History
Anna was abandoned as a young girl because her parents became afraid of her strong shamanic powers, which included the ability to see into other people's minds without willing to. Left on Mount Osore, she was found by Yoh's grandmother, Kino Asakura, who took Anna as an apprentice and gave her the surname Kyōyama (恐山), an alternate reading of the characters for Mount Osore (恐山, Osorezan?). Recognizing Anna's inherent potential, Yoh's grandparents decided that she would be a suitable bride for Yoh.
Before meeting Yoh, Anna's mind reading power known as reishi (soul sight) was one that she could not fully control. She could not help but pick up the negative emotions of others every time she was around other people; because of this, she began to hate others, and this hatred would involuntarily manifest itself as an Oni (demonic ogres, akin to boogeyman in Western cultures). Thus she tried to avoid going out as much as possible, usually confining herself to her room.
Anna and Yoh meet when they are ten years old in 1995 at Mt. Osore, shortly after Yoh and Matamune arrive in Aomori to visit Kino. Yoh is attacked by an oni, unaware that it came from Anna, who cryptically warns Yoh to stay aware from her. However, Yoh persists in trying to get to know Anna and eventually learns that Anna's negative emotions create the oni, who are beyond her control. Matamune, as one of the Asakura family's most powerful spirits, was chosen to accompany Yoh to save Anna from herself because her powers closely resembled those of Matamune's former master, Hao Asakura.
Yoh's positive influence on Anna allows her to gradually open her heart and she accepts his invitation to accompany him to a temple on New Year's Eve. However, the selfish desires of the tremendous amount of people present overwhelm Anna, who summons a powerful oni that begins absorbing other oni nearby. The Oh-Oni created gains the ability to speak and kidnaps Anna to take her to Mount Osore to absorb the lurking spirits there. Matamune sacrifices his physical form to give Yoh the power to defeat the Oh-Oni and save Anna, whose heart opens enough to admit that while she will never forget her deep-seated resentment towards humans and the world, she has begun to love Yoh. Yoh and Anna are able to destroy the Oh-Oni, whose body is forged by Kino to become the 1080 beads.
Because Yoh freed her from the darkness that haunted her each day, she grows to love him and resolves to become stronger so not to feel the same pain in the past and to repay him for everything he sacrificed for her.
Read more about this topic: Anna Kyoyama
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“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)