• Welcome to Touhou Wiki!
  • Registering is temporarily disabled. Check in our Discord server to request an account and for assistance of any kind.

Renko Usami: Difference between revisions

From Touhou Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
(thanks to z-seraph on tumblr for pointing out (post/148794219206/))
No edit summary
Line 1: Line 1:
{{about|character from Touhou fiction|singer|User:Renko}}
{{about|the character|the singer|User:Renko}}


{{Infobox Character
{{Infobox Character

Revision as of 20:47, 3 June 2017


宇佐見 (うさみ) 蓮子 (れんこ)
ɯsamʲi ɽeŋko (♫)
Renko Usami
Renko Usami
Renko Usami on the cover of Trojan Green Asteroid
Species

Human (native to the outside world)

Abilities

Telling the current time by looking at the stars and the current place by looking at the moon (a living GPS).

Occupation

University Student (Super unified physics major)

Location

Kyoto, Japan in the near future.

Appearances
Print Works
Music CDs

Renko Usami (宇佐見 蓮子 Usami Renko) is a student in the outside world, presumably in a college or university. She majors in physics and is very objective and logical in her approach to matters. Together with her friend, Maribel Hearn, 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 spirits and such. Specifically they're interested in Gensokyo and seem to be among the few, or even the only, humans in the outside world who know of Gensokyo's existence.

General Information

Occupation

According to Changeability of Strange Dream, she studies super-unified physics, specializing in "strings." According to Retrospective 53 minutes, she lives in Kyoto like Maribel does, but her actual home seems to be in Tokyo.

Background Information

Name

Her full name is Renko Usami (宇佐見 蓮子), where both the given name and surname are actual names in Japanese. The kanji for Renko (蓮子) literally mean "lotus child" respectively; the -ko is a common suffix in Japanese that's used in female names.

Design

Renko usually wears a black hat with a bow, white suit, and a brown dress. In Magical Astronomy and Trojan Green Asteroid, she is also wearing a black shawl. She also has brown hair and often carries a book with her.

Story

Ghostly Field Club

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

Changeability of Strange Dream

Merry 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 Merry is attacked by youkai. Merry 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 Merry's reality.

Retrospective 53 Minutes

In Retrospective 53 minutes, Merry and Renko were on a train to Tokyo. They were 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. Renko commented on her, saying "You might be as carefree as the Tōhoku people though". The trip lasts 53 minutes.

Magical Astronomy

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

Trojan Green Asteroid

Maribel and Renko discuss the lost micro-habitat space station TORIFUNE, Merry claiming that she has seen inside it and everything is still alive. Since the station contains a shrine to Ame-no-Torifune, they travel to another such shrine and use Maribel's ability to transport themselves there through their dreams. They discover that the interior has become a dense jungle, and are attacked by a chimera. Maribel wakes up with a cut on her arm and is sent to hospital.

Neo-traditionalism of Japan

While in hospital, Maribel is diagnosed with sleepwalking and hallucinations; believing this to be a previously unknown virus, the doctors send her to the mountains for isolation treatment. By the time she's released her powers have grown stronger and she now sees visions while awake. Merry discusses Hell with Renko, but doesn't tell her that she physically travelled to Hell while in isolation. Renko tells Merry that while she was in isolation the news has been talking about discoveries of stone tools more than 25 million years old, though they were dismissed as a hoax.

Maribel and Renko's cameo in Symposium of Post-mysticism

Merry believes otherwise, and presents one she found herself. Merry shows Renko a vision of the underground realm where she found it, and Renko recognises the Ame-no-Sakahoko as being there. Merry calms down, no longer believing the place she saw to be Hell but the world of the gods. The two decide to find more such "Izanagi Objects" that lie unrecognised across Japan.

Relationships

Maribel Hearn

Renko and Maribel Hearn are the only members of the Secret Sealing Club and both are a fellow students at a university. The two are very good friends, working together to seek out other worlds, travelling by train together to Renko's home-town, discussing going to the moon together, and Maribel confiding to Renko about her travels to another world in her dreams.

Sumireko Usami

Because Sumireko Usami shares Renko's surname, has a similar appearance, and as she created the Secret Sealing Club that Renko is part of, there is likely some sort of relation between the two. However, the specifics of this connection is as yet unknown. Sumireko's profile suggests Renko descends from the former.

Gallery

Additional Information

  • Regardless of the place she is at, with her ability to tell the time by looking only at the stars, she can only tell the current time in Japanese Standard Time (JST). If she wanted to know the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), she would have to do the necessary calculation.
  • Regardless of the presence of absence of scenery in a photograph, in Ghostly Field Club she was able to tell where a photograph was taken due to the projection of the moon in the photograph.
  • In both Ghostly Field Club and Changeability of Strange Dream, she was the one who was late for the meeting with Merry.
  • Renko is one of the only characters known to live outside of Gensokyo. As such, she has never actually met any of the other characters except Maribel Hearn, who also lives outside Gensokyo. Yuyuko Saigyouji has encountered the Secret Sealing Club on a visit to the outside world, but Renko did not seem able to see her.

Fandom

Official Sources