Sickness Unto Death Series

Sickness Unto Death, written by Hikari Asada and illustrated by Takahiro Seguchi, is a dramatic and romantic manga epic where clinical psychology becomes the weapon to do battle with the internal torments of despair, sin, and self-image. At the age of eighteen, Futaba Kazuma is going to college to become a psychologist, and takes a room in a creepy mansion. Among his fellow boarders is a troubled young woman named Emiru, whose psychological problems have eerie physical manifestations: her hair has turned white, her body temperature is well below normal, and her blood pressure is also quite unusual. No psychologists or counselors have been able to help cure her of this problem. Will Kazuma be able to determine the cause of Emiru’s despair and save her before it’s too late? The key to her recovery, Kazuma believes, may lie in Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s meditation on despair, The Sickness Unto Death.

The sickness unto death is what Kierkegaard calls despair and in this comic despair is manifested in form of a young woman named Emiru. Emiru is a beautiful young woman from a rich family and plenty to aspire to. Unfortunately she is consumed with grief. She does not align herself with God or God’s plan for her and needs guidance.

So when she meets a young psychology student named Futaba she gives herself to him. In this way she loses herself to him. Kierkegaard defines humanity as the tension between the “finite and infinite”, and the “possible and the necessary”, and in this case Emiru as we come to know her will eventually end under Futaba’s guidance. But who will take her place? And how will she and Futaba go through the balancing act between these opposing personalities as their relationship builds.