Characters/Sana Sakakibara

Sana Sakakibara

Personal Information
Surname Name	Sakakibara Sana
Birthday (Age)	January 4th (n/a)
Type of Character	Main
Additional Information
Hair Color	Dark Grey
Eye Color	Green
Height	4′ 10′′ (147cm)
Job(s)	Bartender at Sara’s Bar
Hobby(s)	Gaming
Like(s)	unknown
Dislike(s)	Spaghetti Socialization
Family	Sara Sakakibara (Mother) Unknown Father Unnamed Brother †
Affiliation	Light Music Club (Chap. 3)
First Appearance	A New You (Picture) First (?) Day of School (Introduction)
Notes	unknown

'No one really knows anything about Sana other than Ayane. She’s extremely quiet and vehemently refuses to talk under almost all circumstances, but it’s less because she doesn’t want to and more because she can’t. It remains to be seen whether this is simply how she is or if there is something about her past that is causing her to be this way [...]'

— Sensei's notes

Sana Sakakibara is part of the Main Cast of in Lessons In Love. She is one of the 10 original main cast girls.

Background

Sana is Sara’s second child, being born after her brother. While she was still young, her brother was stabbed to death on his way home from a friend, which left a mental scar in both of them, though hers isn’t as bad as Sara’s. While she was going through a dark period in her life, she met Ayane and both became friends. Once she entered Kumon-mi High, she became a student in Sensei’s class.

Characteristics

Sana is a very shy and quiet girl. She rarely approaches other people, struggles to start or hold conversations with them and gets easily flustered or intimidated, which can end in her crying or shouting if pushed too far. When she does talk with someone, she’s timid and pauses multiple times mid-sentence.

As she spends more time with Sensei and her friends, she gets more sociable, can keep a conversation going and is able to talk with Kaori and Yuki, two people she wouldn’t have been able to talk to due to their circumstances and strong personalities. Her shy nature stays mostly unchanged, but Sensei assumes that certain aspects of her, like her pauses, are just part of her personality. He summed up her fully developed self as unremarkable and exceedingly average.

Sana isn’t comfortable with romance and intimacy, usually trying to change the subject when it comes up, especially if it involves her, or fleeing out of embarrassment. This includes smaller things like holding hands. Sensei sees her as completely innocent and is convinced that she’s incapable of those feelings, whereas some of her classmates assume that she is capable of those feelings and only suppresses them, like Uta and Nodoka, while those close to her, i.e. Sara and Ayane, are aware of or even know that she has those feelings and that she has particularly strong ones for Sensei.

Due to her small size and personality, she’s often described as incredibly cute.

Relationships

Sensei

Sana had no meaningful interactions with Sensei before the game began. She only started to spend time with him once he started to visit her regularly at her workplace and her dorm room. Sensei decided to help her with her communication problems, and while she was hesitant at first, she slowly made progress. She sees him as a great teacher for helping her with her flaws and grew closer to him to the point where she enjoys his company and sees him as a friend.

While Sana claims that Sensei is only a friend to her, she shows signs of deeper feelings for him. She gets jealous of how other girls are closer to him, particularly her mother and Ayane, and wants to spend more time with him, even inviting him into her dorm room at night during The Inside of a Triangle, knowing that Ayane wasn’t there. Most of her direct actions seem to be subconscious, though, as she either doesn’t recognize her actions as a sign of affection, which Ayane called a disconnect between her heart and mind, or insists that her actions mean nothing.

During Chapter 3, her feelings seem to have grown to a point where they’re difficult to contain, as seen during It Comes To Claim Us All and proceeding events, where she showed her interest more directly and had a few ‘emotional outbursts’.

Ayane

Despite being polar opposites in terms of their personalities, Ayane is Sana’s closest friend. Sana told Sensei in Summer and Winter that she met her during a very dark part of her life and sees her as a family member. They also share a room in the dorm and are often seen together.

She also knows about Ayane’s relationship with Sensei and while she is happy for her, it is shown during Winter and Summer that it eats her up inside to some extent, though it can only be seen when Sensei decided to sleep over in their dorm room during Still Young.

Rin

Rin and Sana are sitting next to each other in class, but they never had any meaningful interactions together. That changed when Sensei forced Sana to befriend Rin during Stronger I Become, which went surprisingly well and they became good friends as time went on. While there are not a lot of interactions between them in other events, they’re still seen together in some events and there are some references to them spending a good amount of time together outside of them. Both are also part of Molly’s D&D campaign and members of the light music club.

Sara

Sana’s mother. While she loves her mother, she doesn’t like her affectionate and talkative behavior at times, because she either ends up embarrassing her or tries to get closer with Sensei, something she doesn’t want her to do. If Sensei decides to date Sara, it’s shows how much it would hurt her during Melatonin, where she found something that made her suspicious and she snapped until Sensei managed to calm her down, but not without promising that he isn’t seeing his mother or would stay away from everyone if he lied.

Sana's Brother

Sana had a good relation with her brother and thinks of him fondly. Unlike her mother, she accepted his passing, partly because she had to prevent her mother from going insane. She still hasn’t moved on enough to bring him up in any conversation, though she told Sensei how he died in Mine (Yours). She has a lock from him in a box on her dorm room shelf and wears his uniform during her shifts at the bar.

Memorable Quotes

• "Maybe there’s a...drummer inside of me that’s just dying to come out some day"
• "Having you just see me as me...isn't enough to make me feel the way I want to feel."
• "[...]the only thing I fear...is spaghetti."

Trivia

• Sana was the winner of the first ever Lessons in Love Gravure Poll, for the month of May 2020.
• Sana is both the smallest girl in class and the smallest non-child character in the game.
• Sana was apparently very talkative in her early years. It’s still unknown what caused her attitude to change, though the death of her brother might’ve played a part in it.