Kano



Kano Jurgen is the main character and protagonist of Kagerou. He was once a psychiatric patient in a mental hospital on Earth, but somehow ended up in Grey World when Fuuka called him to be her Champion.

Kano has several other personalities that could occasionally take over and control the body, the most prominent ones being Red and Kid.

Appearance
Kano is a thin, pale teenage boy with long red hair and an effeminate face that is often mistaken for a girl. One of the most important aspect of Kano's appearance is his eyes, which change color depending on which personality or force has dominant control of his body: green (Kano), red (Red), blue (Kid), clear white (no one home), etc.

It should also be noted that his eyes change colour when different foreign presences affect his mind, such as when he was shown Mindi's account of what happened to her (changed to her darker green), when he was possessed by the artifact in Ir or when Tcaolin kissed him (smouldering red with yellow irises), and when he tapped into the Council in chapter 44 (black with green swirls).

Ever since he was kissed by and then drained Tcaolin, his dominant eye color has been golden or orange with one slightly larger pupil. This change in eye color also carried over to nearly all of his alternate personas, leaving only the color of his speech bubbles and mannerisms to distinguish between them. Only Red seems to retain his unique eye color.

Kano's clothes have changed a few times over the course of the story. His hair was once tied with a blue shoelace that was given to the demon general Dali-Dalai in chapter 2. His clothes were described as making him look like a "goddamn Easter egg" by Red in chapter 20, and the once colourful wardrobe consisting of a dark green top with vertical blue stripes over another green top with a blue pattern of blobs was replaced with Red's picked clothes- a heavy brown trenchcoat, black trousers, and a black shirt with a vertical split at the front.

In chapter 33 he is stabbed in the stomach by Dreamwalker and remarked "there goes another shirt", referring to the numerous times he had been stabbed or otherwise injured. The shirt wasn't replaced until chapter 42 where he had to give up the shirt to a naked Cho, and the newest top (up untill the most recent update so far) is grey and goes over another (black) shirt which probably isn't the same one he used to wear because it has no split down the front.

He also has scars on his right hand, evidence of self-mutilating behaviors. He shows them to Cho when she asks about his life on Earth in chapter 13, saying, "I cut off my fingers." There is a little x-shaped scar on the back of his hand as well as lines around the base of his little and ring fingers, suggesting that those fingers were in fact reattached. They are on his right hand because he would have been holding the knife in his left, as he is left-handed.

Personality
Kano is detached from "reality", often speaking as if talking to himself rather than to whoever is listening to him. He rarely talks about himself, and when he does, it rarely makes sense to those around him. Kano frequently refers to himself with "we" instead of "I," and he may alternate between the two even within the same sentence.

He is not aggressive by any means, fighting to defend himself only reluctantly. He has very little interest in being a champion of any kind, much less fighting hordes of demons to save people he's still pretty sure are hallucinations anyway.

Though we often see him in dangerous situations, the threat often doesn't seem to register on his radar unless it is one of the threats inside his own mind, his own bad memories, and even then his behavior is fairly detached and cynical. The only one he's really afraid to see is Red. And after he beats Red with a crowbar inside his head in chapter 26, Fuuka has him at sword-point, but he just glares at her and says, "What is this? What the hell are you doing?"

Background
Kano's background is shrouded heavily in mystery and is a major plot point of the comic. Kano seems to have been raised by a potentially abusive father known only as the Doctor. We know very little about his parents except that both Kano and Kid seem terrified of contact with his father, that Kano learned to sew up his wounds from watching his father's work, and that the Doctor claims that all girls go to hell.

As a child, it seemed that Kano was frequently bullied for looking like a girl but never reacted much to it. He also fell out of a tree at a young age and cracked his skull.

At some point when he was a teenager, Kano ran away from home and began hitchhiking. One night, while looking for supplies before making a trip out into the desert, Kano entered a gas station and spotted the man who would become Red raping and attempting to murder the clerk. While their eyes and minds made contact, the victim shot and killed Red who jumped or was pulled into Kano's head. Kano then blacked out as his latent psychic power trashed the gas station and Red took over.

After the incident at the gas station, Kano was institutionalized. There, he met his roommate Heyoka who looked after him like a big sister. He was able to open up to Heyoka and tell and show her some of the supernatural weirdness that surrounded his life. Eventually, Heyoka left the mental institution after her court case.

Kano did not get along with any of his fellow inmates except for Heyoka and hated all of his doctors, especially Doctor Di Lucien. In group sessions, he encounter Josh a repressed homosexual/homophobe who was deeply embarrassed by mistaking Kano for a girl (or so he says) and hitting on him. Tensions grew worse between the two after Kano threatened him once, and Heyoka had to break up an attack by groping Joshua to make him run away. After Heyoka left, Josh brutally beat and possibly raped Kano until Dark took over and beat him up and either killed him or drove him to flee the institution. Kano escaped the psych ward and ran to Heyoka after the attack.

Kano was also institutionalized for cutting two of his fingers off. He was trying to chop his whole hand off (probably with a meat cleaver ). It's hard to tell when this happened, but it seems like his fingers did not have stitches or scars at the joint when he lived with Heyoka after the gas station incident.

At some point before being summoned, it seems hinted that he or one of his other personalities may have killed Heyoka. Heyoka's death is somehow tied to an image of a soda can over a storm drain that Kano keeps flashing back to. Apparently the soda is one that Heyoka used to like.