Literature / Sagrada Reset

Nearly half the population of Sakurada, a small town near the Pacific Ocean, has some sort of unique power. These powers range from being able to enter the mind of a cat, to resetting the world back to a certain point in time in the past. Among them is a girl called Misora Haruki, who can reset the world back 3 days. This means that all events and any memory of the past 3 days that "could have" happened, never happened. That's where protagonist Kei Asai comes in. Kei has the ability to "remember" the past. Even after Misora uses her powers to reset the world back 3 days, Kei will retain those 3 days in his memory. Kei and Misora come across the Bureau, an organization that controls and monitors the use of these powers, and they must work together to complete missions issued by the Bureau.

Sagrada Reset (Japanese: サクラダリセット, Sakurada Risetto), also known as Sakurada Reset, is a light novel series written by Yutaka Kōno and illustrated by You Shiina, which was originally serialized in The Sneaker from 2009 to 2012 and collected into seven volumes. A 24-episode Animated Adaptation series premiered on April 5, 2017.

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Sagrada Reset contains examples of:

• A God Am I: When asked by Nonoo what he'd like to be reincarnated as, Kei immediately responds that he wants to be God.
• Animal Eye Spy: Nono can do this with any cat in Sakurada while she's asleep.
• As You Know: In the first flashback to the three founders of the Bureau, two of them spend an entire conversation explaining to each other how their abilities work, how they're currently using them, and what they plan to do with them — almost all of which is information that all three of them already know and have clearly discussed before.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Many ability users have abilities that could easily be used unethically for personal gain (or For the Evulz), yet somehow Sakurada mostly doesn't seem to have this problem. For example, Tomoki is quick to point out that Kei and Misora could use their combined abilities to win the lottery; Kei responds he would only do this if he needed the money. On an even greater scale, there is a character who can temporally freeze anything he touches with his right hand; and a character who can create or destroy literally any non-living thing. And it sure is lucky for the Bureau that the member with an ability to discern lies does not herself lie about whether other people are lying. Heart Is an Awesome Power and Lethal Harmless Powers below provide many other examples of how certain abilities could be used for ill. Yet there are relatively few times where anyone is shown using their powers in a "bad" way; and due to White-and-Grey Morality, even then they are simply using extreme methods to achieve an end they truly believe is just (with the exception of Eri Oka, who is a Card-Carrying Villain).
• Breather Episode: There isn't any mystery to be solved or people to be saved in episode 11. It's just a piece of Haruki's daily life.
• Butt-Monkey: Kei regularly gets various injuries or bleeding wounds because he's the only guy on the team and he always goes for it, knowing that Misora can do a reset.
• Calling Your Attacks: Yoka Murase has the power to erase things she specifies out loud when they're touching parts of her body, which she also specifies.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Eri Oka wants Kei to go back to being the hero she thinks he was, and has decided she will help him by playing the role of the villain he must defeat. She also makes no attempts to hide this.

• Clones Are People, Too:
  • After Mari was pronounced stillborn, her grieving mother unwittingly created a clone of her. After a while, she concluded it was too painful to be Mari's side and attempted to leave Sakurada, but Kei and his friends stop her and instead teach her to love Mari on her own terms.
  • Sumire Soma "clones" herself by arranging for herself to be brought back to life two years after her death. The method of her revival (being brought back into the real world from a moment captured in a photo) calls into question, from a philosophical standpoint, whether the new Sumire is truly Sumire. Regardless of what one decides on that point, the fact remains that she is a person, with as much in the way of feelings and identity and desires as the old Sumire ever had.
• Dead All Along: Mari Kurakawa, the girl Misora befriends in the first episode, was actually a clone created by her mother's power after the original Mari died at childbirth.
• Death Is Cheap: Thanks to an in-universe Reset Button, characters who die usually don't stay dead. However, Misora's reset is not the only way to bring people back to life.
• Disintegrator Ray: Yoka can erase things by touch.
• Emotionless Girl: Misora. She Used to Be a Sweet Kid, but all the sadness surrounding her forced her to always do the right thing; even if at the cost of her own emotions. She only begins to emote after spending more time with Kei.
• Everyone Is a Super: Several people across Sakurada have superhuman powers, but if they leave the city they forget about it. According to Kei, not knowing your own power isn't different from not having a power at all.
