Living Rot

This is my shrine to the project Ikigusare! Please read through. I hope you can share my love for these three girls and their music. ^_^

I guess this can also act as a new fan's crash course on the lore. To be honest, you don't have to know much to enjoy their stuff, but I have mentioned some misinformation going around that peeves me. There's not much you have to learn, so have fun!

Before we start: Ikigusare are a horror band. There is dark subject matter on this page, even though I did it up all cutesy! Please be warned! There will be discussion of violence and some of the things that come with eroguro, but you probably know the drill already. I can only advise you to turn back now if you're not OK with that. You can always come back again if you want.

Ikigusare (イキグサレ), NOT "Ikigusare Idols" like the Internet seems to think, are a digital idol group created in 2005 by Namaichirou Yamamoto (known online especially by western fans as simply "Namaitirou"), made up of three mutant girls with abnormal eyes. Their lyrics all have horror or eroguro themes.

While they began activities in 2005, the first 3D animated video was created with the software MIKOTO sometime in the 2000s. That work was actually lost in a hard drive crash, but someone had it on a CD they obtained and posted it to Nico Nico Douga in 2010. I believe Namaitirou moved on to MikuMikuDance after losing all the MIKOTO files.

Namaitirou decided to make them the way they are because he wanted to produce music himself but wasn't happy with his voice. When he pitched it up, he thought, this doesn't sound natural! So he decided to make the girls singing unnatural too. He figures them scary for it, but I can't think of them as anything other than cute.

That's the reason they're a horror band. He really leaned into those "unnatural" and "scary" elements! They're three messed up girls, but Sango is my favourite because she looks so airheaded. It's cute.

All the skills Namaitirou picked up to support the project from art to music to 3D software experience was entirely self-taught, and apart from learning how to make music it was all learned for the sake of Ikigusare. He's very dedicated! It's great!

Ikigusare is very dear to me for a number of reasons. For one, they're just so cute!! In terms of both the designs and musical sound, I seriously can't get enough. Maybe I've just been infected by the moe anime virus or something but they've taken over my brain and I don't mind in the slightest.

I don't speak Japanese, but whenever I look at their lyrics it's always a fun cross of creepy and cute. That's been my exact thing ever since I was a little boy so it's awesome whenever I find something that scratches this itch.

Also, they referenced my favourite tokusatsu ever, Kamen Rider Ryuki. Am I supposed to ignore that!?

Ikigusare is derived from iki (生き) which means living and kusare (腐れ) which means rot, together meaning something like "living rot" or maybe "rotting while still alive". A fun fact for anyone into BL, the character for "rot" is the same as in the word fujoshi! :-)

So, you get this image of girls who are rotting from the inside... freaky, but that's the whole point. I wonder if they've written a song about coughing up maggots or something.

I think it's a really fun theme though, and it's been executed well for ninteen years and counting, so it's clearly working for him!!

1号	2号	3号
1go / Ichigo	2go / Nigo	3go / Sango

There are three members in Ikigusare, all named for the number of eyes they have: Ichigo, Nigo, and Sango. If you translate their names, they're literally named Number One, Number Two and Number Three. I like to think of them as someone's fucked up (affectionate) little human experiments.

I've seen cute nicknames for them around, but I stick to their real names. I genuinely think they're cuter as numbers.

Some fans think of them as sisters. I don't mean to shut down anyone's fun or headcanons, but this is simply not canon, and from what I've seen people (especially fans who hail from Tiktok) don't fully understand this fact. Please be careful where you're getting your information!

Namaitirou once said in a blog post that he doesn't want the girls to have established personalities, because if he does, you'll fall in love with them and he won't be able to make them sing "boring songs" anymore. According to him: "The situation is that they don't know or have any interest in each other's private lives. That's why I don't know what they like, where they're from, their heights, weights, personalities, or their real names." Still, I think you can pick things up from their looks, official art and renders on their own. Please take this all with a fistful of salt, as it's mostly my personal interpretation and guesswork! Namaitirou himself has no idea!

Ichigo

Ichigo is a cyclops girl. She's the most boyish of the three, so she keeps her hair cropped and is often seen wearing shorts or pants when the others are wearing skirts or dresses. She's got a tan, so she probably spends the most time outside, too. She still has a girlish charm about her though. I love her so much.

