Norisuke Higashikata IV

Norisuke is a man past middle age, of a bit above average height and ordinary build. His light, shoulder-length hair is strung with spheres that grow larger down its length, and stubble or a faint beard shades his jaw. He favors a tan puffer vest over a light turtleneck, pale trousers, and a belt whose buckle is shaped like a heart, and he reaches for glasses when small print needs reading.

At first Norisuke reads as a relaxed, sunny old man. He greets Josuke warmly, calls himself a yanki after the delinquent subculture that thrived in 1980s and 1990s Japan, and laughs easily, proudly showing off his fruit shop and cheerfully running through morning exercises. That geniality masks a hard authority, and he can chillingly remind Josuke that his word is law within the household. Family is everything to him: he watches over all of them, dotes above all on Jobin, his firstborn boy, and on Daiya among his daughters, treats the troublesome Joshu with a light hand, and cannot stomach the notion of his daughters being intimate with anyone, flaring into a murderous rage when he thinks Josuke has seduced Daiya. Toward his imprisoned ex-wife Kaato he is coldly hostile, cutting off contact and refusing her a single coin because her crime shamed the family name. Yet he warms to Josuke over time, refusing under torture to betray him until his family's lives are threatened, and even then he weeps and apologizes for failing to protect him. Kaato observes that he has an unconscious habit of touching his chin any time he is hiding something.

Following clan superstition, Norisuke was dressed as a girl in childhood to keep the Rock Disease at bay, and at eleven, in 1963, the illness struck him anyway until his mother Tomoko took his affliction onto herself through equivalent exchange and saved his life. He married Kaato and fathered four children, Jobin, Hato, Joshu, and Daiya, then filed for divorce and hid Kaato's existence from them once she was jailed for murder, all to shield the family's reputation. The Higashikata Fruit Company likewise passed into his hands, and he took its helm in 1993, and though he brought the young appraiser Rai Mamezuku aboard for his gift with plants, he refused to grow the business past luxury fruit, to Jobin's frustration. His Stand, King Nothing, is a long-range power that memorizes a scent to hunt its target, retracing that target's movements in order, and it can even detach parts of his body. When the amnesiac Josuke's own search for identity stalls, Norisuke adopts him, secretly angling to learn the cure that Yoshikage Kira supposedly discovered. He fights beside Josuke to defeat Yotsuyu Yagiyama, then unknowingly catches the scent of the Locacaca fruit on Jobin. Later he welcomes his daughter Hato's boyfriend, Tamaki Damo, who turns out to lead the Locacaca Organization and tortures him, and Norisuke is reduced to liquid as bait before Damo is beaten. When Kaato reappears demanding payment for her years in prison, he turns her away, and his investigation with King Nothing eventually exposes Jobin's guilt in the killings of Ojiro Sasame and Maako, prompting Jobin to knock him out with Speed King. He survives that attack, and after Josuke wipes out the Wonder of U with Go Beyond, Norisuke is at last discharged from the hospital.