Chiho Futaba

Chiho is a young Japanese girl with long, pale hair. Slight and delicate in build, she shares the frail look that also marks Takuma.

Curiosity and a love of writing define Chiho, who is otherwise an unremarkable teenager. Having fallen for literature and especially storytelling, she sets her heart on becoming an author and works on a book of her own, roaming Morioh's notable spots to gather material despite a poor memory. She looks up to Takuma as a well-read senior, reads voraciously herself, finds comfort in the scent of aged books, and counts children's stories among her favorites, while showing no interest in typical girlish pursuits such as makeup. Because he is the one person she can talk to freely about novels, she gravitates constantly toward Takuma. A rescue in childhood, when a mysterious boy saved her, blossoms first into friendship and then into love, and even after she discovers that Takuma is her half-brother she resolves to bear their child so that his life will not have been spent in vain. For all her lineage as the descendant of a Stand user, she holds no combat potential and cannot even perceive The Book on her own, though her writing gift is real enough that a burst of inspiration lets her fill an entire notebook in a single night.

Chiho grew up amid constant clashes between her parents, and at twelve, unable to read over the sound of her mother smashing dishes, she fled home. She meant to ride a bus to S City but abandoned the plan, realizing she had never known anywhere but Morioh. Around that time a stranger rescued her from a delinquent who assaulted her. As the years passed her friends drifted away toward boys, her closest companion moved off to an all-girls school to train as an interpreter for Hollywood stars, and Chiho poured herself into a diary that read so much like fiction that she decided to become a novelist. She lives with her doting father Teruhiko, and Yukako Yamagishi was once her neighbor. By the year 2000 she is an aspiring writer chasing local rumors for material, looking into the man of the iron tower and later the strange book. She befriends Takuma, convinced he is the boy who once saved her even as he denies it, and their shared passion draws them together until she falls in love and eventually becomes pregnant. Two months into the relationship she invites him home for dinner and receives from him a black amber necklace, the very one her father had given Takuma's mother, Akari, years earlier. Piecing together the truth that she is Takuma's half-sister, Chiho stabs her father to death and sets the house ablaze. After Takuma dies she is taken in by her mother, who lives far from Morioh, and the last public sighting comes in August 2000, when she speaks briefly with Koichi Hirose, reveals her pregnancy and her intent to give birth, and departs Morioh by bus.