Shiki Ryougi

Shiki Ryougi is the main protagonist of Kara no Kyoukai anime and games.

Shiki is a girl who possesses the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, a supernatural ability that allows the user to see the inherent mortality of everything (both living and non-living) in the form of lines. She assists the Garan no Dou agency in handling paranormal cases when combat is required.

Appearance
Shiki has always mostly worn a wide variety of traditional kimonos ranging from colorful yukatas to high quality furisodes up to the age of sixteen. Despite being seemingly unremarkable, her kimono is a luxury item not apparent to the eye. The quality is revealed in the fine details, the haute couture being that she can perform high kicks while still wearing a kimono. She can’t actually distinguish between different Kimono types, but because she’s been in contact with nothing but high-class goods her entire life she can at least tell the difference between “good” and “bad”. At the kimono fabrics shop, she’ll pick out a material without hesitation and leave, at which point Akitaka will look at the price only to find that it costs as much as he makes in two months.

Though she had received clothing from Akitaka that would suit a girl her age, she never bothered to wear them, and because her school was one without uniforms, she stayed with her kimono. She wished to utilize a long-sleeved kimono, but instead wore a Yukata-like, single-piece kimono for ease of changing during physical education classes. Comments from her high school peers and prodding from Mikiya about her insistence on simply wearing extra clothing on top of her kimono caused her to spontaneously decide to wear something over it. She decided to buy a leather jacket, so she began a strange habit of wearing a leather jacket over a kimono during winter.

Her hair is short, and while she often used to brush her hair, it was usually unkempt after her recovery from her 2-year coma. Shiki has ink-black hair, pale skin color and black eyes described as being of "clear void". While she was known to wear wooden geta footwear as part of her casual wear, she commonly wore boots with laces as part of her default attire, especially when embarking on her assignments under the Garan no Dou agency.

While it seems that she is concerned about her attire, she does not actually care. She simply wears what she wishes, but the result ends up consistently being a kimono, laced-up boots or geta, and a red leather jacket. Her favorite outfit is the red leather jacket, but only Mikiya is oblivious to the reason as to why she loves it. She does not favor any particular red leather jacket, and insists that "I will switch to a new one if this one gets worn out".

After the case at Reien Girl's Academy was wrapped up, Akitaka was entrusted with the Reien uniform's safekeeping. In several years, he quietly and discreetly passed it on to Mikiya.

The original concept behind Shiki was "a juxtaposition of Eastern and Western concepts", or literally "an unhomogenized compromise between the East and the West."

Pre-coma, the two personalities Shiki and SHIKI wore the same style of dress with the latter often being depicted as wearing kimonos of various warm colors. Shiki's third personality 「Shiki Ryougi」 was often depicted as having worn a light pink kimono of the furisode variety, all while lacking her signature red leather jacket despite only ever being seen during snowy nights. 「Shiki Ryougi」 was known for displaying a serene and trance-like expression in all of her appearances.

Personality
Children born into the Ryougi family are generally male and are artificially induced with dual personalities, but Kaname was unable to manifest a second personality of his own. Shiki was confirmed to display the trait instead and was raised as the family head in his place, displaying the personalities of SHIKI, a male personality customarily called the "yang" personality, and Shiki, the female personality called the "yin" personality.

It is not the result of Dissociative Identity Disorder even though it is a dual personality, so it is more a matter of whose actions take priority. It is easy to tell which Shiki is speaking at a given time because they both have a distinct style of speaking, most notably that the female Shiki speaks politely and with reserve, referring to herself with the gender-neutral pronoun watashi, while the male persona has a brash personality and refers to himself with the masculine pronoun ore. The two personalities could not communicate to each other but they can both understand what the other is feeling. When one comes out it is like the other goes to sleep, and at the moment they switch they feel each other’s desires.

While feminine before the accident, Shiki, no longer able to feel SHIKI after waking from the coma, assumes that he has died and feels a detachment from her memories before the accident. She does not have a realistic sense of living, knowing that she is Shiki while also not feeling that she actually is Shiki. She hopes to regain herself and the "dead" SHIKI, and decides to put on a cold facade that somewhat resembles the male Shiki's, utilizing a course male speech pattern and "ore", and tries to act as the female Shiki. Touko understands the sense of detachment Shiki feels, and theorizes that the current Shiki is a third, new personality.

She has a cold, mean, heartless, and merciless personality, appearing to care about nothing, but she occasionally reacts in surprisingly feminine ways. Mikiya decides that if she were to be compared to an animal that it would be something like a rabbit. Due to being aware of her abnormality since childhood, being a killer who could not kill, she hated both herself and other people. Developing her cold personality as a result, she secretly wished to experience the happiness of a normal person. Her fate has changed drastically since encountering the materialization of that dream.

