CHARACTERS THE MUNAKATA FAMILY MUNAKATA RYOUZOU [宗方　良蔵] Mikoto...Mikoto....the mask, where's the mask?....start the ritual, the Himuro family ritual...the shrine rope maiden... A folklorist who was investigating the forbidden rituals of the Himuro family. He brought his sickly wife Yae and his young daughter with him to stay in the mansion. He discovered that there was some ritual involving a rope miko, a blinded demon, and five masks. One day his daughter disappeared while playing Demon Tag with four of her friends. When she didn't return, Yae hung herself from the big cherry tree in the courtyard in despair. Munakata continued his research, hoping to unlock the secret of all the ghosts haunting the mansion, but he was killed by the ghosts in the Forbidden Path past the Demon Mouth gate. He collected many helpful pieces of the puzzle, but was unable to break the curse, so he accosts visiting people, begging for their help and scaring/hurting them instead. It's strange, he seems to be one of the few genuinely benevolent moving ghosts ("don't be scared..."), but he still hurts Miku when he touches her. All he wants is for someone to break the curse, and tries to show them the results of his research to help them along. He must have been attacked by the Himuro master in the Buddha room, because his spirit has a strong attachment to that place. He is Miku's great-grandfather. MUNAKATA YAE [宗方　八重] Yae accompanied her husband to the Himuro mansion and took care of their daughter while he did his work. They seem to have all lived together upstairs in the family rooms overlooking the Cherry Atrium. Yae was frail, sickly woman with a heart condition, so she tended to stay indoors. I believe that she was the one who found the infamous camera somewhere in Himuro mansion and began to photograph things to pass the time. She discovered that the camera could photograph spirits, and there are a couple of pictures of Mikoto together with ghost children, so I suppose the powers didn't bother her so much at first. Later on, she became frightened by the ghosts she could see with the camera - especially when she started to see them without the camera. One day her daughter Mikoto disappeared while playing Demon Tag with some of her friends from the village. Mikoto had been playing with the camera at the time, and Yae blamed herself for her daughter's disappearance, assuming (quite correctly) that the ghosts of the mansion had snatched her away. Three days later, her sanity gave in and she hung herself from the large cherry tree in the Cherry Atrium. Her spirit still lingers by the tree, alternately pleading for the ghosts to return her child and viciously attacking passersby when Mikoto doesn't appear. She is Miku's great-grandmother, one of the Neurotic Hinasaki women, and probably the one who introduced the camera into the family as a heirloom. She strongly resembles Miku's mother Miyuki, enough so that seeing her ghost was an unpleasant shock for Miku. She was the owner of the red hairclip that was passed on to Miku. MUNAKATA/HINASAKI MIKOTO [宗方　美琴] Hmmm, her name means "beautiful koto" - as in that instrument in the Koto Room. She was a small girl when her parents came to live in the abandoned Himuro mansion. She often invited some of her friends in the nearby village to play with her, and they'd run through the entire house playing "Demon Tag." She also liked to play with the strange antique camera her mother found in the house. She could also see the ghosts, mostly likely; her mother took pictures of her standing with the ghost of the girl in the white kimono. One day while she was playing with her friends, the other two children got snatched away by Long-Arms, and she herself disappeared. I don't know exactly what happened to her, but she was protected the camera she held. Three days later, when she finally emerged from the house carrying the camera, both her parents were dead and she had lost her memory of what happened in the mansion. Her father's friend, Mr. Hinasaki, adopted her into the Hinasaki family. She only retained the camera and her mother's hairpin as mementos of her time in the Himuro mansion. She is Miku's grandmother, and the person who brought the camera out of Himuro mansion. * back*