ryota back story book spoilers

Tumblr user bevelle, again, has a useful post of Hiraga sibling info from the first novel:
bevelle.tumblr.com/post/164848089254/hiraga-ryouta-facts-from-black-academy
The following is mostly additional info from non-English fan posts, and reflects details from later in the novels.

- Ryouta is 12 as of the first novel, so he's 12 years younger than Hiraga.
- Ryouta is currently receiving treatment in a hospital in Munich. The hospital’s name is Baden. It’s on top of a tall hill on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by trees (the anime shows this at the end of ep 4). There are priests and nuns who provide psychological counselling to the patients. (Baden Hospital is pretty spooky - 200 years ago, the land was owned by a nobleman whose brain was affected by syphilis; he brutally killed girls in the nearby village and later shot himself. His relatives took possession of the house, but it seemed to be haunted, and they donated the building to the church. A mass was performed, which seemed to dispel the spirit. Now the place is used as a hospital, and it’s known for specialising in treating children with cancer.)
- By the way, Hiraga and Ryouta’s father is a musician, who travels a lot for his job (presumably for performances). When he’s away and the hospital can’t reach him, they contact Hiraga instead.
- Their mother was a researcher studying primates, but after she got married and had her first child, she became a teacher to support the family. She called this career change “putting theory into practice”.
- Ryouta describes Hiraga as having always been a prodigy, but also very humble - Hiraga skipped grades thrice, and he easily got into a prestigious German university after they moved to Germany for their father’s job. (My guess is that this means the family moved to Germany around when Hiraga was 15?) Ryouta also thinks of Hiraga as a teacher, especially since Hiraga is so much older. He used to ask questions like “Why do the stars move with me when I walk?” and “Where does the sun go when it sets?”, and Hiraga would bring out the encyclopedia and patiently answer all his questions.
- Ryouta writes letters to Hiraga updating him on his treatment progress (and presumably they also have phone conversations, from what we see in the anime).
- According to the hospital staff, he sings beautifully.
- According to Hiraga, Ryouta has seemed unusually perceptive from an early age.
- In one of the latest novels, Hiraga is visiting Ryouta while Roberto is off on a mission, and Ryouta urges Hiraga to hurry to where Roberto is. (Hiraga does, and it looks like Roberto could indeed do with some help.)
- One of the sidestories is Ryouta-centric, and it covers Ryouta’s childhood and his mysterious golden bookmark and also that ominous shot of him in the anime OP. There's a lot going on.
At the time of the sidestory (which takes place after book 6), Ryouta has been in hospital for 2 years. Since his first day there, he stood out to the staff as being very calm; one of the first things he did was go to the chapel to pray for his family. He tried to not let on his pain/his seriousness of his condition so that his family wouldn’t worry, because he knew that his mother’s cancer took a serious toll on his family. Ryouta is quiet but warm, and looks out for the younger patients at the hospital, and he’s very well-liked.
A member of the hospital staff notices Ryouta’s sixth sense, because whenever he spends the entire day with a patient who seems stable, soon afterwards their condition will abruptly take a turn for the worse, and Ryouta will be praying for them as though he already foresaw their death. The staff member thinks of Ryouta as a prophet, but Ryouta thinks of it far more negatively, and reflects a lot on his sixth sense.
Ever since Ryouta was very young, he often got lost in his own house - when going into another room, it was though space warped around him and the corridor led in a different direction or an unfamiliar space opened up. Whenever he entered this bizarre labyrinth, he arrived at a strange room - it was narrow and dark, with no windows and no furniture, and only a fireplace that was always lit. In front of the fireplace sat three men, wearing white/red/black hoods that hid their faces (!!!), talking among themselves in low voices that Ryouta couldn’t make out.
Young Ryouta was afraid of them, and didn’t understand what they were doing there, but he thought that perhaps his family was sheltering them from some danger, and there must be some reason why his family never talked to him about them. One day he could no longer contain his fear, and told Hiraga about getting lost in the house (though presumably not about the creepy room). Hiraga suggested that maybe Ryouta had a weakness in his inner ear (affecting his spatial orientation), so whenever he felt he was about to get lost, he could just call out to Hiraga and Hiraga would hold his hand and walk with him. They did that, and Ryouta stopped getting lost in the house, and the memory gradually faded, so he hoped that it had all just been a bad dream.
But when he’s in primary school, Hiraga’s busy with his studies and can’t come home for a while, and the visions come back. Ryouta befriends the new neighbour’s son, Danny, who has a weak heart and can’t go to school, but he suddenly sees the three hooded figures appear behind Danny, and he realises that no one else can see them. They’re watching Danny, and Ryouta hears them talking about how Danny is going to die soon. Ryouta thinks that maybe Hiraga could help him figure out this mess, but he doesn’t know how to tell Hiraga, and also he has a sense that if he speaks out about the hooded figures, something terrible will befall Hiraga. One evening he has a nightmare, and the hooded figures appear before him and tell him to go to Danny’s funeral. He leaves his room, follows them to a strange ceremony, and prays for Danny. He wakes up in the morning in his own bed to learn that Danny has passed away.
Ryouta continues having these visions, where he attends the strange ceremony to pray at (unfamiliar) people’s graves. One night, he has a vision of a lot of people boarding a ship, and the priest ushering them tries to get him to board the ship, but he doesn’t want to. The hooded figures intercede, and the priest demands a “substitute” in Ryouta’s place, and calls the name of Ryouta’s mother (Ada). Ryouta, panicking, asks to board the ship instead, but is ignored, and the ship sails away into the sky. Soon after, Ryouta is told that his mother has breast cancer.
As her condition worsens, Ryouta pleads with the hooded figures to spare his mother and let him board the ship instead, but they shake their heads. After his mother passes away, Ryouta has a crisis about how good people who have done nothing wrong die unfortunate deaths anyway, and how life seems meaningless. The next time the hooded figures come for him, he refuses to go to the ceremony, and struggles; he knocks off one of their hoods, and reveals a single glowing eye in the middle of the person’s forehead. Ryouta starts to doubt God for allowing people to suffer, but also thinks that maybe he himself is a bad person who’s been possessed by a devil, and that’s why he’s haunted by these terrifying hooded figures.
Around this time, Hiraga starts working at the Vatican; Ryouta is distressed at him leaving, but figures that maybe it’s for the best that his brother is far away from him. He gives Hiraga a little crucifix.
A few years later, Ryouta is diagnosed with bone cancer, and is hospitalised. One day, he’s in the hospital library when he comes across a thin black book wedged between two others. It has no title, and when he opens it, a golden bookmark falls out. It’s a handwritten journal; Ryouta feels slightly guilty but reads it out of curiosity (it’s in Italian but he uses a dictionary). Ryouta senses that the person who wrote this had the same illness and went through the same painful struggle as him, and is most likely no longer alive. The hooded figures gather around and mutter about how this is “the book of destiny” and “the door has been opened” and now no one can close it.
So it looks like that’s where the bookmark comes from - it’s one of Josef’s, and he left it behind in the hospital where he was a patient.
I think the fan is still posting updates, so quite possibly there’s even more to this and Ryouta finding the journal is more conspiracy than coincidence, but this is the basic explanation at least.

