Character · Toradora!
Minori Kushieda
She works a different part-time job every week, laughs at everything, and is the least readable person in the show.
In Otakana the clue reads: Softball captain who works several part-time jobs
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Toradora!
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Minori Kushieda captains the softball team, holds down an alarming number of jobs, and moves through school at a volume that leaves no gap for follow-up questions. Ryuuji has a crush on her. Taiga is her best friend. The love triangle the series advertises early depends on Minori behaving like a straightforward romantic prize, which she declines to do.
Under the cheerfulness she is observant and unusually careful. She notices what is happening between her friends long before either of them will admit it, and she makes decisions about her own feelings that the audience only ever sees the outside of. Yuyuko Takemiya keeps her interior life mostly closed, which annoyed a lot of viewers and is the point.
Toradora began as light novels in 2006 and reached television in 2008 through J.C.Staff, and Minori is the character whose reputation shifts most on a second viewing. First time through she is comic energy. Second time, the ghost stories, the running and the cheerfulness itself all look like somebody managing something carefully.
Spelling MINORI
MINORI is the given name, and Kushieda is the surname that stays off the board. Six letters alternating vowel and consonant the whole way, which makes it forgiving once any two tiles land. Minori is also an ordinary Japanese word for a harvest or a crop coming good. The final I is a full beat, not decoration.