Ehō Norimaki

Ehō keeps his black hair combed over to the right and looks out with brown eyes. His outfit centres on a green jacket marked by a grey stripe beside the zipper, worn with a black scarf and grey trousers, and his brown ninja sandals leave the toes open.

Enthusiasm defines Ehō, whose devotion to the shinobi path runs deep and who warms to anyone showing the same drive. By the same token, wavering and indecision draw his sharp criticism. His self-assurance tends to pull shier classmates into his orbit, and he unwinds with rounds of Extreme: Shinobi Picture Scrolls. Ghost stories genuinely unnerve him, yet he was among the handful who stuck out the investigation into the Academy's Seven Mysteries to the finish, fainting only once along the way. In ordinary circumstances he shows real courage, as when he threw himself into looking into a threat made during the Academy festival.

Though not yet a shinobi, Ehō drills diligently with his grandfather and breezed through the physical tasks of his trial day, stumbling only on the Tree Climbing exercise. He first crossed paths with Himawari during that one-day Academy trial, where his excitement at the Hokage's daughter joining soured into dismissiveness once he learned she was unsure about becoming a shinobi at all. On a mission to recover a lost cat, his impatience with her indecision boiled over, and after he and Yuina found the animal they ended up stranded in a well; Himawari leapt down, talked him out of firing a flare, and the three climbed free on their own. He apologised for his behaviour, and the trio kept training together as friends from then on.

When suspicious men appeared during the Chūnin Exam finals, Ehō and Yuina tailed them to the train station and watched them abduct Amado, leaving him awed by the genin who gave chase. Once formally enrolled, he settled in beside Himawari and Yuina, clashing with a classmate named Soul over the point of a fasting exercise and joining the class's uneasy investigation of the Academy's Seven Mysteries, which he capped by fainting and mistaking a paint-covered Shino for a ghost. He was cast in the class play about the Sannin, and when the festival drew a terrorist threat, he and Eiki uncovered a hidden array of explosive tags, with Ehō racing back to warn the others while Eiki stayed to disarm it. During a later survival exercise on a remote island, he and his classmates discovered their teacher Hana was secretly an assassin who had targeted the princess Kae, and they banded together to track her down and see the ordeal through.