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Sakuyo was born to Kanon and Daigo Izumi, both ethnic Koreans native to Kamagasaki, or as it is officially (and euphemistically) now known, Airin-chiku, a slum neighborhood on the outskirts of Osaka. Daigo was a street tough with a soft side, gone straight some years ago in an effort to create a safe family environment for his family, Kanon a blue collar girl who’d gone through her wild years and just wanted to eke out a living in the shadow of Kansai’s great city. Both loved their daughter dearly, but it quickly became apparent that providing for her was a labor beyond the slum city. Construction work was too thin to support the dream of a comfortable lifestyle, and a drought in available work soon forced them to choose between food or shelter. They chose food, and the Izumis joined the growing number of homeless people living in Kamagasaki.
Sakuyo grew up as a street urchin, occasionally a beggar, and as she grew older, occasionally a pickpocket. She stared in the window at secondhand electronics stores selling old televisions, on display playing American music videos and Japanese TV dramas, and as she did, she dreamed of living that way, with a cozy futon to sleep in, with indoor heating, with a CD library full of music and visits to the bakery to pick up fancy Western-style breads. Occasionally there was work, and with the shady construction dealers around Kamagasaki, she ended up putting in extra hours herself, digging and carrying heavy loads from when she was 9. They needed the money; still, Daigo was apologetic, and he always made sure to keep a little money free to buy Sakuyo a manga or a treat of some kind. The manga ended up being read over and over, until they were worn and stained.
Sakuyo had few friends her age those years in Kamagasaki. It was a dying slum, and the workers who drifted through the town were mostly middle-aged or elderly men without families of their own. They treated her well enough; Daigo was on good terms with his fellow workers, and Kanon had taught Sakuyo not to steal from their fellow poor, after all, who needed everything they had. They taught her songs and salty language. What few children there were were mostly from gangster families or, in any case, better off. They taught Sakuyo to keep up her guard, emotionally and physically. More than once she started fights with them, to be scolded by Kanon and privately encouraged by Daigo (“well, let’s keep it a secret from your mother… hey, did you win?”). Daigo taught her pride; he taught her to stand up to bullies, and to never let them get to her. That she could be better than them, and she could even show them a lesson or two.
Two years ago, at age 13, something strange happened. When no one was around, Sakuyo found a bizarre white mouse nibbling on a crust of fallen bread, and the mouse called her by her name. It said she could call her Kyubey, and that it was a fairy from far, far away; it told her of secret battles waged on the edges of the world, between magical girls and Witches; it told her that she had a gift, a special dream, and it could awaken that dream for her in exchange for her assistance protecting the world from the Witches’ curse. She hesitated; in truth, she appreciated just having a friend around, somebody to listen and something to pet. But in her dreams at night she saw those brightly lit sets, she felt the warmth, she smelled her mother cooking on a shiny new range. And she made a wish: to get out of Kamagasaki, to reach the light; to have what those gangster kids had.
That night was when everything went wrong.
That night was the night when a bouryokudan organization came through, clearing out the homeless in preparation for a construction development. Sakuyo doesn’t know who threw the first punch, and Daigo has never told her, but three things she knows happened on that night. A fight broke out. Kanon was stabbed, suffering a mortal wound. Daigo’s anger and drive from his days on the streets reawakened. In the space of one night, Daigo rallied his fellow destitutes and friends from work, and he told them he was fed up. They deserved better. Sakuyo was there when they broke into the organization’s local bank and burned their stockpile of ill-gotten gains. They fled immediately; several of them were arrested, but they sought passage east, where they wouldn’t be recognized, where they could start again. Tokyo. The Izumi-gumi was born, a small but preternaturally successful syndicate filling gaps left open in Tokyo’s underworld.
At first, Sakuyo was swept up with Daigo’s temper. She had lost her mother; the wish-rat had betrayed her; and they were on the run. On the way to Tokyo, she did not stay long enough in one place to encounter many Witches, nor was she in a mood to. Upon reaching Tokyo, though, the Izumi-gumi’s fortunes multiplied, as if by magic, and soon she was living in the kind of luxuries she had always dreamed of. Her first few encounters with Witches were desperate and left her in rough condition, until she was joined by a water-shaping Tuner Puella Magi named Shizuko, herself relatively newly minted, who showed her the ropes. They became friends, aiding one another for half a year before her mentor fell in battle. She reached out to the rest of the Tuners, largely to be rebuffed and taken advantage of. She has seen the first friends she made at Ohtori turn their backs on their lessers, as well, and consequentially, has thrown herself increasingly into her work battling Witches, alone. Increasingly distant with her father, dissatisfied with luxury and rough with her classmates, Sakuyo is a problem waiting to happen.
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