Mayumi Yamagishi

Thin-rimmed glasses and a small mole below her lower lip give Mayumi's face its distinguishing marks, framed by black hair worn long. Because her transfer to Tokyo-3's middle school is so recent, she still dresses in her previous school's outfit, a white shirt under a sleeveless yellow vest paired with a green skirt, which makes her instantly recognizable among classmates wearing the standard uniform of New Tokyo-3 1st Municipal Junior High.

Mayumi functions as a deliberate echo of Shinji, a girl built on the same introversion and the same instinct to retreat from other people. Childhood trauma taught her to keep the world at a distance, and where Shinji buries himself in music, she disappears into books instead. The two keep crossing paths in quiet corners suited to loners, most often the school library or the local book shop.

As a young child Mayumi saw her father kill her mother, stabbing her to death after a dispute over work, and she has held everyone at arm's length ever since. She grows up as the adopted daughter of an engineer working for the United Nations and eventually transfers into Shinji Ikari's class in Tokyo-3.

Depending on the player's choices, she can join the Earth Defense Group, the festival band formed by Shinji, Toji Suzuhara, and Kensuke Aida, performing the song "Kimi ga, Kimi ni Umareta Wake" at the school's cultural celebration. In one branch of the story, the Insubstantial Angel conceals its Core within her body, confronting Shinji with the question of whether the girl must die. Once exposed, the Angel withdraws its Core back into itself and falls to Rei Ayanami and Unit-00. Freed of her burden and touched by Shinji's message, Mayumi leaves Tokyo-3 carrying a new sense of hope.