Nagisa Renge/History

Life means suffering.

Eight years ago [as of the start of the game], the Kirijo Group experimented on a group of one hundred children for the purpose of artificially inducing their Personas, putting them under the knife of advanced surgical procedures and giving them expensive, addictive drugs to control their powers. Because of this, the vast majority of those children died, and those that survived were sentenced to a greatly reduced lifespan--either their own Personas would kill them, or the suppressant drugs would, as one of its inconvenient side effects, induce an early death. For seven sweet years, Nagisa lived knowing none of this. Although she grew up in an orphanage in Sumaru City after her parents died in an accident when she was four and she had no family to take her in, she got along well with the other children, made friends easily, and hardly ever made it apparent how badly she missed having a mommy and daddy to love her. She'd run and play with the other children, and when prospective parents came in, she'd follow them around with the most hopeful, terrified expression just like the other children--hopeful that she'd have new parents, terrified that she'd be rejected. Her fears increased in a vague way based on what the older children told her, that the people who came in only wanted very young children, and the older you got, the less anyone would want you. Someone will want you no problem, they kept telling her. You're young and you're really cute, there's no way someone wouldn't take you home! And although it was stated with mixed envy and resentment, Nagisa clung to that hope for the next three years. People who can't have children of their own want children who are good, the orphanage caretakers told her, and so Nagisa tried her very best to be good to everyone and everything, human and animal and plant and toy, shoving all her fears and anxieties and loneliness deep inside where no one could see or be bothered by them, for as she was repeatedly told, no one wanted a bothersome child. One day, it seemed her wish would come true when a representative from the Kirijo Group adopted her, along with several other children from the same orphanage. It was the most thrilling moment of her life... and yet, very soon thereafter, she was introduced to hell. Nagisa was healthy but not an especially hardy child, and the experiments left her body frail. To this day, her growth is still stunted; although she's fifteen, she looks like she's only eleven or so at best. It was a deeply traumatic experience, and after she was declared a failure for being unable to manifest a true Persona--all efforts only produced something shadowy and misshapen--and thrown away back in the slums of Sumaru to die in the gutter, Nagisa felt as though everything she had ever hoped for and believed in had betrayed her. As far as she knew, all the other ninety-nine children who'd gotten adopted with her were dead, and the drugs she needed were so, so very expensive... Bewildered and hurt and afraid and (though she didn't like to admit it to herself) angry, she struggled on to do the only thing she could--live. The Dark Hour was open to her, and so it became unbelievably easy to come back to Port Island every so often to steal what she needed to survive and buy the drugs she needed (for the Kirijo Group didn't particularly care who bought what, so long as they had the money). But as hard as she struggled, she constantly had to contend with the Shadows that stalked the night and her personal Shadow that tried to destroy her constantly, held back from success only barely with the suppressants and Nagisa's own desperate hope that, in spite of her own slipping values in the name of her own survival and the fact that she was all alone, if she was simply good enough, someone would love her for herself. This hope, too, was the only thing that kept her from sinking into despair and depression and rage knowing that she would inevitably die young as a result of the operations that had been made on her by the people who had promised her a new home.

The origin of suffering is attachment.

