Later, when a dog may have mistaken Kanna for its mother, Kanna says,
As they reflect that they both lost their mothers young, Takuya repeats the point:
For Takuya, Kanna is a figure of both maternal nostalgia and sexual attraction, once again linking familial with sexual love.
The tragic story of Kanna’s life hinges on the fantasy scenario of limited immortality resulting from her Celestial or Dela Grante biology. Kanna has stopped aging physically at around age eighteen but, to survive, must have Hypersense Stone close to her body. As a result of her “peculiarity,” unable to forge healthy relationships or lead a normal life, Kanna states that her mother, Amanda, was her only friend. Following Amanda’s death and real estate brokers scamming her out of the Hatano household, Kanna becomes a prostitute, spending years or decades sleeping with clients depicted exclusively as significantly older men or, given Kanna’s agelessness, men who appear significantly older. Although Kanna understands her johns do not care about her, sex allows her to suppress her isolation:
Kanna herself harbors a kind of Oedipal complex, perhaps part of the “hidden tension” she claims human life is built upon. She feels strong affection for her mother, whom she describes in sexual terms as “incredibly well-proportioned.” After Amanda’s death, Kanna’s absentee father leaves her alone and battling loneliness through sex with older men, men perhaps the age of her imagined father, akin to how “Mr. Mother Complex” Takuya, meanwhile, favors older women. In the Epilogue, when, under the cumulative strain of her sister’s death and her own torture, Amanda enters a state of emotional instability, Takuya takes advantage of her vulnerability to have sex with her under the moonlight. In this scene, Amanda uses language about loneliness reminiscent of Kanna’s: “Takuya… I’m sick of it… I’m bloody sick of being alone!”
When they are through, Amanda stops weeping, for “carnal satisfaction and a sense of security [have] overridden her loneliness” in a manner analogous to how the daughter with whom Takuya has in this moment impregnated her will pursue sex with older men to “fill up the loneliness in [her] heart.” Kanna’s conception prefigures the tension of her life. Longing for the father she never met, Kanna reenacts her mother’s moonlit dalliance with Takuya with various older men until she resolves her complex by having sex with her father in Meiunji Park under the moonlight. Kanna duplicates her conception in an act that supposedly proves Takuya does not “despise” her for “[pocketing] dirty money,” the sex a demonstration of the love she never (before) received from her missing father. While less overt, for Kanna is somewhat less of an absurd caricature than Takuya, she too nurses Oedipal feelings even as her father prefers to liken her to his mother. As Yu-no is simultaneously Takuya’s daughter and mother, so too is Kanna.