| Nanami | |
 The Folklore Student | |
| Profile | |
|---|---|
| Wishes: | Acquire the monkey paw |
| Characteristics | |
| Gender: | Female |
| Status: | Deceased |
| Hair Color: | Brown |
| Eye Color: | Grey |
| Appearances | |
| First Appearance (Manga): |
Chapter 18 |
| First Appearance (Anime): |
Episode 8 |
| Voices | |
| Seiyuu: | Chie Nakamura |
| English: | Gwen Lau |
Nanami (なな未) was a folklore student who liked to visit antique shops and anyone's house that had valuable, priceless antique items. She stumbled across the Monkey Paw upon arriving at Yūko's Shop.
She was never referred by name in the anime.
Appearance[]
Nanami was a young pale-complected woman with brown hair and grey eyes. She appeared to the around the same height as Kimihiro Watanuki. She was usually seen wearing suits or casual clothes that covered her whole body.
Personality[]
Yūko Ichihara described Nanami as "the kind of person who never listens," which seemed to be an accurate assessment, as although she was warned to not open and look inside the artifact that she got in Yūko's shop, her academic curiosity outweighed her reason.
Nanami also seemed somewhat hubristic, as after discovering that the artifact held a Monkey's Paw, she dismissed everyone's warnings about the object's nature, even though she had studied about it before, claiming the danger of the object would not affect her, as she believed herself to be special and "able to handle" its power.
Like many people before her, Nanami believed she could control the Monkey's Paw when in reality, it was the other way around. Such attitude led to her demise. As Yūko grimly commented, Nanami started her journey with her eyes closed and lost control of her own fate.
Plot[]
Using the Monkey's paw[]
Nanami discovered that every time she made a wish, one of the Monkey Paw's "fingers" would snap. Since there were five fingers, Nanami knew that she had only five wishes.
The first wish[]
Nanami wished that it would rain from that that moment (the afternoon) until the next morning. The first finger snapped, and it did indeed rain all night. The next day, all the water in the school's pool was gone because since it was not "naturally supposed to rain," the water used for the rain was taken from the pool.
The second wish[]
Nanami wished to obtain an antique mirror that she had always wanted to buy, but the antique store owner would not sell it for a reasonable price. At the moment that she wished it, the second finger snapped and the mirror that she wanted fell to the ground, appearing from out of nowhere behind her.
The third wish[]
Nanami wished to do good on the thesis that she was writing. She had to write an important essay about folklore that according to her would determine her place and path in her future career. Nanami wanted to write an original essay but had no ideas and so, in a time of desperation, she asked the monkey's paw to give her an essay that would amaze her professor. The third Monkey's Paw's finger snapped and gave her materials for her to write about. A few days after writing the essay, she received a phone call from her boss saying that her essay was incredible and that he had sent it to a publisher, who was considering publishing her essay.
The fourth wish[]
This wish was unintentional and during a time of desperation. Nanami worried about being late for her presentation that morning but had overslept. and she decided that the only reasonable excuse was if there was an accident that delayed the train. Even though she just thought about this inwardly, the monkey's paw took this as a wish and granted it. The finger snapped and just as the train was pulling up, a woman beside the student fell forwards onto the train tracks and was run over by the train, thus delaying all trains and giving Nanami a reasonable excuse.
The last wish[]
This was the wish that led to Nanami's demise. The student had received a phone call from her boss saying that her essay was a work of plagiarism. This was because the monkey's paw could not create an original essay on its own, so it only took the work from someone else. Because of her apparent plagiarism, she lost the opportunity to have her work published. Nanami then went into a storage room in the school and thought about her situation, fraught with worry. Since the essay that the monkey's paw had given her had turned out to be plagiarized, she thought that the woman who had fallen onto the train tracks would also appear to be her fault. She was frightened that the police would think that she had pushed the woman in front of the train, and that they would also think that she stole the mirror from the antique shop. Suddenly, someone started banging on the storage room door and she thought that it was the police coming to get her. In desperation, the student held the monkey's paw in front of her face and used her last wish, asking it to make her disappear. The fifth and final finger of the monkey's paw snapped, and the hand came to life, wrapping its fingers around the student's neck and strangling her to death.
Trivia[]
- Just before Nanami arrives at the shop, Yūko comments that she offers a "temporary home" for the objects she keeps and most of them will go to other people, though the new owners are not prepared for what they will receive. It can be said Yūko foretold Nanami's situation with the Monkey's Paw, as she later said that Nanami "was not compatible with it", though Yūko never explicitly confirms that something bad would happen to her.
- Nanami's first wish was the only one to not significantly affect her. Even though she noticed that the pool's water was gone, she neither seemed to care, nor correlate it with her wish.
[]
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||