Character · Durarara!!
Izaya Orihara
He says he loves all of humanity. He means it roughly the way an entomologist loves beetles.
In Otakana the clue reads: Information broker who loves humans in the abstract
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Durarara!!
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Izaya sells information out of an office in Shinjuku, and his real trade is arranging outcomes. He knows which gang is short of money, which student is lying to her parents, and which two people should never be introduced, and he sets them against one another to watch what happens. He keeps a chess set on the desk. The metaphor is not subtle and he does not intend it to be.
His affection for people is genuine and completely useless to any individual person. He will happily talk a stranger out of jumping and then ruin her life for the pleasure of seeing how she copes. The one exception is Shizuo Heiwajima, whom he hates without qualification and provokes at every opportunity, in a feud that has been running since school and has damaged a large amount of public property.
Durarara's structure suits him. Narita writes an ensemble where every chapter switches narrator and nobody sees the whole picture, so a character whose business is the whole picture ends up at the centre of a story that never quite lets him control it.
Spelling IZAYA
IZAYA is five letters, and the Z is the letter worth guessing early since almost nothing else in the set uses one. Two A's, in the third and fifth slots, with the Y between them. The name is the given one, so Orihara is out, and note that Japanese order puts the family name first, making him Orihara Izaya at home.