It would be a lie to say that no one ever did love her. Nagisa managed to survive in face of her near-constant pain and the occasional proto-Persona attack, and the homeless shelters in Sumaru City gave her places to sleep and eat. The money she stole from homes and businesses when she returned to Port Island were shared with the poor when she returned to Sumaru City, to let her rationalize her "bad" actions. It was the little things that allowed her to keep her sanity--learning how to cook, talking with other homeless people, helping the shelter workers, helping out at libraries where she also stayed for hours to read, learning other people's stories, wandered and ran through the streets at night to explore Sumaru, and in a twist that never occurred to Nagisa to be messed up, was taught by an older homeless man who'd lost his own daughter to violence how to use knives to "dissuade" assailants and perverts. Nagisa slowly gained an understanding that, as unfortunate as her life was, she was not alone in feeling that way. It, at the very least, made it a little easier for her to try to be "good," and for a given value of happiness in light of her situation and her constant repressed fears and loneliness, she was, or at least could be, happy. Unfortunately, Nagisa never fully took into account the suffering this caused for those losing their money--or that they'd contact the police to track it down. It took seven years, but when Nagisa was nearly fifteen, the money trail led back to the homeless shelter she frequented most in Sumaru City... and the shelter workers there were blamed. The charges placed on them were tenuous, because while they possessed the money, there was no proof that they had actually been the ones who'd stolen it. However, it being Sumaru City, rumors spread like wildfire--that the workers were all corrupt, that they were using the shelter as a front for their criminal activity. Rumors being what they are in Sumaru City, they took on their own life, and it became truth enough to shut down the place for good, and the ill that caused spread out like a drop of arsenic in a pool of water. Nagisa was devastated and deeply confused by this. Why did this happen, after years of things being more or less okay? Why did the people who had been kind to her made to suffer and become twisted, when she hadn't wanted anyone to suffer? Had this been her fault? Had she been a bad girl after all? She spiraled down from there quickly after that, running from Sumaru and everything, not knowing where she was going or looking back at what she'd left behind her, only running, stumbling, walking, trudging along until finally she collapsed more than twenty miles from the city limits. Guilty and ashamed and in pain, she wept, staring up at the night sky and the moon above. Her proto-Persona appeared then, her latest swallow of suppressants having been ineffective. It began to smother her, and for a moment, Nagisa struggled desperately, casting about for the box of suppressants before realizing she had dropped it somewhere at some point. It was then that she collapsed on the grass, the will to struggle on in the face of hopeless odds drained from her, white spots going off before her eyes as she stared up at the full moon. It was at this time, feeling what remained of her life drift away, that her senses gained a certain clarity she'd never sensed before--the spring night wind was bitingly cold and carried the scent of cherry blossoms and newly grown grass, the crawl of ants up her arms, the subtle colors of the stars, the gentle buzz of insects in the brush and distant croaks of frogs as they ate them, the cold dampness of dew soaking her clothes, the pockmarks surrounding the rabbit pounding mochi on the moon, the taste of death in the back of her throat...

The cessation of suffering is attainable.

All of a sudden, it seemed to Nagisa as if the universe, for all its uncaring ugliness and thoughtless cruelty, was more beautiful than she could have imagined. The stars were brilliant and spread to all corners of the sky, and the full moon seemed to wrap her gently in cool light. Truly beholding them made Nagisa realize how vast a place it was, and how small she was within it. Why should the universe care? It wasn't that it was being cruel to her specifically, or that it favored anyone in particular. It was what it was, as was everything within it. An end would someday come to everything. Hers had just come then, that was all. In this way, all the pain and suffering and anxiety she had endured was unthinkably petty, but because it was petty, it was something she could rise above. There was no point in regretting or begrudging her short life, and in this way, the beauty that was the world would envelope her and return her to a place where there was no more suffering. And so, with this sudden understanding of the universe, Nagisa severed her attachment to life, accepted her death, and closed her eyes, letting darkness surround her. The darkness broke, and changed into light. The Shadow-esque proto-Persona that had never quite fully formed despite all the operations she'd suffered changed then, into a beautiful woman with a kind face, who smiled down at Nagisa and offered her a hand. Thinking that she had already died and this was an angel of some kind, Nagisa accepted it and stood up. Understanding, through the voice of her Persona, whispered into her soul: this was a true Persona, hers. The road would not be easy--Nagisa would still not be able to completely control her Persona, though at least now she could fight and defend herself--but nothing of worth was ever gained without suffering. And so, upon reconciling with her death, she was reborn. No longer did she feel resentful or hurt over what the Kirijo Group had done to her, and she felt that she could accept the burden of how her well-meant actions had hurt others she'd cared for. Feeling as if she had been somehow saved, Nagisa decided that she needed to think very carefully on how she should use her power to share this feeling with others. ...The problem with that was that Nagisa focused on the feeling of being truly alive and at peace the moments before her would-be death.

The eightfold path leads to the cessation of suffering.

And so Nagisa made her decision to start a new life, which she has embraced over the last year. She utilized the power of her Persona and the skills she'd learned on the streets to gain the strength enough to "help" others, the first of whom being those shelter workers who'd been warped as a result of the rumors that had been spread about them. They survived the attack--and by Nagisa's perspective, they seem these days much more sedate and at peace (or, possibly more accurately, terrified). More recently, she also began to hear the preachings of Strega, and recognizing its leader Takaya and supporters Jin and Chidori from their brief time together as the Kirijo Group experiments, Nagisa traveled back to Port Island and approached them, introducing herself plainly and asking to join them. Surprised to see that anyone else had survived those experiments, the three accepted her easily enough, at least from Nagisa's perspective. These days, she goes between Sumaru and Port Island to help Strega with their work, believing in Takaya and the message of the Fall--knowing very well from her own experience that death can, indeed, save someone. Whether she's simply deluding herself or not depends on one's point of view.