Noriaki Kakyoin

Kakyoin is a fit, slender young man of a bit above average height. His signature outfit is a formal, trench-length green school uniform with gold trim and dress shoes, the kind worn by Japanese high schoolers, and he is never seen without a pair of cherry-shaped earrings. His red hair sits fluffed at the back and longer at the neck, with one large twisting bang falling across his face, though the side that bang hangs on shifts oddly depending on how he faces. Many people find him striking; stewardesses swooned over him during the Tower of Gray fight, and a street vendor in India called him beautiful. Partway through the story his eyes are slashed by the Stand Geb, leaving two thin vertical scars that he usually keeps behind dark sunglasses. He also spends time in striped pajamas and eye bandages during his hospital stay.

Because of DIO's brainwashing, Kakyoin is introduced as a callous teenager who attacks bystanders and preaches that might makes right, only to reveal himself afterward as a righteous if blunt young man. He remains brutal toward enemies and wields a manipulative charm against them, yet he is otherwise proud, cold, and somewhat withdrawn, the image of the honorable-student type. Araki has described his manner as effeminate, given his soft speech, while also noting how stern and direct he can be, and Kakyoin loathes bowing to anyone, his humiliation at having once knelt to DIO fueling his hunger for redemption. His childhood was lonely: no one else could see Hierophant Green, so he felt permanently misunderstood and grew depressed and distant. Once he finds true friends, however, his loyalty runs without limit, and he throws in with the Joestar group to fight evil, mirroring Jotaro's own reasons. He is deeply versed in the nature of Stands, brave enough to stay calm even while dying, and quietly odd in his habits, giving cherries a lick before he eats them and basking in the sun while still dressed in his school uniform.

Kakyoin struggled to make friends as a boy, since none of his peers could perceive his Stand, and he retreated into himself while watching other children fill their address books with names he would never have. Two or three months before Part 3 begins, DIO approached him during a family holiday in Egypt and planted one of his flesh buds, bending Kakyoin to his will and ordering him to kill Jotaro Kujo. Returning to Japan, he transferred into Jotaro's school and struck on their first meeting, using Hierophant Green to puppet the school nurse. After Jotaro beats and captures him, he removes DIO's implant with Star Platinum despite the danger, and the freed Kakyoin sets out for Egypt beside Joseph Joestar, Muhammad Avdol, and Jotaro himself. His Stand, Hierophant Green, is a long-range humanoid that stretches its tentacle limbs, unravels into a web of strings, and fires the emerald barrage he shouts as the Emerald Splash; he can even slip it into a person's body to seize control, and his quick, calculating mind ranks him among the group's sharpest tacticians.

Across the journey he tears apart Gray Fly's Tower of Gray to spare the plane, weathers Rubber Soul's impersonation of him, and outwits the Hanged Man by trapping it inside a single coin so Polnareff can avenge his sister. He laughs his way through Arabia Fats' Sun, defeats Death Thirteen by carrying Hierophant Green into a shared dream, and is the first to expose Mannish Boy as a Stand user before punishing him. Soon after reaching Egypt his eyes are slashed by N'Doul's Geb, forcing him to recover in Aswan. Later he wagers his soul against Telence D'Arby in a racing video game and loses, regaining it only when D'Arby falls. In the final confrontation he binds DIO within a lattice of Hierophant Green's tentacles, but The World's ability to halt time lets DIO slip free and punch a fatal hole through his abdomen. With his last strength he fires the Emerald Splash at a clock tower to warn Joseph of the time-stopping power, then dies on January 16, 1989. In the spin-off Crazy Diamond's Demonic Heartbreak, a cousin named Ryoko sets out to uncover how he was killed, wearing a single cherry earring in his memory.