u/JustASqu1d

If you spend any amount of time in the Project SEKAI fandom discussing the immiscible discord event, you will inevitably stumble upon the same, universally accepted literary consensus: Asahina Mafuyu is the modern incarnation of Gregor Samsa. And to be fair, the fandom is absolutely correct to draw this conclusion. The parallels are meticulously baked into the narrative of the "Samsa" 2DMV. Both Mafuyu and Gregor are solitary figures crushed beneath the weight of their families' utilitarian expectations, functioning as well-programmed machines suffering from a societal "bug."

On a surface level, the Mafuyu-Samsa parallel is undeniable. In Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa is defined entirely by his utility to his family; he is a traveling salesman whose only sense of self-worth is tied to the paycheck he brings home.^(1) When he inexplicably transforms into a giant insect, his first thought isn't horror at his lost humanity, but anxiety over missing the 8:00 AM train. Mafuyu mirrors this tragedy of commodification through the lens of extreme academic and social expectation. Her identity has become a meticulously maintained a facade of excellence. Her value is defined primarily by her academic and future potential. Within a family environment that prioritizes stability and traditional success, Mafuyu’s own internal desires have been sidelined in favor of a version of herself that functions like a machine. For both her family and eventually for Mafuyu herself, her worth has become synonymous with her ability to produce the results required of a "perfect" daughter. When the "bug" in her programming, her repressed depression, and her desires to create begins to surface, she becomes an alien entity within her own home, just as Gregor becomes a monster in his. She is the insect trapped in the circuitry of a world that only values what she can perform.

Nevertheless, to say that Mafuyu is the only Kafka parallel is not just an oversimplification; it is fundamentally incomplete. While the fandom hyper-fixates on Mafuyu's psychological alienation, the character who physically embodies the reality of Kafka’s tragedy is often overlooked. To fully appreciate the weight of the "Samsa" commissioned song, we have to look past the honor student facade and turn our attention to the girl composing in the dark.

Yoisaki Kanade parallels Gregor Samsa and expands upon the metaphor. When we look at Kafka’s broader bibliography, she emerges as a textbook "Kafkaesque" protagonist.

To understand the Samsa connection, we must first look at the timeline. Mafuyu perfectly encapsulates Gregor pre-transformation: a dutiful child hollowed out by crushing obligations. Kanade, however, is the embodiment of Gregor post-transformation. After his metamorphosis, Gregor is locked in a decaying room, stripped of his framed clippings, and abandoned by a disgusted maid. Kanade’s life is similarly restricted to a single room following the trauma of her father's hospitalization. She removes her family photographs after moving into her father's room and lives a nocturnal existence amidst scattered music sheets and cup noodles.

Yet, Kanade's literary connections extends far beyond the confines of Gregor's bedroom. Look closely at her relationship with food, and you will see the ghostly outline of another Kafka work, A Hunger Artist.^(2) The story follows a performer who fasts himself to death while his audience slowly stops paying attention. In an interview with the New York Times, Frederick R. Karl, a literary critic and Kafka's biographer, noted that this story was essentially a self-portrait where Kafka himself wasted away, viewing his biological needs as obstacles to his writing.^(3)

Kanade embodies this exact same brand of slow self-consumption. She views her own well-being—sleep, nutrition, sunlight—as a detriment to her relentless 24/7 production cycle. She neglects her body to serve her music. Where Gregor's starvation is forced upon him by a neglectful family, Kanade's is self-imposed, making Mochizuki Honami's role as a caretaker even more important. Honami disrupts this "hunger artist" narrative. By baking her warm, sweetened apple pie, Honami subverts the weaponized apples that killed Gregor Samsa and breaks the cycle of starvation, forcibly anchoring Kanade back to her own humanity. If the raw apple in Kafka's work accelerates Gregor's death, then Honami's apple pie sustains Kanade's life. It reminds Kanade of her humanity. It reminds that she is not a machine designed to output music. It reminds Kanade that she is a human being who deserves to be nourished and loved.

