Makio Tanihara

Makio keeps his blue hair cropped short, cut so it ends just shy of his forehead and swept to the left, above matching blue eyes that artists tend to draw with small, pointed pupils. His junior-high self wore the hair a touch longer and the gaze a shade softer, before both sharpened into the harder high-school look he carries now.

Crude and quick to swear, Makio built an early reputation on picking on others, with Izumi Miyamura chief among his targets. Put in a spot that unsettles him, though, he clams up, keeping his thoughts to himself and letting someone else move first. The bluster, it turns out, springs from insecurity and a hunger to belong among his friends, and a pointed dream about Miyamura finally drives him to weigh his failings and try to atone. He also carries a mild wariness of girls, shaped partly by the parade of girlfriends his womanizing brother kept dragging home and by the forceful women around him. Even so, he proves fairly studious, at least beside his layabout sibling.

Back in junior high Makio ran with Kōichi Shindō's circle and joined in freezing out Izumi Miyamura and the rest of the class. As Shindō drifted toward Miyamura the two friends cooled, and Makio quietly worried that Shindō might get singled out over it. One low point saw him neglect the school rabbits across a summer break and then pin their deaths on Miyamura.

The reckoning arrives in high school. Spotting Miyamura walking with Kyōko Hori, Makio calls out and tries to slip back into old cruelty, only for Hori to swiftly drive him and his companion off. A later dream forces him to confront how baseless his bullying always was, rooted in nothing more than wanting to blend in with a crowd that judged Miyamura on his gloom and piercings. Waking with a heavy conscience, he badgers former classmates for Miyamura's number, and when the calls go unanswered he assumes rejection, only to learn on visiting the family bakery that the phone had simply broken. Refusing Miyamura's suggestion to try a shop still open, he insists on buying the bakery's cheesecake, a small gesture that signals he no longer wants to keep his distance. The two ease into a friendship, and Makio, Miyamura, and Shindō soon turn into regulars in each other's company. Elsewhere he plays reluctant guardian to Yuuna Okuyama, who adores him and whom he only ever calls Margarita, openly scorns his freeloading brother Youji, and stays flat-out terrified of Hori, whom he regards as an oni ever since their first clash.