CIVILIAN . FUJIHARA, KAZUE

Female Male Unknown Female

...Heterosexual?

Twenty-four

March 13th 1988

Japanese.

Native Japanese
Fairly fluent in English but definitely not at 100%

Nazo is her stage name for the band
Kazu is the nickname coined by their lead singer

0.50

Civilian

N/A

N/A

N/A

Dani

Lukas Madeleine
Marielle LaRoux
Ryeson Savage

Would prefer not

Piko from Nico Nico Singer

Being lead guitarist & backup vocals for Sound Fuse - aka famous, just not in this country - has its perks. (HELL I NEVER MADE A DESCRIPTION HERE WILL DO IT LATER)

● Is just the right height to pass for a somewhat tall female and slightly short male (in Japanese standards, anyway) – 5'5”. She also lacks a lot of curves, save for her hips – which is easily concealed by looser clothing. She isn't really bothered by her complete lack of bosom.

● While Kazue certainly isn't masculine-looking, if she's wearing just the right clothes, styles her hair just right, and pointedly ignores makeup, she can convincingly appear to be a pretty-boy like many other male Japanese stars, causing confusion about her gender. To this end, she does dress like this, and does it on purpose - mostly when she's on stage with her band-mates, doing any interviews, or making any public appearances. She's made it nigh impossible to truly pinpoint her gender, and refuses to say which one it is - this is assisted, of course, by the fact she even has a voice that's on the lower pitch of female, and she does well in imitating male mannerisms and postures in many things she does.

● Natural hair color is a very dark coffee brown, but it's always changing. One thing about her is that she can't be satisfied with a hair color for long, and once every month or two, there will be a new color - or, at the very least, a new variant of color streaks through her current choice of 'base' color. She'll be the first to admit, she has a bit of an obsession with her hair, and simply can't be satisfied if it's the same color for more than two months.

● When she was younger, more rebellious, and more troubled, a couple of her male friends managed to convince her to get a tattoo - which are a pair of tribal-style wings at her shoulder-blades on her back, one of the few marks left on her from her youth, and definitely the most innocent one - if one can consider a tattoo innocent.

● Rather nasty scar that was the result of an…accident when she was in her early teens, located on the side of her leg right above her left leg. It was a fairly severe slash, one that needed a copious amount of stitches, causing a limp in her walk for almost two months.

● Her wardrobe is somewhat noteworthy – it varies so wildly from one thing to another one almost has to wonder if she's the same person. If there's anything to describe her style, it's 'bipolar'. When she's with Sound Fuse, or doing anything public/publicity-related, she's wearing anything that matches them - very punk-styled, baggy pants, combat boots, leather armbands, all her piercings in, etc. She also makes it a point to wear almost no makeup, either, save for a thin layer of foundation and eyeliner - the less of her feminine features that stand out, the better. Outside of that, however, it's far less difficult to tell her gender - especially when she's out in public and trying to not look like who she really is - she'll pop on a nice blouse, flowy skirt, tie her hair back into something far more conservative, actually make use of the cosmetic kit she carries, step into a pair high heels, and presto, she's an entirely different person. Everything she wears always varies on what goes on around her, where she's going, and the like – much like her attitude.

How one sees her does depend a lot on who you meet her as. There's Nazo, the stage persona, who's confident, flirtatious, rather a smartass, and frustratingly cryptic in subjects they don't want to elaborate on – such as their gender. Nazo is also considered blatantly bisexual, as they don't discriminate who they flirt with, and eloquent to boot – choosing words carefully before speaking, though that is in part due to concealing gender. Then there's the covert version of Kazue, who pretends to be a chipper, sociable, slightly timid, “average” female as so no one would ever suspect her to be Nazo, pretending to be the sister of various members of her band anytime she is asked why she's touring with them. The real Kazue is a mix between these, though she's not offered many opportunities to show it beyond those in her band.

