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Maribel Hearn

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マエリベリー・ハーン
Maribel Hearn
Maribel Han, Mæriberie Hearn

More Alternative Spellings
Maribel Hearn
Maribel Hearn on the CD Illustration of Unknown Flower, Mesmerizing Journey
Species

Human (native to the Outside World)

Abilities

Ability to see every boundary all over the world

Occupation

University Student (Relative Psychology major)

Location

Kyoto, Japan in the near future.

Relationships
Appearances
Music CDs

Maribel Hearn (マエリベリー・ハーン Maeriberī hān) is a student in the outside world, in a university. She majors in relative psychology and sometimes has difficulty telling the difference between dream and reality (at least, in regards to Gensokyo). She believes subjectivity to be more true than objectivity. Her clan has had the ability to see boundaries since "ancient times" and seeks to dive into another world, despite such a thing being forbidden. Together with her friend, Renko Usami, she has an interest in what would be considered the paranormal. Their club, consisting of only the two of them, describes itself as a club for necromancers. However, they don't do many of the things necromancers would normally be associated with. Instead, they investigate the possibility of other worlds and such. Specifically they're interested in Gensokyo, the Netherworld, and the Moon, and seem to be among the few, or even the only, humans on the outside world who know of Gensokyo's existence. Maribel has visited Gensokyo in her dreams.

Concept

Name

Maribel's nickname is "Merry" or "Mary." She also complains that Renko never calls her by her full name because it's hard for Renko to pronounce. As Maribel's name is written in katakana, she is not of Japanese ethnicity. There is no official romanization for her name, which contributed to many heated discussions about her actual name in her original language. Other than "Maribel" (a Hebrew name that is a very rough approximation of the katakana), there are also "Merryberry" (a closer romanization but utterly meaningless) and "Mæriberry" (arguably closest to the katakana, but still meaningless). The Japanese toho-motoneta wiki posits that her first name could be a corruption of "mulberry". As for her last name, "Hearn" proved to be a popular alternative to "Han" (rough approximation of the katakana), since "Hearn" (as in Lafcadio Hearn) is actually transcribed as ハーン (haan) in Japanese. When ZUN was asked in a high school open lecture about the relation between Maribel and Yukari (see Fandom section below), ZUN cryptically brought up the topic of Lafcadio Hearn - this seems to confirm that her last name was meant to be "Hearn". [1]

Appearance

Usually, she is seen with blond hair, a purple dress and a white mob cap. In Changeability of Strange Dream her white cap was gone, but now has a red ribbon at her collar. In Retrospective 53 minutes, she has a red bowtie around her shoes that she didn't have in Ghostly Field Club. In Magical Astronomy she has her white mob cap again, but the ribbon at the collar is gone. Instead she had red shoes. On the CD illustration of Unknown Flower, Mesmerizing Journey, her shoes appear to be black again and the red ribbon on her collar is back.

Story

Ghostly Field Club

Using a photograph of the Netherworld and Renko's ability to determine location from the moon and the stars, Maribel and Renko attempt to find the entrance to the Netherworld in a ghostly field.

Changeability of Strange Dream

Maribel is talking with Renko about how she is visiting a strange world in her dreams. It starts out nicely but begins to become nightmarish as Maribel is attacked by youkai. Maribel has trouble figuring out what is reality and what is just a dream, and to further complicate the issue, she presents Renko with some of the items she had obtained in her dreams. Renko realizes the truth, and in the end must decide on which will be Mary's reality.

Retrospective 53 Minutes

On a train to Tokyo, Maribel and Renko are looking at a simulated kaleido screen of the outside and discussing the trip, the view, and the nature of objectivity and subjectivity related to it. The trip lasts 53 minutes.

Magical Astronomy

The university campus is abuzz with news of public tours to the moon. Maribel and Renko talk about the world on the moon hidden from humans and eagerly try to plan their own trip to there. Maribel gets a special idea.

