Nanase Fujikura

Nanase is a young and striking Japanese woman, slim of figure with long dark hair that flows loose or is sometimes gathered into a ponytail. Her wardrobe shifts between plain dresses and, more often, red kimonos patterned with various floral designs.

With Rohan she comes across as warm and easy, taking a quick, open interest in his drawings and offering praise, untroubled by his fascination with her. Yet a volatile temper lurks beneath, flaring when he overhears her on the phone and again when she discovers she has become the subject of his sketches.

Her devotion to her late husband ran deep enough that she wasted away after his death, and she shows a flicker of regret for feeding Rohan to the darkness of the painting. Her aims are partly noble, since she means to seal away the curse born of her husband's work, yet she is equally set on freeing herself, willing to gamble Rohan's life to do it.

Roughly three centuries earlier she married the painter Nizaemon Yamamura, who drew an unnaturally black pigment from the trunk of an ancient tree to create Under the Moon, a work depicting her. Because felling that protected tree was forbidden, he was put to death just after their wedding, and the widowed Nanase soon fell ill and died.

She returns years later, apparently as a ghost, under the name Nanase Fujikura, renting a room at the inn kept by Rohan's grandmother. The seventeen-year-old Rohan, then an aspiring mangaka, grows fascinated and sketches her, which sets off her temper more than once. She eventually confides the tale of her husband and his lightless masterpiece, but breaks down over the phone and flees, returning only briefly before tearing apart his drawings of her and vanishing.

A decade on, Rohan travels to the Louvre and finds the black painting, from which Nanase and a host of ghosts emerge. She had sealed her husband's hatred inside the artwork and inherited a three-hundred-year curse that demanded human sacrifices, planning to use Rohan to end it for good. Apologizing as the spirits close in, she severs her connection to him, and he survives only by erasing his own memories, after which she is never seen again.