  • It's later revealed that in theory, people all around the world should have abilities. The only reason they don't is because of two ability users who are preventing anyone outside of Sakurada from discovering their abilities.
• Evil Laugh: Kei has one of these at the start of Episode 10, when he learns of Sumire's revival.
• Exact Words: Urachi was satisfied when Sumire told him that his plan would succeed and that she wouldn't do anything to hinder his plan, because Sakuin confirmed she was telling the truth. What Sumire didn't mention was that his plan would succeed briefly, and that she had already done everything she needed to do to hinder his plan. She was even able to get away with saying that she hoped his objective would be achieved quickly, because she did — so it could be reversed with a reset before the save expired. Later, when he asks if she ordered Kei to be at the scene of his staged accident, she is able to deny it without Sakuin detecting it as a lie, because it was pre-death Sumire who sent that message, and post-death Sumire doesn't consider herself to be the same person.
• Face Realization: It takes Kei getting temporarily killed to make Yoka realize she is not as cruel and ruthless as she thought she was.
• Fake Memories: Eri Oka's ability is to either remove a real memory, or implant a fake memory. The Necessary Drawback is that these effects don't stack; any memory she removes or implants will undo any tampering she did previously.
• Fauxlosophic Narration: The series is a bit heavy on philosophical musings and Koans, and quotes at least three thought experiments or skeptical hypotheses (e.g. Swampman, plank of Carneades, five-minute hypothesis). They usually relate in some way to the current situation, and sometimes they are genuinely thought-provoking, but they rarely if ever add anything necessary to the story, and rarely affect the actual plot.
• Fling a Light into the Future: More than one character uses Tomoki's ability (sending a telepathic message to anyone at any time) to give someone else (or themselves) critical information at some point in the future. Sumire uses this in combination with her precognitive abilities to give Kei the information he needs exactly when he needs it. Two years ahead of time!
• Forbidden Fruit: Kei was already on his way to Sakurada when the Witch warned him to turn back because Sakurada would "never let him go". Later she admits that she did this because she knew that it would make him all the more determined to go to Sakurada and stay there.
• Friendly Enemy: Eri Oka, an old friend of Kei's, promises to be the villain to Kei's hero, and yet she has no trouble talking with him in a civil, almost friendly manner.
  • Urachi is usually civil even to people who are in the midst of openly defying him.
• Good Is Not Soft: Kei can and will play dirty if he thinks the ends justify it (or if he can erase it with a reset). He does not hesitate to have his demands met by threatening to kill himself, or force someone to kill him (temporarily) to make a point, or kidnap a civil servant.
  • As it turns out, Sumire will likewise not hesitate to temporarily kill herself for the greater good.
• Heel–Face Turn: She is more misguided than evil, but Yoka does a 180 thanks to Kei and Misora.
• He Will Not Cry, so I Cry for Him: Kei is unable to grieve after Sumire's death, so Misora does it for him.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Yoka's true goal, according to Kei, was to have people that could help her move on from her brother's death.
• I Hate Past Me: Sumire hates her past self for dying and leaving her with the burden she was carrying. (This is less contradictory than it sounds, since post-death Sumire does not see herself as being the real Sumire.)
• Important Haircut: Misora cuts her hair just slightly above her shoulders after helping Mari and her mother.
• Killed Offscreen: Sumire takes a hike to the mountains and doesn't return. Her body is found by locals and no foul play is suspected.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Kei believes good people can only be good if they take no benefit from their good deeds, even personal satisfaction. (But see Secretly Selfish below.)
• Lethal Harmless Powers:
  • One very minor character has the ability to make people unable to look at her. This is used by the antagonists to cause a car accident. It wasn't fatal, but the user could certainly use the ability lethally if she desired.
  • Hitsuchi can extract information from people. Turns out he can kill someone if he extracts too much.
• Living Lie Detector: Sakuin's ability is to tell whether someone is lying or not.
• Logical Weakness: Some abilities naturally negate other abilities, or have obvious workarounds:
  • The following abilities are immune to Misora's reset, which rearranges the world to a previous state:
    • Kei's perfect memory. Presumably it's so perfect that his memory centers can't be rearranged; either that or his memory is non-physical and thus can't be targeted.
    • Yoka's erase ability, which can erase anything her body touches. If she specifies for her whole body to "erase" the reset, then her body will not be affected.
