Sakuya izayoi

[ edit ] Main Profile
Easily one of the most enigmatic characters, despite appearing in so many games, Sakuya is the Chief Maid at the Scarlet Devil Mansion. She works for her mistress, Remilia Scarlet, and is apparently the only human working at or living within the mansion. She has the power to stop time. She is known to then place knives in midair and resume time to allow these knives to fly towards her targets. Stopping time is also a handy way of doing large amounts of maid work in a short time. Because nearly everyone living or working at the mansion are maids, being the chief of them all means there are few people there with more authority within the mansion than Sakuya.

During Embodiment of Scarlet Devil Sakuya attempts to prevent the heroine from reaching her mistress to whom she is very loyal, but fails. Later, during Perfect Cherry Blossom, Sakuya is able to show more of her true character, even if her main reason for trying to solve the problem is that the delayed Spring will affect her too. During the events of Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, she is initially commanded by Remilia to find possible suspects behind the strange weather. After Remilia grows tired of "questioning" suspects, she orders Sakuya to personally find and deal with the culprit. After doing so, Sakuya tells Reimu where to find the culprit, and later helps to rebuild the Hakurei Shrine after it is destroyed for the second time.

[ edit ] Fun Facts

 * The characters for Izayoi literally mean "Sixteenth night" (the night just after that of the full moon), and Sakuya "Flowering night."
 * Sakuya Izayoi is apparently not her real name, according to Perfect Memento, but is only a name given to her by Remilia . Her real name is unknown.
 * Since Sakuya has tremendous skill with handling knives, she is extremely good at cooking.
 * According to Sakuya, if she happens to run out of knives, she can freeze time and pick up the ones she threw previously.
 * According to ZUN, "Manipulation of Time" is synonymous to "Manipulation of Space." She takes advantage of this fact in several ways, from enlarging the space inside Scarlet Devil Mansion , to probably storing an immense amount of knives around. Maybe it's general relativity?
 * Sakuya can also use her powers to accelerate time, such as making bamboo flowers bloom instantly, even though this would normally take sixty years.
 * Sakuya may be an homage to Dio Brando, the main villain of the manga series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, a vampire who is known for stopping time and being skilled at throwing knives. (ZUN has also referenced JoJo's Bizarre Adventure in Remilia's dialogue and Shoot the Bullet Scene 65 . Sakuya also takes the same pose as Dio with one of her moves in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, and has a Spell Card in EoSD named "The World," which is also the name of Dio's stand.
 * Sakuya is often made to have nosebleed in fanworks over Remilia Scarlet or Flandre Scarlet.
 * Sakuya "prepares" food for Remilia and Flandre Scarlet . It's a mystery how this is done exactly, although she mentions in Phantasmagoria of Flower View that with so many flowers around, she can make as much tea and as many pastries as she wants. (Flowers have often been used to provide flavoring for tea, especially in the past, and are still the basis of jasmine tea.)
 * In some fan-produced works, Sakuya is depicted with dog ears and a tail, probably a reflection of various characters referring to her as Remilia's dog. For example, in Sakuya's scenario of Perfect Cherry Blossom the three Prismriver Sisters offer to make her a part of the banquet by eating her. Lyrica starts singing "dog meat, dog meat", implying that Sakuya is a dog. Sakuya is the only one of the three heroines available that the Prismrivers threaten to eat. In that game, Yuyuko names Sakuya "dog of the devil".
 * Another recurring joke with fans is the idea that Sakuya pads her chest to make it seem bigger than it is and goes to great lengths to hide this secret, even from Remilia herself. The origin of this joke was due Sakuya's portraits in Immaterial and Missing Power, which for some reason showed her with larger breasts than were seen in all of her other ZUN-made portraits (with the possible exception of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil).
 * There have been several clues spread across the Touhou series that suggest that Sakuya may not actually be human. Most of these occur in Imperishable Night, where Eirin Yagokoro is surprised to see her (according to Eirin's profile). In another scene, she survives staring at the full moon (which should drive humans insane, even though Marisa, Youmu and Reimu survive staring at it as well...). She has silver hair just like Eirin and uses silver knives, both the color and metal silver representing the Moon in many contexts. In Perfect Memento , Hieda no Akyu agrees that Sakuya probably does not come from Gensokyo, and the description of Kaguya Houraisan 's powers are quite similar to Sakuya's time manipulation. These all seem to point to the possibility that Sakuya may in fact be Lunarian . (Some doujin artists have attempted to explain the relationship between Eirin and Sakuya in their stories. These range from the ideas that Eirin created Sakuya's Lunar Dial, but prolonged usage erased Sakuya's memory, to the two of them even being sisters.)
 * Meiling and Sakuya are the only characters in EoSD to have their long sideburns in braids.
 * Her alternate outfit in Immaterial and Missing Power and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody is an homage to Ruukoto, the series' first maid. In Touhou Hisoutensoku more alternate outfits were added, including a Shinku palette and a Dio Brando palette.
 * Since the announcement of Undefined Fantastic Object and of Sanae Kotiya as the only new playable character (along with Reimu and Marisa), parallels were immediately drawn with Sakuya, the first playable third character of the Windows games. Sakuya or sometimes Youmu was the titular reoccurring side-protagonist until later in the series ( Mountain of Faith, Subterranean Animism ), when she was completely omitted and unmentioned. Jokes and fan art of Sakuya being venomously jealous of Sanae's newfound popularity and prominence commenced. The fact that Sanae is shown with larger breasts than Sakuya also played a factor in some of these fanarts. One fan supposedly even went so far as to hack the source code of Undefined Fantastic Object to put Sakuya into a stage from the game; in it, she battles against a deranged, ranting Sanae to reclaim the role of third playable character (Sanae drags Kanako and Suwako into the fight as well), with Sakuya prevailing via some last minute time trickery. (The hack also makes a joke about Kanako being the only one of the Moriya trio not to be a playable character in Hisoutensoku.) However, the "in-game" dialogue reveals that this "hack" is actually just an edited video, and the creator jokingly requests to not ask him how he "hacked" the game.
 * Why she wasn't a playable character in UFO may be explained by her ending in Phantasmagoria of Flower View . She says that resolving incidents is the job of a Shrine Maiden. Sanae happens to be one.
 * It can be explained that she only gets herself involved if it affects the Mansion or Mistress. The last normal game that condition covered was Imperishable Night