To contrast The Metamorphosis, after the first maid flees, the Samsa family eventually hires an elderly charwoman who treats Gregor not as a tragic figure—or even a person—, but as a disgusting pest, occasionally taunting him. Under the neglect of his family and the staff, Gregor's room is slowly stripped of its human elements and repurposed as a storage closet for the household's junk. The degradation of his room shows his loss of humanity. Kanade’s room, on the other hand, devolves into a dark wasteland of instant noodle cups, energy drink cans, and scattered music sheets. However, Honami acts as a constant, disruptive force against this decay. By cleaning the space, doing the laundry, making food and letting the sunlight in, Honami actively prevents Kanade’s room from becoming Gregor’s storage closet. She ensures the space remains liveable, forcibly anchoring Kanade to the physical world.

If Kanade’s physical reality mirrors The Metamorphosis and A Hunger Artist, her psychological reality is a perfect reflection of Kafka’s masterpiece, The Trial.

In The Trial, the protagonist, Josef K., is arrested by an unidentified agency for an unspecified crime.^(4) He is caught in a bureaucratic labyrinth, endlessly fighting a charge he cannot name. Strikingly, Josef K. is referred to primarily as "K."—the exact same online pseudonym Kanade uses in Nightcord at 25:00.

For Kanade, this "unspecified crime" is the internalized, insurmountable guilt surrounding her father’s hospitalization. She doesn’t need a literal court to indict her; she has already convicted herself. Just as Josef K. becomes obsessed with the ritualistic process of navigating his legal nightmare—seeking lawyers and truth-seekers until the original crime is completely overshadowed by the struggle itself—Kanade uses music as her ritual. She treats every note and every beat as a piece of evidence in her desperate bid to "prove" she can save Mafuyu. Her coping mechanism is her trial, and it binds her to her guilt. She is caught in a loop where the act of trying to "fix" the tragedy only serves to deepen her entrapment within it.

But what makes Kanade truly "Kafkaesque"? The term "Kafkaesque" is often misused to describe something that is simply weird or overly bureaucratic. But biographer Frederick R. Karl defines it much more specifically: it is "when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns... begin to fall to pieces," leaving you to struggle against an insurmountable force using only the "equipment" you have, even when you "don't stand a chance."

Crucially, Karl notes that the Kafkaesque hero does not give up. They do not lie down and die. They insist on uncovering what is un-coverable. This is Kanade down to her core. Her entire life is built around a single "control pattern": the mission to save Mafuyu through music. Her "equipment" is her ability to compose, but she is fighting a fundamentally surreal battle. She is trying to use melody and rhythm to bridge a gap created by Mafuyu’s deep, psychological dissociation and her mother's indifferent control. There is a mismatch between Kanade's tools (the creation of sound) and the obstacle she faces (the hollowed-out silence of Mafuyu’s lost self).

Kanade is trying to recover something that might be unrecoverable—the "true" Mafuyu hidden beneath the mask—but she refuses to give up. She continues to compose, to reach out, and to hold her ground, even as her own life is dismantled by the effort.

To argue that Kanade fits the Kafka parallel better than Mafuyu is not to say that the Mafuyu interpretation is wrong. They are two halves of the same fractured identity. Mafuyu represents the internal death of the self under the weight of expectation. But Kanade is the one living out the full Kafkaesque tragedy: the physical decay, the endless trial of unspecified guilt, the slow self-consumption, and the beautiful, doomed insistence on fighting an impossible battle with nothing but a keyboard and a screen.

It must be acknowledged, of course, that this is a meta-analysis rather than a purely textual one. Honami doesn't even appear in the immiscible discord event, and the specific beats of The Trial are never explicitly cited. However, the strength of the narrative lies in how it functions as a literary ecosystem of paratext, metatext, and hypertext. While Mafuyu provides the immediate, visible "bug" in the system, it is the broader context of Kanade’s life—her isolation, her self-starvation, and her role as the "K" under perpetual trial—that completes this Kafkaesque landscape. By looking across the entire story, we see that Kanade provides the necessary "other" to Mafuyu's transformation, proving that the light isn't just a place to hide, but a space where the doomed struggle of the Kafkaesque hero becomes an act of radical empathy.

References

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200
2. Kafka, Franz. Collected Stories. Knopf, 1993. Everyman’s Library 145.
3. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/29/nyregion/the-essence-of-kafkaesque.html
4. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7849

P.S. This was written for academic writing practice, but also something I had to share with the community. This is my interpretation of Kafka's works and immiscible discord, but if you have any other interpretations, please feel free to comment them. The post was also stylistically inspired by sonniemon and Frostbyte Freeman