    • Kagaya's time lock ability. Things locked by him cannot be unlocked by anything except him, so anything he locks cannot be targeted by a reset.
    • Tomoki's telepathic messages. Since pre-programming a telepathic message doesn't involve physical matter, presumably it cannot be negated by rearranging the physical world.
  • Sumire's precognition involves seeing people's future memories, so any ability that affects memory will affect it. Urachi manages to surprise her because he has created many gaps in his memory (by using his ability to reset to an earlier version of himself).
  • Sakuin can detect lies in a person's speech. Since a lie is a deliberate falsehood stated with intent to deceive, a person can get around Sakuin's ability by sincerely believing something false (making it not deliberate), or by using Exact Words (making it not a falsehood). It's unclear if removing the "intent to deceive", for instance by using sarcasm, would fool her ability.
  • Eri Oka's ability, which involves removing or implanting memories, doesn't work on Kei's inviolable memory.
• The Magic Goes Away: This is the ultimate goal of the primary antagonist. Of course, Kei ensures that The Magic Comes Back.
• Mental Time Travel: Misora's resets don't turn back time but simply restore everything to a previous state. Most people, including Misora, don't remember whatever got reset. But Kei, having a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, experiences resets as Mental Time Travel.
• Minor Living Alone: Aside from Sumire and Tomoki (who are implied to live with their respective parents) and Misora (who is stated in the first book to live with both parents), any of the main characters might live alone; their parents are not seen (with a couple brief exceptions), so it's unclear for everyone except for Kei, who explicitly does live on his own. It turns out the Bureau made an arrangement to provide for him, and to erase his past history, on the condition that he never leave Sakurada.
• Mr. Exposition: Be prepared for the fact that almost every dialogue with most of the characters will consist of a long exposition of their abilities and views of the world.
• Mundane Utility: Tomoki's ability of sending telepathic messages at any time in the future has at least once been used as a wake-up call.
  • Sumire has used her precognitive ability to anticipate the weather so she can be prepared (with an umbrella, for example). Then again, wouldn't anyone do that if they could see the future at will?
• Necessary Drawback:
  • Played straight: Most abilities have several limitations, which are oftentimes the only things preventing their users from being able to hold the city in the palm of their hand. Misora's reset ability, for instance, is limited by save point restrictions: Each save point only lasts for 72 hours; she can only have one save point at a time; she can only use a save point once; and she can only save once every 24 hours. The Witches can see the future, but the first can only see someone's future if she's touching them, and the second can only see someone's future if she's having a conversation with them. And so on.
  • Averted: There are some abilities that don't seem to have any drawbacks to speak of, or at least none that would prevent their users from controlling the city if they wanted to. These abilities are invariably possessed by people who are far too scrupulous to abuse them. The supreme example is a character with the ability to create or destroy any non-living thing. The only limitation is a one-minute cooldown between uses.
• Negate Your Own Sacrifice: Kei survives getting his head blown off when Misora resets to minutes before Yoka started their confrontation.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: When Sumire jumps off a building, she is saved by Yoka catching her, even though her speed and distance fallen weren't reduced. Justified, as Yoka used her ability to nullify the impact.
• Omniscient Morality License: Both the Witch and the Second Witch take actions that seem to be awful on the surface, but are actually the best possible means to the best possible "ending". For example, Sumire killing herself. Also somewhat applies to Kei, who can go to extreme lengths because he either can reset afterward, has already reset and therefore knows what's going to occur, or can predict what will happen with high confidence.
• Oracular Urchin: Sumire.
• Parental Abandonment: Inverted with Kei, who made a conscious decision to abandon his parents.
• Power Nullifier: Eri Oka can take away other people's powers by making them forget how to use them.
• Punny Name: Eri Oka's name, said in the Eastern order (family name first), sounds exactly like "okaeri", which means "welcome home".
• Reset Button: Misora's ability functions as this in-universe.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Kei can remember the world as it was before Misora reset it.
  • His memory is so ripple effect-proof that he alone is immune to Mr. Urachi's ability, which erases people's memories about abilities. When Mrs. Urachi deactivates her ability, so that even people in Sakurada forget abilities, Kei is the only person in the world who remembers.
• Save Scumming: This is how Misora's resetting works. She selects a point to "save" and then begins the reset.
