Kakeru Ohzora

Kakeru is a young man of twenty-nine whose features bear a striking likeness to Haruka Tenou. He is most often pictured as the stargazing scientist, an eye pressed to his telescope or his thoughts drifting toward the moon.

A lifelong dreamer, Kakeru has loved astronomy since childhood and holds fast to the belief that a princess named Kaguya lives on the moon. His imagination is at once his gift and his burden: it makes him a brilliant, romantic thinker, yet his partner Himeko reads it as the fantasy standing between him and a serious career. The manga sharpens this portrait into a genuine prodigy who designed a rocket at twelve and earned degrees across space aviation, engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine, only to be kept from the astronaut program by a hidden heart condition rather than any lack of talent.

In the S movie, Kakeru watches a meteorite fall to Earth and recovers a small crystal from the crash site. Soon after, he saves Luna from an oncoming car, brings the cat home, and cares for her, never realizing she is quietly falling for him. His girlfriend Himeko, an astronaut chosen for the Luna Frontier Project, cannot share his belief in a moon princess and tells him he would have made a fine astronaut had he only set the fantasies aside. Meanwhile the crystal, sought by Princess Snow Kaguya to freeze the planet, binds itself to Kakeru's life force and slowly drains him. After Sailor Moon destroys the ice princess with the Silver Crystal, that same power grants Luna's wish and turns her human. She goes to the collapsing Kakeru, plays the part of his Princess Kaguya, and carries him into space to witness the moon's beauty, telling him he must recover and wait on Earth for his true princess before she kisses him. He wakes restored, and later meets Himeko at the airport with roses in hand.

The manga short story The Lover of Princess Kaguya follows a similar path with pointed differences. Here Kakeru is Himeko's childhood friend and a true scientific prodigy whose secret heart condition, not any failure of skill, has barred him from space. He names an approaching comet Princess Kaguya, and the shard he keeps in a petri dish swells as his health declines, eventually revealing Princess Snow Kaguya within. When Himeko shatters the crystal, the enraged princess blankets the world in Snow Dancers. Super Sailor Moon defeats her, and at Chibiusa's urging uses the Holy Grail to make Luna human so she can reach Kakeru's side, tell him to live for his real Kaguya, and kiss him back to life. As he wakes, Himeko is revealed to be carrying his child. The Sera Myu musical Kaguya Hime's Beloved broadly retraces this manga version.