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Snowflakes were falling all over wintry Kyoto when the world was graced with Subaru's birth.
It is said that children born in winter time are to have a much sadder and stormy life
than those born during sunny summer.
Perhaps Subaru is the living proof this statement is true.
With his healthy-frail mother dying on giving birth to twins, Subaru was promptly to become an
orphan when his father died mysteriously little time afterwards, and so his raising and
education were left in the hands of his Grandmother, Lady Sumeragi, the respected matriarch of the ancient Sumeragi Clan.
The main inheritance he was given from his late father was the utterly important title
of Thirteenth Head of the Sumeragi Clan, a task he never got to finish himself due to his inpredictable pass away.
With that enormous responsibility over his just-born child's shoulders, Subaru was to become the
young Sumeragi Prince, something that carried along a life divested of anything else but concentration
and discipline in order to master the mysterious Omnyoujitsu arts. Here the story appears somehow
blurred, though according to Hokuto's own words, eventhough she was the elder of both high Sumeragi
twins born from the former Head of the Clan, it were Subaru's Omnyoudo skills and the gift of
the Sumeragi Family's magical powers that laid on him the ones that granted the male inheritor this
unrefusable title.
There begins a story of a shattered childhood, signed by the absense of warmth and love other than his twin sister's
who he was afterwards barely allowed to even see while he was absorbed by his extremely, almost tyrannically dominating
Grandmother and her wishes to make of him the most powerful, disciplined and pure-hearted Omnyouji Magician ever
existent.
It was as if she had considered Subaru as the most proper and suitable replacement for the son she had lost,
so Subaru's childish games were changed for the complicated practices of Sanscrit entonation and grammatics, while
his contact with the real world gradually became more and more blurred, partially due to his confinement to the
Sumeragi mansion at Kyoto in the first years, partially because of the way in which Omnyoujitsu trainning
called for the whole of his young attention.
So Subaru was to become a white cherry blossom growing in a solitaire, over-protected garden, therefore his
reserved and shy personality, always to be contained by the severe watchfulness of Lady Sumeragi. He remaint kept behind a
perfumed barrier of perfection and denied the capacity to know what real evil was. It's more than sure
this strange lack of what a normal child always needs to become accustomed to the surrounding world is the one that
marked his perpetually innocent heart with the idea of being 'different'.
Subaru's yearning for simple things, his love towards animals which were the only ones he could understand, his
need for tenderness and protection, his caring towards people not bearing as much luck as him, it all has root in his
almost inexistent childhood. Maybe it's even in the lack of the vitally important male figure, replaced by the overpowering
prescence of a female one where Subaru's absolute infatuation with a masculine model such as his soon-to-be beloved
has it's basements, together with his homosexual tendencies, but that's just a theory of mine.
Maybe he would have become a totally different person, had his father lived.
The truth is his childhood years were marked by events that afterwards came to mean important crisis in the
teenaged Subaru's life: his apparently superdoted intelligence (notice that in Tokyo Babylon Volume 2: 'Dream'
he is drawing trigonometrical problems on the ground when being only ten, while when he is sixteen years old he has certain difficulties at school), the lost of Mitsuki's friendship
framed by her childishly cruel words, the death of his beloved dog and, of course, the mysterious stranger he met
under a Sakura tree...
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