Due to her impulse to kill, she tries to feel a sense of living through killing, but never succeeds due to various accidents and benevolent obstructions. With her uncertain sense of living, she listlessly continues to go to Touko's office on a daily basis. Shiki declines Mystic Eye Killers from Touko, which would allow her to live a normal life free of seeing death if she were to wear them. It could be seen as a sign of how self abusive she is, or it can be called more like an episode that reflects her heart of clear water. While Touko put a large amount of money into constructing them, Shiki simply shoved them back, saying "Why should I do it to please you?" Her reasoning for declining is the same as refusing to wear the uniform of Reien Girls' Academy, in that she thinks it looks ridiculous on herself.

She can be said to occasionally behave like a "Stone-head-like stone head", evidence that she lives by feelings alone.[14] She has an animalistic view towards other people, dividing them into two categories regardless of good or evil. Deciding based upon "those she can be with" and "those she cannot be with", she will stay with someone "she can be with" even if she hates them. Touko is "dislike", Azaka is "like", and Mikiya, in her own words, is "I do not know."

Strawberry ice-cream is one of the few things she is fond of, but it is also one of the things that she hates. She despises cold food, but always seems to buy it from the convenience store. Her persistence towards eating it caused Mikiya to make insensitive comments like ".... are you... are you trying to conquer your weakness...?".

She is not exactly a dog lover but she likes them for their personality due to Mikiya's nickname "Puppy-kun". She has a monthly allowance of 50,000 yen. If she ever needs more money beyond that, she casually puts out an “I wanna go shopping” sort of aura, and Akitaka Suzurigi will make arrangements.

SHIKI is the personality that controls the aspect of "Denial/Negativity." He is a lost killer responsible for Shiki Ryougi's destructive impulses. Even though the only emotion that he can feel is "to kill," he despises his own impulses and voluntarily became Shiki's subordinate personality. He has the speech and gestures of a youth. The relationship between them changes upon the entrance of Mikiya, and he decides to act as the substitute at the time of the accident and disappear.

Shiki possesses an actual third personality.「Shiki Ryougi」 is the will of the body that manifested as a personality of its own, and is directly connected to, the Root. Because she is connected to the Root, she is considered part of it and one with it. The pronunciation of would be Void if it were to have one. Having always existed in the gap between Shiki and SHIKI, she hid her existence from both personalities after creating the two. This personality is housed in the body rather than the other personalities housed in the mind.

Shiki Ryougi was fated to be erased by the Counter Force before birth due to having the Origin of, which would be connected to the Root itself; however, the Ryougi used specific methods to prevent this from happening. After Shiki Ryougi was born, the Ryougi realized that the child was completely empty without a personality of its own. To fix this, they forcefully awakened Shiki's Origin. Upon gaining a personality through the Origin Awakening,「Shiki Ryougi」immediately became able to see every event recorded in the Root and, deciding everything to be uninteresting and meaningless, created the perfectly split personalities of Shiki and SHIKI as the Ryougi family wanted of her then hid herself behind the two.

Because she has no interest in anything due to her omniscience,「Shiki Ryougi」 usually remains dormant within Shiki.

Combat
Shiki has been described to be a speed-type combining both the Mystic Eyes of Shiki Tohno as well as the skill and techniques of Shiki Nanaya, with high-spec movements that show no opening in either offense or defense.

Against normal humans, Shiki has shown that she is a fair combatant without a weapon. She was able to easily defeat the group of teenagers pursuing Enjou Tomoe in Paradox Spiral and was able to toy with four men for a time in Murder Speculation (Part 2).

Shiki possesses heightened physical abilities, enhancing her mobility in combat. She apparently has enough self-discipline to endure a great deal of pain, since she did not stop a charging attack against Fujino when her arm was twisted in midair. This arm was later replaced by a prosthetic crafted by Touko. She is also able to trace the Lines of Death with her fingers as long as the opposing object is not physical in nature, being able to cut through Souren Araya's Bounded Fields easily.

Magical Prosthetic Arm
Shiki has a Magical Prosthetic Arm that allows her to grab things from a distance, and also affect intangible objects. When she went up against Kirie Fujou, who was a ghost that had several other ghostly figures under her control at the time, Shiki used her Magical Prosthetic Arm to grab her in her ghostly form. It has been stated by Touko that her second arm prior to going up against Kirie will be twice as strong as the original, and that it would take an elephant to destroy it. It also showed great durability when Shiki was running at high speed and jumped off of a building and landed on the other building, grabbing the roof as she landed. Shiki had to cut off her first Prosthetic Arm because a ghost was grabbing it and was going to throw her off the Fujou building. In the movies, Shiki's puppet arm has a hidden compartment to store a secondary knife.