She's quite laid-back and humor-driven, making her hard to get riled up - though she seems to do a good job of getting everyone else worked up, either through her constant inability to take anything seriously, or her habit of occasionally pulling pranks on those she lives near. She likes to keep people on their toes, likes to keep them guessing - one of the many reasons that, to the public eye, her gender is unknown - she likes watching them speculate, watching them try and manipulate it out of her, and is even more amused when she shoots them down, and crushes their hopes. She's certainly not a bad person - her sense of humor is simply a little strange, and what others consider mean-spirited in some cases. She is, however, a generally upbeat, friendly person to be around, even if she may make fun of you a bit.

It was from her debacles with her family that she learned humor was the best way to deal with everything, causing her to make light where she sometimes shouldn't in order for her to feel a bit less downtrodden by a situation. This is a bit of a double-edged sword, however, as some people don't appreciate how easily she seems to brush things off - even if when, in truth, it does effect her, she simply chooses not to emotionally deal with it, as it's easier for her. She deflects from all serious situations, for the most part. She hates it when people fight, or someone brings up a highly uncomfortable subject, and she's the type who will make highly inappropriate or ill-timed jokes and jabs as so to distract whomever caused the situation away from whatever they were speaking about. It perhaps makes her seem a lot bubblier and naïve than she is in reality - though it also helps her be incredibly hard to anger, as she even deflects insults thrown directly at her.

She's incredibly proud of how far she and Sound Fuse have come, and she's well aware of her talents, causing her to have many egotistical moments - she has a hunger to prove herself even now, and always likes to point out when she's the 'better' in any given situation - even silly, petty ones like in her video games. Her egotism mixed with her humor can sometimes make her come off as a…well, complete bitch, given proper circumstances, though that's certainly never show she means it. She rather likes her sense of self-confidence (seeing as, not 6 or 7 years ago, she had no self-confidence, so the change was quite nice, being able to feel like she's worth something in this world), so she has a habit of taking it too far. She would never, ever purposely hurt any of her friends, however, seeing as she has an incredibly deep-seated loyalty for those few she allows into her heart, and actually attempts to show her affection in forms other than teasing - though, overall, the teasing comes out more often than the affection.

Due to her family being as they were, she can get clingy to her friends, being afraid that she may lose them or they may get sick of her, or something equally bad - one of the few insecurities she has left. This drives her to be a lot more intrusive into their lives than should be allowed, prying out every piece of information she can when she notices anyone hiding anything. It also ties into her trust issues - some deep-seated pessimism in the back of her head tells her they could be hiding something big, something vastly important, and it was going to hurt her when she found out later rather than sooner. However, as a whole, she's not too bad or irritating of a girl - a little odd, a bit emotionally distanced, but generally good at heart, if push comes to shove.

Kazue was the second-born child and first daughter of Fujihara Shouta & Ishi, a middle-class family living in the hub that is Tokyo, Japan. They weren't what you'd call a happy couple, but they were comfortable - and everything seemed…well enough in the start of things. Growing up, she had few people to keep her company beyond her mother and her older brother, which mostly ended with her following her brother around like a secondary shadow until she was five or six years old - when she was able to leave the house that was. She was an energetic, chipper girl even from the start, and no one would have ever believed the unrest that started to erupt in her home when Kazue was between the ages of four and six - something that started small and erupted into something much bigger.

It started with her mother - something small, all her father had done was push her a little roughly - she could remember the fight accompanying it only vaguely, and had no clue what it was about, but Kazue remembers vividly how shaken her mother had been after that. It was never anything that left lasting harm, and he always apologized profusely, and yet, despite this, kept doing it. It was when she was seven that he first physically assaulted her brother, and nine when he finally did it to her. She came to fear for her younger sister, whom had been born when she was six years of age, warning her to be careful around their father. He never hit them, per se, he simply would push them around a bit too roughly, which could result in them falling against something painful or losing balance and falling to the floor entirely. She hadn't thought him abusive, and she never genuinely feared him…until she was about eleven years old, and she failed an entrance exam into one of the best and most difficult schools in the area.