- This is no longer about Ryouta, but it’s also contained within his sidestory.

The first line of the journal is “Dear you - How are you feeling right now?” Ryouta, naturally, doesn’t know this, but it’s pretty clear that the journal was written by boarding school Josef. He addresses “the other me”, and hopes that this person is leading a happy life. Then Josef basically recaps the events of the boarding school backstory from his POV. He talks about how he had a happy ordinary childhood, but then he was diagnosed with a brain tumour when he was 12, and was told that he only had a few years left to live. He closed off his emotions, smiled meaninglessly, and tried to pretend that he didn’t feel pain and grief and rage; he was dubbed “Saint Josef” by his schoolmates who had no idea.
Then Josef met a boy who seemed as lonely as him; he was very quiet, and the rumours Josef heard about him were rather unflattering - he was known as a “problem child”, etc. Josef says he was drawn to this boy (i.e. Roberto) because he felt they were akin in their loneliness, and he wanted to get close to this boy who had closed off his heart - he says he had no noble thoughts of helping him or healing his soul, but just wanted a companion who was wounded like him. He does the thing with winning Roberto over by reading aloud everyday; while his condition deteriorates, he keeps himself going with the thought that he needs to keep reading to Roberto. Eventually they actually become friends and start talking about books, and Josef is really taken with Roberto's intelligence and thoughtfulness.
One day the principal asks Josef about his friendship with Roberto, and expresses the hope that Josef will become Roberto’s confidant. This surprises Josef, who feels that it’s pretty cruel to both him and Roberto, given that Josef doesn’t have long to live and the principal knows it. The principal explains what happened to Roberto’s family; Josef is stunned, and thinks that if it were him, he would hate God and curse everyone in the world. But later he learns that Roberto has amnesia, and his interpretation of this is that instead of sinking into hatred and anger, Roberto forgot, this shows that Roberto must have a very beautiful soul, etc.
Soon after, Josef finds a book by a medieval scholar, Daniel Sacramento Orlando (...this is my best guess), entitled “The Appearance of God’s Love”, and this helps him clarify just what Roberto means to him. There are LOTS of excerpts from this book (the story is on multiple layers of epistolary at this point), but basically it’s the author’s description of his wretched life and how he became religious and joined the priesthood. At some point he fell out of favour in the church and was assigned to preach in a remote place, where he learnt about a flower that the local people called the “flower of sacrament” (!). It was an unremarkable shrub with small white flowers, but one day when the author was stranded in the forest, he was guided by a beautiful silver light, which turned out to be coming from the flowers of sacrament. The glow of the flowers led him safely back to his church. It turned out that this was a natural property of those flowers.
The fan’s posts stop at this point - I think they’re still updating - but it looks like it’s building up to Josef saying that Roberto is his guiding light, his flower of sacrament, etc.