Nakshie

Nakshie is the private, affectionate name Yohan gives to the child he is expecting with Kazumi and continues using after the child’s birth. More than a casual nickname, it marks the child as the emotional center of Yohan and Kazumi’s developing family: the name appears when the baby is still hidden within Kazumi’s pregnancy, becomes part of Yohan’s imagined parental role, and remains in use as the child grows into Kenzie. Its recurrence links pregnancy, marriage, birth, and everyday parenthood in a single verbal thread.

Meaning and First Use

Yohan first uses Nakshie while Kazumi is unconscious and he is speaking to her pregnant stomach. He asks whether the baby thinks “mommy Yohan” is beautiful, then asks what the child’s gender might be because they do not yet know it. The uncertainty is important: Nakshie is chosen before the child has a confirmed sex or final public identity, allowing Yohan to address the baby as a person rather than as an abstract pregnancy. He proposes a playful household vocabulary in which the child will call him “mommy Yohan,” while Kazumi will also be treated as a mother, although Yohan jokes about their bodily difference.

The name therefore belongs to the couple’s deliberately unconventional family language. Yohan is openly gay, identifies with feminine expression, and continues to dress up and wear makeup, while the later narrative places him in a marriage to Kazumi and a parenting role. Nakshie helps hold these apparently conflicting positions together. It is a tender address that makes room for Yohan’s chosen maternal presentation without erasing the physical and social facts that the story repeatedly treats as comic, intimate, and negotiable.

Pregnancy and Parental Imagination

Yohan’s conversations with Nakshie turn pregnancy into an interactive relationship before the baby can answer in words. When he asks the child’s gender, the baby appears to kick inside Kazumi, and Yohan responds by warning Nakshie not to kick the mother. He then asks how many siblings the child would like. The scene presents Yohan’s attachment through bodily signs: the kick is interpreted as a response, and the nickname gives that response a recipient and a family context.

The same pattern continues when Yohan speaks to Kazumi’s abdomen after a frightening episode. He tells the baby to rest and not kick the mother, then returns to the question of whether the baby thinks “mommy Yohan” is beautiful. He also asks the unborn child what gender it will have, explaining that the couple will wait for an ultrasound when Kazumi is well enough. Nakshie thus accompanies both reassurance and uncertainty. The name does not solve the pregnancy’s risks or answer the question of gender; instead, it gives Yohan a way to perform care while those matters remain unresolved.

Nakshie also helps convert responsibility into affection. Yohan explains that he will marry Kazumi because he does not want their child to grow up confused by unfamiliar partners and because marriage will allow him to uphold his responsibility as a parent. Although Kazumi is hurt that the proposal is not presented as proof of romantic love, Yohan’s repeated address to Nakshie shows that the child is not merely a legal justification. The nickname is the language through which duty becomes a daily, emotionally charged bond.

Birth and Family Continuity

At the birth, the nurse first takes the baby to cut the umbilical cord, while Yohan looks at the child after it has been wrapped in a towel. He celebrates the newborn’s arrival and soon receives the baby back in his arms. Even amid the hospital’s practical sequence of breastfeeding, a vitamin K shot, eye drops, measurements, footprints, screening tests, pediatric examination, and a likely first bath, Yohan remains focused on the fact that his Nakshie has finally been born.

The name also bridges the unborn and the born child. Holding the baby, Yohan speaks softly and asks whether the child will accept the name Kazumi wants to give: Yoshiro Kenzie. The final name is therefore not Nakshie, but the nickname remains the emotional designation established during pregnancy. The child’s features are described as a mixture of both parents—Yohan’s eyes and nose, Kazumi’s lips, and cheeks compared to soft Mamon—so the naming moment joins biological resemblance with the couple’s invented domestic language.

Later Use and Narrative Significance

Nakshie remains in circulation as Kenzie grows. When someone hides near the mansion and threatens not to stop until obtaining Yohan’s money, the name is heard while Yohan plays with Kenzie and Kazumi watches them together. Later, when Kenzie is eight months old, Yohan praises the crawling child as his Nakshie and kisses the baby’s cheeks repeatedly. Kenzie cannot yet speak and communicates through baby talk and random sounds while practicing to walk with a walker, but Yohan’s continued use of the nickname preserves the intimacy first created before birth.

The expression’s significance lies in this continuity. Nakshie begins as a playful answer to uncertainty—an unborn child whose gender is unknown—and becomes a stable term of endearment attached to a named, living child. It carries Yohan’s maternal self-description, Kazumi and Yohan’s shared parental responsibility, the child’s arrival through a hospital birth, and the ordinary tenderness of later family life. By surviving the transition from pregnancy to infancy, the nickname makes the family’s identity feel less like a single declaration than a practice repeated through speech, touch, anticipation, and care.