Additional Information

Trivia

  • There has never been an official romanization for her name マエリベリー・ハーン (Maeriberii Haan). It is likely that the ハーン in her name translates to "Hearn", as in Lafcadio Hearn the Western author of Japanese Youkai horror stories. Lafcadio Hearn was known as "Koizumi Yakumo" after he gained Japanese citizenship. To add to this parallel, as stated below, "Yukari Yakumo" isn't Yukari's original name, either, nor was Maribel of actual Japanese ethnicity (judging by Maribel's name). After becoming Koizumi Yakumo, Lafcadio also wrote several stories and baiku on the Japanese and Zen beliefs of butterflies and dreaming as one (a recurring theme for both Yukari and Maribel), including a well-known translation of the story The Dream of Akinosuke, where a man travelled to another world in his dreams only to find out in the end that it was real, albeit it turns out to be a world of ants instead of humans (it also contains a reference to the Zen Butterfly philosophy at the end). To add to this, several of Lafcadio's most well known works appear to correspond to Maribel's stories
    • "In Ghostly Japan" was a collection of ghost stories by Lafcadio. ZUN stated he was trying to get a ghostly mood for "Ghostly Field Club".
    • "Exotics and Retrospectives" was a collection of Lafcadio's musings about Japan. It contains a large article about Mt. Fuji as well as a discussion about Zen, musings on paintings, and about the psychology of the color blue, among various other themes such as "beauty in memory" and "literature of the dead", which are all topics and themes that show up in Retrospective 53 Minutes.
    • Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things is a collection of youkai horror stories, including "The Dream of Akinosuke". It would most likely have been what "Changeability of Strange Dream" may have been themed after, given that Maribel is dreaming in a youkai horror story of her own.
    • "The Romance of the Milky Way" may possibly be what Magical Astronomy was themed after. One of the short stories in it is called "The Mirror Maiden", and Magical Astronomy ends with Maribel about to manipulate a boundary using a reflection (in essence, Maribel is a mirror maiden). It was also Lafcadio's final work (published posthumously after his death), just as Magical Astronomy was apparently Maribel's last story (even after Unknown Flower, Memorizable Journey was released).
  • The actual name of Renko and Mary's club is "The Sealing Club", not "Ghostly Field Club", as stated in Ghostly Field Club (which is a story about their club investigating a ghostly field).
  • In Imperishable Night, ZUN mentions in Kaguya's "End of Imperishable Night -Half Past 2-" spell card commentary that this is the time right after when the gate to after-life world has opened. He thus implies that Maribel and Renko possibly did succeed in finding the entrance to the Netherworld in Ghostly Field Club, but all he has to say about it are "So, what did Renko and Merry see, at all?"