Nigo

Nigo has two eyes, so you'd think she's normal, but her right eye is bulging right out of her face thanks to some mysterious botched(?) surgery she seems to have undergone. That side of her head is completely bald, and she's even missing her ear! Still, she's got a sisterly and mature aura, and her eyes are apparently weak enough that she has to wear reading glasses! So cute. She also appears to be left-handed in some renders?

Sango

Sango has three eyes... along with two noses and two mouths. She's a freaky two-faced girl! She keeps her light hair in twin-tails and has a very aloof vibe to her. She seems like a sweet girl who would be a very good friend. She's my favourite out of the three, but I already mentioned that.

Of course, all three girls seem to be into the occult and also killing people. They also seem to like the snow and the beach and fighting monsters though, so hooray for variety!

Despite being the obscure idol project they are, Ikigusare has actually got some really popular songs. I don't know what luck Namaitirou hit with the algorithms, but I'm glad he did, even if newer fans don't really get what's going on. That's what this page is for!

Ochuusha Girl (Injection Girl)

This is by far Ikigusare's most popular song, hitting 3.1 million views on YouTube. The story is pretty funny, but of course it's still a horror story: the narrator has drugged you, tied you to a chair, and is threatening you with lethal injection. Maybe if you didn't cheat on her this wouldn't have happened!

...But she's just kidding, it's not really poison because she'd never hurt someone she loves. She just wants to scare you.

...But she's kidding again, and she shoots up the poison in front of you, and asks you if she's sexy while convulsing and frothing at the mouth! It's a fun story and a cute tune to go with it. I get why it's so popular even if it's not my favourite.

Kitsune Tsuki (Kitsune Possession)

Their next most popular! A song about being possessed by a kitsune. I don't like that the most popular translations of this song only refer to a "fox", because it's obvious the idea is the Japanese folklore kitsune, not a regular fox.

Anyways, our narrator is always hungry during the night and always mean to her own family. She can't control her own actions no matter what! But when she decides she's been possessed by a kitsune, one appears in her dreams and tells her it will kill her for blaming her own weakness on it.

So she starts blaming tanuki instead, because they're similarly mischeivous creatures :-). The fun thing about this song is that it's a palindrome when broken up into the Japanese syllables: ki-tsu-ne-tsu-ki.

That's enough of that though. I want to talk about my favourite songs! This is MY shrine! So I'll do as I please. Moving on...

This is only a few of them. I have a lot of favourites, but I've cut the list down here for the sake of brevity. I've focused on songs that have film clips, but maybe I'll add more without them in the future.

Most of all, I hope you'll enjoy the music just as much as I do!

Aibiki

As far as I can tell, the lyrics are about being so obsessed with one's lover that the narrator wants to take them to a meat processing plant so that they can be minced up into paste and truly become one.

Romantic, right? It's a really fun song, and the film clip isn't anything TOO special, but I do like to watch monster girls dance.

Sakura no Ki no Shita ni wa (Under the Sakura Tree)

This song is so calming to me!! Ikigusare 5 is a great album, but this song in particular is really one of my favourites, even if it's lower quality than some.

It's about finally leaving a cursed school. The cherry blossoms are pink because of blood, there's spirits everywhere, so farewell and good riddance!

A ridiculously cute tune...

Yume Densha (Dream Train)

This is one of their cutest in my opinion and it doesn't really have any gorey themes. It's simply a song about anxiety that everything goes wrong in the world, but love overpowering over even that.

Planes crash easily, ships sink in an instant, trains derail fast, but I'm happy if I'm with you!.

Ushimitsu Call (3AM Call)

My very favourite from their third album, and I'm so shocked it got a film clip just recently!!

Someone mysterious keeps calling late at night and making strange noises, no matter if the phone is off, out of battery, or worse. Creepy... but it's the only communication that matters to our narrator. (Possibly the only they get at all!)

The instrumental on this is SO good. Namaitirou made this song too addictive.

You can find Ikigusare in several places:

Homepage
YouTube
Ikigusare's Twitter
Namaitirou's Twitter

Please give Namaitirou and his project all of your support! He's doing all of this himself after all!

All done? Back to Mouseling.net...