Manami Okuda

Okuda is a small, slight girl, noticeably more petite than her female classmates. Her dark hair, which sometimes reads as faintly purple, falls into a pair of low braids that end just past her shoulders, and she peers through round lenses at the world with brown eyes, tinted a deep purple in the anime. Seven years on from graduation she has swapped the twin braids for a single plait draped over her left shoulder.

Reserved and easily flustered, Okuda struggles to put her thoughts into words, which leaves her unusually blunt when she does speak. Underneath the shyness she is warm and dogged, driven by a wish to be genuinely useful to the people around her. Her time under Korosensei gradually settles her, teaching her to voice what she feels with far more ease than before.

Okuda steps forward early in the series by bluntly inviting Korosensei to sample her homemade poisons, and the two begin concocting toxins together after class. He praises her gift for chemistry while gently pushing her to shore up the language skills she neglects, a lesson that pays off when she finally learns to fold literary reasoning into her formulas and vaults to the very top of the grade in science, edging out both her rival Natsuhiko Koyama and the school's leading student Gakushu Asano. That result earns her a place among the handful of students who get to fire on one of Korosensei's tentacles.

Her chemistry keeps her useful across the year, whether whipping up a smoke screen for the class's escapes or tending poisoned classmates alongside Kotaro Takebayashi on the island trip. When the class recovers research data from the space station, it is Okuda who untangles the technical language and reveals that Korosensei's chance of self-destructing sits below one percent, with a neutralizing agent strikingly close to the very poison she first brewed. Seven years later she and Takebayashi work side by side as researchers, their study of artificial blood, guided by notes Korosensei left behind, impressing their supervisor.