Towa Kannagi (神無木 登和, Kannagi Towa) is a major character of Mermaid Saga, appearing in the story “Mermaid Forest”.
Biography[]
Towa is the twin sister of Sawa, born in the Kannagi family which for ages has done researches on mermaids in a hidden repository called Mermaid Hill in the Kannagi lands, where a mermaid caught by an ancestor is being kept along with medicines and poisons made from her corpse.
She contracted a terminal disease, and her sister who thus became the sole heiress of the Kannagi family line, had her drink the blood of a mermaid which cured her illness, but caused her right arm to become deformed resembling that of a deformed one’s and turned her hair white. She learned by overhearing her father scolding Sawa that she knew that mermaid flesh is poison and no one had ever attained immortality, meaning she was used as a guinea pig for her hope to remain forever young and beautiful, and was reported dead of her illness and locked in a cell beneath their house, never allowed to come out.
For years, Towa lived alone completely cut off from the world except for her fiancé, Dr. Shinna who offered many times to take her away from the life she was leading, but she would always kindly refuse, saying she has something to do. While she didn’t age on the outside, her internal organs continued to age naturally, and her deformed arm would cause her great pain, so she would have Dr. Shiina repeatedly amputate the right arms of still fresh dead young girls that were either brought to his clinic or taken from a new grave so that she could reattach them to her, since each arm would become deformed causing the pain to come back after a few years. After her father died, Towa is released from her cell by Sawa who had a life of her own, getting married and having a child, but eventually lost both her husband and son and so would live with her as she is the only family she has left. While still living in the same house, Towa hold no sympathy for Sawa since despite being identical only she got to the privilege to live the life of an ordinary woman, and tries to make her reveal the location of Mermaid Hill in vain.
One night, Mana is brought by Dr Shiina as the next dead girl whose arm was to be amputated and reattached to Towa, but much to her surprise, she wakes up since she is immortal, so Towa keeps her as a guest. She then finds Yuta breaking in her estate, and after learning he’s a friend of Mana, unleashes her deformed dog Shiro on him. The day after, as Sawa and Dr Shiina were digging a grave for him, she notices his wounds disappearing thus realizes that he’s also immortal so has him locked in the cell she had been held in. She sympathizes with Mana then as she admires her body strangles her to death with the bandages of her right arm for she decided to have her head cut off and her own head placed in her body. She leaves Shiro with Yuta in the cell then tasks Dr. Shiina to cut Mana’s head off although he couldn’t do it so she was unreluctantly about to do so herself, which eventually makes Sawa relent and take her to Mermaid Hill.
She brings Mana along ready to chop her head off in case Sawa was lying, and as she becomes ecstatic to have finally found the mermaid in a pit, Yuta arrives and warns her how it is rare for a person to withstand the violent mutation by eating mermaid flesh but she says whatever the outcome didn’t matter to her and throws Mana into the pit to get mermaid flesh from the mermaid for her, which forces Yuta to go into the pit as well. After witnessing the two take down the deformed one that was in the pit, she comes down to get mermaid flesh and tells Sawa to eat it, revealing that her long desire was to get revenge on Sawa by inflicting the same suffering she underwent, however, as she tries to force her to eat it, Sawa suddenly dies of a heart attack. Robbed of her revenge, she cries saying it’s not fair and joins her sister in death as she demands that Mermaid Hill and everything associated with it be burned.
Trivia[]
- Her seiyu in the anime provided the voices of Asuka Mizunokōji from Urusei Yatsura, Kyōko Otonashi from Maison Ikkoku, Sue from Maris the Chojo, Suzuko from Fire Tripper, and Seiko Shima from One Day Dream in the Rumiko Takahashi Anthology.
- A character from Hanyō no Yashahime is named Towa. Coincidentally, both characters have a twin sister.
- Her deformed right arm is three-fingered in the manga, but is five-fingered in both Mermaid Forest (OVA) and the TV series.
- In Mermaid Forest (OVA):
- She uses her dog named Shiro in searching for Mermaid Hill.
- She kills herself after Mermaid Hill is in flames by running into it.
Gallery[]
To be added