It was her first trip to the hospital in her whole life. She blamed herself for it - she'd allowed herself to be caught somewhere unsafe, and when her father had given her a harsh shove, she'd went ungracefully down a flight of stairs, and by the time she reached the bottom, she was out cold. They were forced to take her due to the fact that they hadn't been able to wake her up and, fearing concussion, they'd rushed her there. After the event, her father had seemed truly guilt-stricken, and had apologized profusely to his eldest daughter for it, for which she assured him she did not blame him for - though inwardly, she'd come to view him in a much more sinister light, and found it more and more difficult to forgive him for everything he did as time pressed on, and the instances became more frequent, and more vicious.

There were no significant events for a while, and Kazue took refuge in her schoolwork, her friends, and her newfound passion, music - secretly working odd jobs, saving for months and months and months to be able to buy a very battered, but reliable, acoustic guitar, and the little time she did spend at home was either focused on schoolwork, or plucking at her new toy, keeping as withdrawn from her family as possible - she'd even pulled away from her mother and her brother, whom she'd adored to pieces and were part of her fondest memories as a child, but to see the family being cracked apart by her father…she couldn't take it, and at the time, she hadn't had the courage to fight it. So she focused on her friends, and learned several things from the one who'd introduced her to her new passion for music. She kept at her odd jobs in-between all this, as well, secretly saving up to be able to take lessons.

The more she immersed herself into learning how to play her guitar, however, the more her grades in school dwindled - she'd managed to find somewhere to take lessons, and would evasively give an excuse to where she disappeared each Thursday, always having a friend play as her backup in case her parents asked them. She began to function regularly on a mere four or five hours of sleep, sneaking out of her window to practice at the nearby park as soon as she'd rushed through schoolwork. She should have known the whole thing would have blown up in her face one day, really.

When her father found out why her grades were dropping so drastically, he did two things - one, while she was at school, he took her guitar, cut the strings, and tossed it in the trash can, and two - when she did get home, and immediately launched into a fit of hysteria and rage over what he'd done to the thing she'd worked so hard to earn, there was a fight unlike any the family had seen, and for a moment, Kazue had debated fighting back at him when he shoved her against the wall of their apartment complex - she'd stood back up and kept going, asking him why he thought her hobby was such a bad thing when she was genuinely good at it. When he shoved her again, harder and more violent than he ever had, her upper leg had collided with a sheet of metal where their building was performing construction - slicing her leg clean open, and resulting in another hospital visit. A profuse amount of stitches and a warning from the doctor to take it easy later, they went home. This time, he didn't apologize.

That was the last time he ever struck her. This was mostly helped by the fact that she only lived there for two years after this event, but that's jumping ahead a bit too far. She knew she was on her final straw by now, however, seeing as her father's outbursts had become violent enough to scare her whole family into submission - save for her brother, who had moved out one year prior to Kazue's most recent 'accident'. He'd promised to help them move out if he could, but his contact with the family nearly dropped of entirely after he left…honestly, she didn't blame him. She wouldn't want to associate with them if she could leave, either, just knowing that the pull of wanting to help them would bring her right back where she started. It all came to a head for her barely after she graduated high school.

She only just managed to get semi-decent grades in her final exams in high-school, and began to try and quickly make up for it, attempting to get into college as fast as possible, which seemed to be getting her nowhere - she was never a terribly brilliant girl to begin with, so it wasn't easy. She was never stupid, just…naturally average, and had to work incredibly hard to live up to the expectations her father had had for her. Unfortunately, her father apparently 'discovered' the reason for her grades - her steady boyfriend of two years, with whom she was quite serious with, even to the point of discussing marriage, and him being her first. Her mother and sister knew about him - but her father never had. This ended quite horribly, mostly with her father demanding the two of them break up, firing the biggest fight yet - and this time, Kazue fought back. This time, he actually hit her - and this time, she hit him right back. She decided her line had been crossed, and she wouldn't deal with it anymore. In the ten minute window she had as her father sat stunned at the fact his daughter had had the balls to fight him, she gathered a few of her favorite clothes, her new guitar (which she had hidden much better), and fled.

