Kyōsuke Hori

A tall figure at 180 centimeters, Kyōsuke cuts a handsome but disheveled profile, his dirty gray hair hanging well past his shoulders and often draped over his face. Weary golden-brown eyes give him a perpetually tired cast, one that lifts only when he sets a mock-serious expression before erupting into a deep belly laugh. Izumi Miyamura's first impression is that the man looks like an oversized Sōta, joking that the boy had simply grown huge. The OVA reworks his eyes into flat, empty black.

By his daughter Kyōko's account, Kyōsuke is blunt, self-centered, and pushy, the sort who cracks jokes during weighty conversations and disappears for long stretches. A streak of stinginess runs through him too; when the family floats the idea of splurging on beluga caviar or shark fin soup, he shoots the request down flat. His moods swing on a dime, as when a nap interrupted by Izumi's arrival flips his slumped exhaustion straight into good cheer. Coming through the door, he tends to reach for a cigarette first thing.

Kyōsuke stands as the patriarch of the Hori family, though his constant work travel leaves Yuriko and the children to keep the household running in his stead. He enters the manga around its twenty-third chapter and reaches the anime in its fifth episode. His warm welcome of Izumi, once the young man starts courting Kyōko, reveals a father who is gruff on the surface and fond underneath, and in time he becomes father-in-law to Izumi and grandfather to Kyōhei.