Kaato Higashikata

Kaato is a fifty-two-year-old woman whose shoulder-length black hair is parted down the middle, coiled into a spiral bun on each side that trails into spiraling pigtails. She dresses in a long gown fringed at the waist and printed with playing-card backs bearing the Higashikata crest across her chest and hips. Large rectangular bracelets ring both wrists, and a later depiction bares more of her cleavage.

Kaato is a layered woman who shows a different face to each person she speaks with. Her warmest affection is reserved for her son Jobin, whom she has doted on since he was a boy, partly because he was already showing the Rock Disease's first hints. That devotion has a dark edge: on learning he was being bullied, she buried the unconscious tormentor alive to transfer the illness away from her son.

She is tender toward her children yet quick to punish disrespect, and she initially looks down on Josuke as a freeloader. Her calculating true self surfaces only for those she trusts, chief among them Jobin, while in public she reads as charismatic and loving, so much so that the prison community adored her. Freed at last, she first demands her due reward for the years she lost, but comes to care more about shielding her family than collecting on it.

Fifteen years before the story, Kaato was a devoted housewife to Norisuke Higashikata IV. When she discovered that Jobin was being extorted by a fellow boy scout, she loaded the unconscious bully into her car and drove to a shrine, having her son bury him alive to cure his Rock Disease. Five years later the corpse surfaced, DNA tied it to her, and she was imprisoned for fifteen years, divorced by Norisuke, who told the children their mother was dead.

Released on time served, she recovers a card deck hiding a cellphone, a trick of her Stand, and quietly calls Jobin, asking him to keep her return a surprise. She reappears at the Higashikata house to Norisuke's horror, endures Joshu's attempt to humiliate her, and answers with a hidden chair leg to his chin before demanding half of the family's assets. Her Stand, Space Trucking, stores objects between playing cards to be produced again when a card is flipped, and she uses it to hide the Locacaca plant for Jobin. In the end she trades Tsurugi's Rock Disease onto Toru to save her grandson and avenge Jobin, dying in the calamity that follows.