The next two years were a blur of odd jobs, sleeping on the couches of friends, occasionally getting bits of money from her brother (who she'd managed to get back in contact with once she left), and even occasionally sleeping on public benches when worse came to worse. Her resolve wavered many a time, but there was always someone around to convince her what she did was the right thing, and to not go back. So, she never did - slowly but surely, she managed to start establishing herself a life…not a good one, mind you, but she managed to eventually maintain her own very small, very crappy apartment, and she did everything she could to get extra money, including street performances of her music ability, which were both an act of practicing her skills as well as impromptu cash. This was how she was eventually found, and recruited by, Herrick Kobayashi.

When she was almost 20, she officially became a member of Sound Fuse, mostly as her form of release - she never expected anything to come of it, she never thought of it as more than a fuel for her passion for music in exchange for a little extra cash from the small gigs they would do. She never dreamed they'd actually become famous. There were a good three years spent on smaller performances around Tokyo, at clubs and occasionally something for a small event outside, with steadily growing appointments as time wore on. Kazue found herself being unable to balance her job as a waitress and her weekly shows properly, and, being forced into a tough choice, she picked cutting her work hours in order to do what she actually loved. Her time with the band had allowed her to rekindle a little confidence in herself, even before they were able to break it big.

It was only a little bit over a year ago that Sound Fuse hit a sensation level, and broke onto the music scene with such a force, some people wondered where they came from. Kazue, in that short span of time, has been working hard to try and contact her mother and sister, attempting to convince them both to leave their home - offering them money. Funnily enough, her family seems oblivious to her fame - with her stage name, mixed with the fact she dresses so she doesn't look the gender she is, and also thrown in with that her parents certainly don't keep up with the music scene, she suspects only her brother knows about it, and that’s only because she kept in a constant phone contact with him the whole time, the only family left she actually considers family. The rest of them seem so far away now, in a different lifetime almost. And despite it sometimes seeming so surreal, her life in fame seems almost natural to her now, even if, not seven years ago, finding her sleeping on an abandoned bench in a park wouldn't have been out of place at all.

● She has a cat by the name of Miki who has been her constant companion and her baby for six years now. She found her just outside her dinky apartment in Tokyo when she was still crawling around in the dregs of poverty, and, unable to resist the poor starving cat despite the extra expense it would be, took the thing in. Miki was the only thing who kept her sane at several of the lowest points in her life, and she refuses to be separated from her for very long. Even after she broke big with Sound Fuse, the cat has always been with her - except now she's pampered rather than fed scraps from Kazue's own dinner.

● She has a bit of a language barrier, even if she's decently fluent in English. She can read some basics, she can understand those speaking it, and she has a fair knowledge of being able to speak it herself, but there are some bumps she hits. Slang, for one, often completely derails something for her, and she also has some issues being able to tell when someone is joking with her or not, seeing as she's generally on unstable footing with English - she's been known to take thing quite seriously by accident because she just doesn't know how sarcasm and humor comes across in the language. However, she's steadily getting better with sarcasm, seeing as it's one of her favorite things, and to be able to portray it in two languages properly is her goal.

● Her accent ties in a bit to her English issues, but it deserves its own mention. Her Japanese accent is noticeable, though not what you'd call gratuitous - she's understandable, if still slurring certain sounds her native tongue didn't have an equivalent to.

● Her guitars (three electric, one acoustic, and she ALWAYS travels with all four) are her babies second only to her cat. If you break them, she will break you.