Swordsmanship
She was trained by her father from a young age. Without her self-suggestion, her overall ability in swordplay is about equal to Taiga Fujimura. Her most notable ability, self-suggestion, restructures her body starting from the brain to become purely for combat; her muscles act in a way unbefitting that of a living being and her blood vessels adjust themselves so that Shiki does not even have to breathe. All functions of the body needed as a "human" are removed in favor of functions needed to be a weapon. Araya notes that in this sense she's not a knife-fighter, but a swordsman; and whereas she can only strike within three meters with a knife, her range triples to nine meters with a katana. Araya notes that if Shiki was not severely injured from their previous battle, he would have been killed instantly. To the astonishment of Araya, Shiki ceases being Shiki and there is a change in her "vessel" once Shiki uses her autosuggestion, implying a personality swap to that of 「Shiki Ryougi」. Once Shiki uses her self-suggestion, she is able to battle demons even without the use of her Mystic Eyes, and can even see into the future like Seo Akira. Nasu states that a battle between the katana-armed Shiki and the knife-wielding Shiki would be much like a fight between Shiki and one of the puppets at the Ogawa Apartment Complex.

In Paradox Spiral, she wields a katana called Kanesada Kuji, a five-hundred year old sword that has gained a large amount of Mystery due to its old age; merely unsheathing the sword would obliterate the bounded field that Touko set on the Garan no Dou. The sword was broken when it landed on Araya, and repairing or reforging the sword would lose the "history" and abilities that it previously had.

Mystic Eyes of Death Perception
With her Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, she can see the lines of a target's death that can act as both the "points" and the "lines" that Shiki Tohno sees. A cut along any line will bifurcate the object, no matter the sharpness of the cutting tool used, and certain lines would result in instant death for the target. Her abilities extend to cutting things with no physical existence, such as Fujino Asagami's manifestations of her telekinetic powers. Unlike the other Shiki, Ryougi shows no definite proof after her release from the hospital that the use of her eyes causes mental strain on her brain, leading to the hypothesis that one's mentality greatly affects whether or not the brain can handle the power of the eyes. It does not matter if the target has a spiritual body like a Servant or they are dead like the ghosts surrounding Kirie Fujou, as it only matters if they are "living" in the sense that they can interfere with the current world. She has a hard time with Souren Araya's Śarīra because it belonged to an enlightened one who achieved "becoming extinguished, alive." Killing it using the lines of death would require her to decipher advanced "lines of death" levels higher than the normal concept of death. It's revealed by Touko Aozaki that her eyes are actually linked to the Root, the 'origin of all things.' Consequently, as a user of the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception it can be said she is several ranks higher than Shiki Tohno, who can be said to be her polar opposite.

Connection to the Root
Her third personality born from the body can be said to be directly connected to the Root, and she can even be called the Root itself. While Shiki can see the Root with her Mystic Eyes, 「Shiki Ryougi」 can go even deeper, connecting to where all cause and effect begin and everything and nothing exist. She claims the ability to do anything she wishes, as being connected to it makes her an equivocal existence. She claims restructuring the laws governing atomic matter, going back in time to change the evolution and development of all life, and reconstructing the orders and laws of the world would be easy for her to accomplish. It is not actually changing the existing world, but instead annihilating the old one with a new reality.

Despite this ability, her combat ability is only possibly around the level of Ciel, allowing her to manage a defensive fight against a being on the level of a Servant. She is still much stronger than the regular Shiki, who holds no hope in even competing with a Servant defensively.

However, she was later noted to be the second strongest being in the Nasuverse when not including Servants, under Arcueid Brunestud and above Primordial Demons.

Trivia

 * Shiki is definitely got the rough outlook and personality, the overpowered abilities, and borderline psychopathy. Plus the book was written in the 90s and takes place in the 90s. What makes her stand out though is her rather conservative attire.
 * Shiki seems to like her leather boots, but aside from that, she is always shown barefoot at her place and often shown barefoot in official artwork and such. It's mainly used as a sign of purity, especially in shots of her wearing a white kimono and with a sword in hand.
 * Shiki makes almost no use of modern conveniences except for refrigeration and electric light, almost never even answers her telephone (and she hasn't changed the answering machine's message from its default), wears traditional clothing whenever possible, seems most comfortable in Touko's ancient, run-down office, and is utterly disgusted by drugs and casual sex. Although gender is more or less a non-issue for her for personal reasons; she questions Tomoe's sexuality in a completely neutral manner and tries to make a vulgar joke when the Kokutou siblings bring up the possibility of her dating Azaka's female classmates.
 * Shiki is shown to own three of the same jacket.