• Secretly Selfish: Kei believes that most people are this; he believes that good people are only truly good if they take no benefit from their good deeds, even personal satisfaction. This obviously disqualifies most people in the world. But contrary to how it sounds, this isn't a condemnation of humanity, because Kei doesn't think being "truly good" in this way is a goal all people should aspire to. Indeed, despite feeling that Misora Haruki is perfectly good because she's so emotionally dead that she derives no satisfaction from doing the right thing, he still works to reawaken her emotions, because he believes that it is more important for a person to be happy than to be perfectly good. In other words, he thinks it would be wrong to try to make a person truly good.
• Self-Defeating Prophecy: The Witch and Second Witch's predictions are based only on what has happened up to that point; the Witches can act on what they've predicted to create a new future (which they can also predict).
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Kei and his friends frequently use Misora's reset ability to do this.
• Single Tear: Kei does this in Episode 20 after meeting his mother to get Misora to reset.
• Sliding Scale of Visuals Versus Dialogue: Most of the story is carried by exposition and internal monologues instead of visuals. The characters rarely emote and the dialogue just barely avoids being monotone and presents a good opportunity for Worldbuilding.
• Spell My Name With An S: "Sagrada" or "Sakurada"?
• Stepford Smiler: Sumire is the Depressed type. Whenever she's with Kei, she wears an enigmatic smile. When she's alone, it's clear that she's melancholy and dejected most of the time.
  • The narrator often mentions Kei forcing his smiles, and the first novel discusses the performativeness of Minami's cheerfulness.
• The Stoic: Sakuin's voice carries little emotion, and her placid facial expression rarely changes. She doesn't even react when Sumire pinches her cheek for no reason; she simply asks what she's doing.
  • Not So Stoic: Sakuin gasps loudly and rushes forward in horror when Sumire jumps off a building. At the moment of impact, she turns away, hunched over and burying her face in her hands.
• Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: Kei threatens to slit his wrists if a Bureau agent doesn't give him permission to deal with Mari and her mother. The agent, being a good person deep down, relents and Kei uses Misora's resetting power to undo his injuries.
• Take a Third Option: Basically the entire plot is Kei finding increasingly clever and complicated ways to do this.
• Terminally Dependent Society: Sakurada, as far as being a city of ability users, can only exist because of an ability that can keep something from leaving a specified area (in this case, keeping memories of abilities from leaving Sakurada); while the rest of the world, as far as being a world where abilities are unknown, can only exist because of an ability that erases a single memory from everyone in the world (in this case, the memory of abilities). If the first user ever dies or stops using her ability, everyone in Sakurada will forget their abilities; and if the second user ever dies or stops using his ability, everyone in the world will discover their abilities. They've both been kept temporally frozen for years to prevent this from happening; unfreezing the first one and having her deactivate her ability is how Urachi enacts his plan to get rid of abilities.
• Thanatos Gambit:
  • Sumire kills herself in order to set the events of the story in motion.
  • Kei's plan to talk Yoka out of her misguided vendetta is to goad her into killing him. The plan works.
• These Hands Have Killed: For all her talk about reforming the Bureau by force if necessary, Yoka is absolutely horrified when she actually takes a life, Kei's life to be more precise.
• Three Laws-Compliant: Kei compares Misora's three rules about using her power to Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics. He even advises her to find a Zeroth Law.
  • The first rule is that she refuses to reset in circumstances when there's any chance of causing an incredibly negative impact on surrounding events or people.
  • The second rule is that she will agree to a proposition as long as it doesn't violate the first rule.
  • The third rule is that she resets whenever she sees someone crying.
  • The Zeroth Law is that she will follow Kei's orders.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Some of the abilities displayed in Sakurada are pretty "lackluster" to say the least, with tons of limitations and obscure applications, making them only useful in the most generous of terms and only for specific situations.
  • Heart Is an Awesome Power: In the aforementioned specific situations, or when combined in the right ways, some abilities can be terrifyingly powerful or useful:
    • Misora's reset is as good as useless on its own; and Kei's perfect, Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory has limited applications on its own. But combined, they can be weaponized to remarkable effect, as seen throughout the series.
