There was a note, like a letter, from the director in amongst the data I was given prior to starting work on the song. Accompanying it was a memo about the ending added in this game that said, "I remembered that I created the ending of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly with the intention of making something that would make someone in a healthy mental state despair, and show people in a state of despair a reason to go on living, and have decided to return to that origin."
Seeing this reminded me of how when I had been writing Chou, the first song I wrote for Fatal Frame, I wrote the lyrics to contain a double meaning, while following the main beats of the story, so the song would sound different depending on whether or not the listener had played the game.
I, too, decided to return to this origin once more, adopting the same method I'd used for Chou, and - just like the director - set about writing a song that would bring despair to someone in a healthy mental state, while bringing light, if only just a sliver, to someone feeling despair.
For me, the process of writing songs for Fatal Frame involves me myself stepping into the shoes of the game's characters, asking myself what I would see or feel if I were the protagonist, if I were the final boss, and turning that into lyrics. Up until now, I've kept avoiding doing this with the big sister, Mayu. But for this game, I went kind of like, "Alright, third time's the charm!" (laughs) and resolved to put myself in Mayu's shoes, building on the image of the song.
At the same time, I was searching for the kind of title that would call twins to mind. "Utsushie" means something that's alike but different, I guess, or where one of the two isn't the original. Even though they're twins, they aren't the exact same - they each have their own feelings and values, and their own different lives. Mayu and Mio only stumble into the village; they aren't people who were always meant to be sacrifices. I thought the word was one that would carry the insinuation of these things, and so chose it as the title. I decided to write it using hiragana here, but when written in kanji it becomes 写し絵, so it also contains the first character of "photograph" (写真) (laughs).
She doesn't want to be apart from Mio, but Mio is steadily growing up - in that case, she wants to go back to the time before they were born, when they were one. This dependence, or maybe rather intense feelings accompanied by mental unwellness, of Mayu's is something I simply cannot sympathise with myself. During the course of writing the song, though, I realised that this feeling of "if we can't be together then I want to die" could be switched out for an emotion arising from a completely different experience that could realistically occur within real life society. After that, the whole thing came together all in one go.
Though the story I penned was a completely different one, it felt as if the sections of the lyrics meant to evoke the game turned into metaphors within this alternate story, and both sides felt like they slotted together neatly. Maybe you could say that the process of writing the lyrics itself was like a kind of "utsushie".
This time around, right from the start, I wrote the song with the intention of adding in bits here and there where it sounds like two sisters are singing together. You actually can't sing the chorus by yourself (laughs). I also added some harmonisation to the chorus to make it feel like the twins of Minakami Village who were once sacrificed are joining in, too.
Before I got started, the director requested that I write something where the ending could be interpreted as either despair or hope; that he wanted it to end as something that felt like it was heading from 0 towards 1, or the other way around and heading towards 0. In part due to this pressure, I was prepared to struggle with choosing the words to end the song on, but in actuality the words poured right out with no hesitation. I felt like I was being guided by something as I wrote, which was a bit unsettling (laughs).
Within the final refrain, anata wa utsushie, I've secretly included the meaning of "you weren't me, but if I cry, you'll probably cry too, and if I smile, you'll probably smile too, so it all depends on me". Maybe that's the thing I wanted to tell Mayu most of all.
Written on: 1 October 2025 / Tsuki Amano