Joji Joestar

Joji starts out as an ordinary-sized boy with a wings-style haircut whose bangs sweep upward. He favors a collared T-shirt stamped with a central star and the word JoJo repeated across it, paired with belted shorts. Later, after his encounter with Kars, the ancient being reaches into his brain and stretches him roughly twenty centimeters taller, pushing him past six feet. Because he was adopted into the family rather than born into it, he carries none of the Joestar birthmark.

Sharp and quick-witted, Joji has cracked a long string of private cases on his own and has a gift for untangling elaborate puzzles. Kars, unimpressed, dismisses him as a fool who lacks grit and struggles to believe such a boy descends from Joseph. The meeting with Kars nonetheless pushes Joji toward greater courage, and even without his memory disc he wins the ancient creature's grudging respect by describing his genuine passion for solving mysteries.

Japanese by birth, Joji was given up by parents unable to raise him and taken in by Jonda Joestar, who brought him up as an Englishman. He grew into a celebrated teenage detective, at one point solving fifteen sealed-room mysteries back to back. In 2012 he realizes those murder sites form a sliding puzzle laid over a map and travels to Morioh to investigate, where he befriends a boy named Tsukumojuku Kato only to find him dead the next morning. His inquiries lead to the Arrow Cross House and pull him into a spiraling catastrophe as the town breaks off from the mainland and drifts out to sea beneath a dome.

The novel hands Joji two remarkable powers. He never possesses a true Stand of his own, borrowing Rohan Kishibe's Heaven's Door to perceive Stands before receiving U-Boat, a fleet of miniature submarines, from Kars. Far greater is his Beyond, also called Trinity, which grants him the awareness that he is a character within someone else's story and, through sheer belief, the means to accomplish whatever he must. He shares this Beyond with George Joestar II as well as, in time, Dio Brando, and among the franchise's powers few rank as formidable.

His journey carries him from Morioh into outer space, where he confronts thirty-six alternate versions of Kars, and eventually helps set right a reality that Made in Heaven has reset dozens of times over, before Kars at last sends everyone back to their own separate dimensions.