Ikumi Unagiya

Ikumi is a tall, full-figured woman with fair skin, brown eyes, and dark hair reaching her upper back, its bangs swept to one side and the rest bound in a ponytail held by a purple scrunchy. Her working outfit is a white tee with long purple sleeves carrying her shop's logo, snug black trousers with a buckled belt, and black rubber boots, topped by a brown cap with goggles and a pair of work gloves. Whenever her young son is near, she trades the gloves, hat, and goggles for an apron.

Ikumi runs her shop with a heavy hand and is not above force to get her way, once flattening a whole gang simply to haul a reluctant Ichigo in to work, then tying him up to do it. She is fiercely proud of the business and refuses to rename it no matter how many callers mistake it for an eel restaurant. Beneath the aggression sits genuine warmth: she plays the doting mother around her boy, Kaoru, and shows Ichigo a caring, protective side, offering him shelter and counsel in his low moments and coming to regard herself as an older sister to him.

When Ichigo keeps skipping work, Ikumi bundles him off to the Unagiya Shop, where a stranger named Kūgo Ginjō soon arrives asking her to look into a man Ichigo recognizes as his own father. As Ichigo's ordeal with Xcution and Shūkurō Tsukishima deepens, she takes him in again and again, urging him to lean on the adults around him. After his return from the Soul King Palace she lends him her umbrella and later gives back the Substitute Shinigami Badge he left behind. A capable brawler with surprising strength for her frame, she was around thirty-three during the Fullbring affair and later remarried.