Character · Erased
Kayo Hinazuki
A girl in a thin red coat, bruised, always alone at lunch, and the reason a grown man wakes up in 1988.
In Otakana the clue reads: Girl in the red coat who is always cold
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Erased
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Kayo Hinazuki is eleven, lives in Hokkaido, and is cold in a way the adults around her have decided not to examine. Her coat is too thin for the snow. The bruises get explained away. Her classmates keep a polite distance because she is unfriendly, and she is unfriendly because home has taught her that being liked leads nowhere good.
In the original 1988 she disappears in March, and two other children follow. Satoru Fujinuma, who was in her class and did nothing, is thrown back into his own eleven-year-old body eighteen years later with one job: make a different March happen. The show turns a serial killer plot into something much smaller and harder, which is a boy trying to get a girl invited to a birthday party.
Kei Sanbe serialized Erased in Young Ace from 2012, and A-1 Pictures animated twelve episodes in 2016. The Japanese title, Boku dake ga Inai Machi, means the town where only I am missing. Kayo's scenes carry the show because Sanbe writes the small rescues with the same weight as the murders: a hot meal, a coat that fits, someone waiting at the gate.
Spelling KAYO
Four letters, KAYO, the given name; the family name Hinazuki is longer and not what the game wants. Two beats, ka-yo, and the Y is doing consonant work rather than sitting in a vowel run. No long vowel hides here, so the KAYOU and KAYOH that other Japanese names train you to expect are both wrong.