from her masculine acceptance of herself as the one in charge – that Manabu knows best, that what she wants is most important, regardless of the pain and suffering it inflicts on others.

When she realizes she can influence the past, Manabu’s goal shifts into finding the version of reality that will keep Yukari alive. This becomes such a driving force that she even begins to torment Yukari herself; she learns she can take on the roles of other people, and becomes Yukari’s mother. She becomes horrifically abusive in order to try and repress Yukari’s unique vision of the world, in the hopes she won’t attract Jaunt’s attention. Manabu sees nothing wrong with it, even defending and downplaying her behavior.

I suppose to an outside observer, the way I did it might have seemed cruel, but Yukari’s life depended on it, so I steeled my heart… I didn’t give in to crying or shouting. I didn’t overlook the slightest transgression. … At the same time, I showed her plenty of love so that she wouldn’t mistake my intent. After I berated her sufficiently that she’d never forget it and made sure her body remembered too, I hugged her. … I wasn’t doing this out of hatred, but out of love, out of a pure desire to protect her. … I wasn’t like Alice’s mother. … The important thing was to protect Yukari at all costs. … She didn’t need any friends who would put her life in danger… she had to grin and bear it to get through her last year of junior high. But Yukari never made it … she was hit by a car and died. According to witness testimony, Yukari had wobbled into the line of traffic as if she had intended to do so.

It is a dark, haunting description, made worse by the next line, separated by a paragraph break: Someone tell me: where did I go wrong? This makes it absolutely clear what is wrong with Manabu, what it is about her perception that is flawed. She literally doesn’t understand why her abusive behavior was wrong, when it had the positive outcome of a succeeded at a goal she made for herself. She never asks or considers if this is what Yukari wants – and clearly, it isn’t, since the child decides to kill herself to escape it.

The more that Yukari speaks to alternate versions of herself, the more she travels through time, killing and torturing others, the more unhinged and detached from her own humanity she becomes. She is slowly losing her sanity and her emotions, until she quite literally becomes detached from her own self. No matter what she does, Yukari always dies – but she refuses to give up, determined to “win”. Ultimately, she removes herself from reality, to ensure that no one else can perceive her existence. If no one can see her, no one can anticipate or influence her behavior. She can spend her unnatural, inhumane existence defending Yukari from death.

She is reborn as a non human entity, something outside the laws of the universe; she experiences reality from its very beginnings from billions of years ago, until the moment of Yukari’s almost death. This time, she survives, and awakens in a hospital room, observed by the detached former “Manabu”.

To the former human’s shock and awe, she is in fact perceivable by one person: Yukari. The girl recognizes that a version of her friend is in the room with her – and Manabu cannot believe it is possible.

“I” could no longer be observed by anyone. … I … remade myself into a being to whom the theory of everything did not apply. … All so no one could observe “me”. … And thus, there was no one who could determine “me”. So I could be sure now that no one would come between “me” and protecting Marii Yukari.

What a terrible fate. Manabu’s dehumanizing of others, removing their agency and ignoring their feelings, leads to the inevitably end result – the dehumanizing of Manabu herself. A person who does not respect others agency, who doesn’t understand the value of individual freedom, can hardly put the same value onto their own lives. She sees herself a prop as well, a tool towards her ultimate goal – the only thing that matters is “Yukari lives”. Even if that erases her own existence.

However, Yukari sees her, and is able to hear the story of what’s brought her to this bought. She’s upset by it, by what Manabu has suffered, but she’s also determined to reveal the truth: that it was all for nothing.

The only one who can change my fate – the only one who should change my fate – is me. … you don’t have the right to change me.

It’s a simple statement, but it shocks Manabu, breaks something inside her. Her entire existence across eons has been built upon this idea, but Yukari rejects it utterly. Only now does Manabu begin to see how she’s gone wrong: she’d “been forcing my own desires onto her”. So attached to and in love with her friend, Manabu became obsessed, uncaring of what Yukari wanted or needed so long as it filled Manabu’s goal. Only now, speaking to Yukari herself – connecting with her – does the simple and obvious truth finally occur to our protagonist.

She still doesn’t fully understand it – because her own world view has brought her to a point that it’s impossible. She’s no longer human. She knows, intellectually, she was a human once, but she cannot understand what that means. She has become the philosophical zombie, the Mary in a black and white room – a consciousness removed from human experience and unable to comprehend it.

Manabu no longer remembers how to go back; she cannot undo what’s shes done. Luckily for her, Yukari is skilled at fixing robots; she can put the girl back together. The act is a simple, soft thing – a single kiss, pressed up against the little robot body Manabu seems to have become attached to. It makes Manabu remember their first meeting – the kiss, the warm bodies, the physical weight, the humanity of it. This memory – this connection with another person – returns her humanity to her.

That was how we met. Yes, we must have been alone there then. We met miraculously – improbably – in this wide world. … that kiss, belongs to us alone. That feeling when we embraced and looked into each other’s eyes, belongs to me alone, my qualia of purple.

Manabu returns, back to a time before Yukari left for Jaunt. She destroys the cell phone in her arm, removes her ability to travel through reality and time, and the memories of those other lives begin to fade. But she doesn’t forget her realization – her recognition of the humanity of herself, and others. She goes to Yukari and tells her the truth – that she wants Yukari to stay, that she’ll miss her, that she wants to be friends with her and Alice and the other girls. They reach out, grasping each others hands.

Oh, it was this easy all along. … If you have no power, you can just ask for help. If someone else needs help, you can extend your hand to them. You can meet and start anew.

The second story ends, returning us to a concept discussed much earlier: light. Light always travels on the shortest path. How does it do it? By testing every path, ruling them out, and using the final shortest path as its true journey. By using paralleling realities – just like Manabu did – trying to find the shortest path to victory. Now, Manabu has learned what that shortest path is – to reach out and truly connect with others.

The path shown by the light.

An epilogue chapter called “If” explores a little of the aftermath, but I’ll leave that section untouched so those of you who wish to read it might have something to look forward to. It’s truly an experience, an incredibly unique blend of scifi and horror, with a relationship between two girls that is essentially to the plot. The love – the adolescent desire between them – is integral to the plot and its themes; the story cannot be separated from its yuri dynamic. And amidst dozens of romances and novels coming out year over year that explore isekai or villainess plotlines, Qualia the Purple feels like an incredibly powerful, unique exploration of female attraction that I really haven’t seen elsewhere. I highly recommend it.