[ edit ] Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red

 * Main article: Article and Interview: Sakuya 

The article reports of Sakuya sneaking into Marisa's house and stealing various objects with the intent of building a rocketship to travel to the moon. Sakuya explains her odd behavior by claiming she is only carrying out Remilia's request.

In the interview, Aya asks to speak to Remilia to find out why she wanted those items, but in stalling Sakuya, she is late in delivering tea to Patchouli, who arrives to see what the hold-up is. Patchouli explains that they were going to use the items for a magic spell which would send them to the moon, but it ultimately proved useless in the end. The interview ends with Sakuya inviting Aya to join them for tea-time.

[ edit ] Perfect Memento in Strict Sense

 * Main article: Perfect Memento: Sakuya Izayoi 


 * Sakuya both lives and works at the Scarlet Devil Mansion as a maid and she's the only human there.
 * She's in charge of all the fairy maids there.
 * The other maids have many perks to their jobs and rarely choose to leave, but are not paid or given vacations.
 * The maids are nearly useless though and most of the work is done by Sakuya alone, which would be impossible if she didn't stop or slow time.
 * Sakuya's power to manipulate time is not something that could normally be learned.
 * Although she can speed or slow time it's difficult to change things that have already occurred, such as undoing damage.
 * She can also manipulate space, conjure things, and is a skilled knife thrower.
 * Sakuya joined the Scarlet Devil Mansion before it moved to Gensokyo, and since she had never been seen there before it's unlikely that she's from Gensokyo at all.
 * Her origins are mysterious and she may be from the world outside Gensokyo, some other world, or even the Moon 's capital.
 * One theory is that she may have originally been a vampire hunter who tried to defeat Remilia Scarlet with her trademark silver knives and lost.
 * She works for Remilia willingly and it is not known what her motivations are or why Remilia has chosen to trust her so much.
 * Sakuya Izayoi is not her real name, and was supposedly the name Remilia gave to her after she lost to Remilia as way of controlling Sakuya's fate.
 * She shops at the Human Village, but she is cold toward other humans and has no friends there.
 * However, ever since Remilia was beaten by the heroine of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Sakuya has begun opening herself up more.
 * Remilia may have fated this to happen.
 * Although Sakuya claims to be in her late teens, many things about her suggest she may be much older and possibly even hundreds of years old.

[ edit ] The Grimoire of Marisa

 * Main article:  The Grimoire of Marisa: Sakuya Izayoi's Spell Cards 


 * Insert Summary Here