    • Hiroyuki's ability is to take photos that a person can enter by tearing it in the same place it was taken; but everything in the world only lasts for 10 minutes. This ability's only obvious use is for taking some brief trips down memory lane. But since your spatial position doesn't change when the world disappears, this ability can be used as a form of teleportation: If there's a locked door before you, and you have a photo where the door is open, you can enter that world, pass through the open door, wait out the 10 minutes, and return to the real world on the other side of the door. This method is used to free the Witch from her confinement. And that's not all: If you combine this ability with Yoka's and Sakagami's, you can permanently bring a person in the photo back to the real world, even if they've died since the photo was taken. You could theoretically make anyone effectively immortal, or clone anyone, just by having Hiroyuki take a photo of them. Furthermore, the photo world's imitation of the real world is such that someone who has lost memories due to an ability's effect will regain them if they enter a photo world where that effect is not active. And lastly, once Hiroyuki takes a photo, its power thereafter lies in the photo, and not with Hiroyuki. Even if he forgets his ability, the photo itself will retain its properties. After everyone but Kei has forgotten abilities, this fact is what allows Kei to restore Misora's memories of how to reset. It should also be noted that the people in the photograph can still use their abilities as if they were the real person.
    • Yoka's ability of being able to erase a specified thing that a specified part of her body touches sounds pretty lame, if only because of the Inverse Law of Utility and Lethality. But due to very broad interpretations of the word "erase", and the ability to even "erase" physical properties, physical laws, and abstract concepts, Yoka can use her ability to bypass any obstacle she can touch, fly (erasing gravity), turn any part of her body into a lethal weapon (erasing "human body"), locate someone quickly (erasing the path to them), negate the impact of a fall, or make herself immune to someone else's ability (erasing [ability]) — including Misora's reset.
    • Tomoki can send a telepathic message to anyone, can include any voice he hears in the message, and can specify the message to be sent at any time in the future, allowing characters to communicate with others or themselves when it might not otherwise be possible. And it transcends resets, so the message will arrive when intended even if a reset erases the moment it was created. This is possibly the most understated and overlooked ability; both despite and because of that, more than once it has been a critical ace in the hole, or managed to salvage a situation that was going off the rails. (There are many examples, but the biggest one is that it allowed Kei to win the fight against Urachi, by secretly transmitting their conversation to Kagaya in order to persuade him.) Not to mention that it can indirectly determine someone's identity; the fact that Sumire Soma was able to receive a message from her pre-death self proves that she isn't just a "Swampman", but is the real Sumire (or else that the Swampman thought experiment is false).
    • Nono has the ability to access the senses and memories of any cat in Sakurada while she's asleep. Lame, right? Except that she can use it to find or observe things without being seen herself (though there is an element of chance, since she can't control the cats she accesses, and it seems she can only access one cat at a time).
    • Kagaya's "lock" ability can keep something immobile indefinitely, keep someone alive indefinitely, or prevent something from being affected by a reset.
    • Michiru's ability is a dream world — an almost-exact replica of Sakurada — where she can make anything happen; and other people can enter the dream world if they sleep close enough to her. You can only stay there for as long as your body naturally remains asleep in the real world, and you obviously can't take anything from the dream world back with you, so at best this seems to be a nice way to have some really kick-ass dreams. But theoretically, you could use this to functionally be active 24/7, thus regaining the 1/3 of your life that you lose to sleep. You couldn't do anything that needs to have physical results in the real world, but you could still think, read, study, play, perform hobbies, hang out with friends, and so on. And someone who has a debilitating condition or injury (such as Michiru herself, who can't walk in the real world, and the Stray Cat House Man, who is hospitalized by some disease) can be free from it while they're sleeping (which could be a lot, if they're sick enough). Indeed, the Stray Cat House Man spends a lot of time in the dream world, writing The Script and spending time with his many cats. Because access to Michiru (and thus her dream world) is usually restricted, one can also use it to hide information by writing it down in the dream world and putting it somewhere safe.
• White-and-Grey Morality: The main antagonists aren't seeking personal gain or to cause suffering, and for the most part their methods are no more extreme than the protagonists'. Both sides want what they think is best for everyone, and are trying to achieve it with as little pain and suffering as possible. The conflict is primarily because they simply have opposing philosophies and ideas about what's actually best for everyone.
  • Depending on how you feel about their respective goals and methods, the conflict might instead come across as Good Versus Good; or as Grey-and-Gray Morality, with Kei's side being A Lighter Shade of Grey at best.
• Your Head Asplode: What happens to Kei when Yoka kills him during their confrontation.