Fandom

  • Due to her power to see boundaries, she is sometimes depicted with Yukari.
  • There is a fan theory that Maribel and Yukari Yakumo are actually the same person. Maribel's clothes are very similar to Yukari's clothing from Perfect Cherry Blossom, and both wear red, white, and purple in the various outfits they have (the colors of the visible spectrum border), and wear ribbons in the shape of an eight (the number that Yukari's name stands for). Both characters have blonde hair and (in some depictions) purple eyes, and have abilities related to boundaries,and Changeability of Strange Dream has Renko speculating that Maribel's power to see boundaries is evolving into the power to manipulate them, while Magical Astronomy ends with her about to actively manipulate a boundary in the same way that Yukari did.
    • One theory is that Maribel's ability to see borders fully evolved into the ability to manipulate them (as Renko speculated was happening), she went back in time and got stuck in the past, and she became Yukari (Not necessarily in that order). It's already officially confirmed that Maribel has gone back in time at least once and possibily more than that. In Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, there is an entry about a mysterious memo founded "several hundred years ago" written by a person who believes she is wandering in the bamboo forest while she is dreaming. Despite the fact that the memo is several hundred years old, it mentions a GPS and a cell phone, even though those would not be invented in the outside world until centuries later. The key phrase "I'm gonna tell Renko about it when I wake up" is a clear tip-off that this memo is Maribel's (and clearly ties into her trip to the Bamboo Forest in Changeability of Strange Dream. She even gives Renko a piece of the paper afterwards). The theory goes that Maribel later made another time jump even further into the past (at least 1,200 years ago) and became Yukari after that. Cage in Lunatic Runagate chapter 3 also mentions time travel via spiriting away as possible. The evidence either supporting or at least allowing for Maribel to have become Yukari is:
      • Curiosities of Lotus Asia chapter 26 points out that "Yukari Yakumo" isn't Yukari's original name but instead is a name that Yukari gave herself (and Yukari's article in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense supports this by implying Yukari wasn't originally named Yukari 1200 years ago.) The implication here would be that whoever Yukari used to be (Maribel in this theory), she decided to change her name to Yukari Yakumo, with all the symbolism that name entailed.
      • Changeability of Strange Dream ended with Renko urging Maribel to make her dream (Gensokyo) into a reality. Yukari in Memorizable Gensokyo refers to herself as the representative of Gensokyo's reality. Maribel also stated in Changeability of Strange Dream that she would like to transform that nightmare (Gensokyo) into a paradise by stopping the youkai attacks. Depending on how much you believe Yukari had a hand in various events at Gensokyo's history (the moon invasion making youkai decide to stop expanding their territory, the Hakurei border forcing youkai to value humans, Yukari's agreement to send the extremely atrocious youkai to live in Former Hell away from humans, and the spell card rules that Akyuu states appears to have been drafted by a youkai), that could be what Yukari has been working towards all along.
      • At the end of Magical Astronomy, Maribel is planning to go to the moon using the same technique Yukari uses to go to the moon in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense and Silent Sinner in Blue (utilizing the moon's reflection). Cage in Lunatic Runagate chapter 5 also has Yukari apparently (she tries to pass it off as a make-believe story but doesn't do a really good job with that) reveal to Ran that, even before Yukari went to the moon later for the youkai moon invasion (as the story implies it was the young youkai's first time on the moon), Yukari once went to the moon just to play and look around the capital, which is what Maribel wanted to do.
      • Many of Yukari's spell cards in Perfect Cherry Blossom appear to be referencing Maribel's stories for whatever reason (or alternatively, many of Maribel's stories are referencing Yukari's spell cards in Perfect Cherry Blossom, depending on how you look at it). For some examples:
        • The spell card "Curse of Dreams and Reality" is stated in Changeability of Strange Dream's ending. "Dream and reality are different, so you can make an effort to change dream to reality". It is brought up again in Retrospective 53 Minutes's 11th section.
        • "Balance of Motion and Stillness" is possibly referenced in Changeability of Strange Dream's sixth section. "Though, the bamboo forest sloped a little, which made me lose my sense of balance. I suppose I ran straight, but I cannot say whether it was true. I ran for a long distance, but all I could see was the scene I've seen before. Does this forest lead eternally? Or am I running in the same place?"
        • "Mesh of Light and Darkness" is possibly referenced in Changeability of Strange Dream's seventh section, "Butterfly in the Zen Temple" in Changeability of Strange Dream's seventh section and Retrospective 53 minutes's 11th section, "Xanadu of Straight and Curve" appears to be referenced in the 2nd section of Retrospective 53 minutes, and "Boundary of Life and Death" (as well as Yukari's theme, Necrophantasia) is apparently brought up in Magical Astronomy's 9th section.
      • As stated in the Name section of this page, when asked about the relationship between Maribel and Yukari, ZUN cryptically brought up Lafcadio Hearn. He also stated not to think too much about it, which means maybe he intended the most direct and simplest analogy to be the case for Maribel and Yukari's relationship. In essence, Lafcadio was a non-Japanese author who later moved to Japan and changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, just as Maribel Hearn (who isn't Japanese) may have moved to Gensokyo and changed her name to Yukari Yakumo.
  • An alternative theory is that when Maribel sleeps she dreams that she is Yukari and when Yukari sleeps she dreams she is Maribel. Because Yukari is nocturnal and is known to sleep during the day neither of them would normally be awake at the same time. Maribel is strangely able to cross the border into Gensokyo while dreaming. Some fans go further with this theory to suggest that Gensokyo itself was created in Maribel's dreams, likely due to Akyuu speculating as such in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense. However, the one time Maribel has been depicted as dreaming in Gensokyo (Changeability of Strange Dream), she was actually Maribel in Gensokyo, not Yukari, and all available implications were that the world she was visiting in her dreams had existed before she started visiting it.

Official Sources

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References

  1. ZUN (19 Februari, 2005). "Doujin Barrier: The Work Called Touhou and the Fantasy of Game Creation" (in Japanese). Nagoya's Toukai High School: coolier. Retrieved 6 September, 2011. Check date values in: |accessdate=, |date= (help)CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link)