Touma Inaba

Name: Touma Inaba

Gender: Male

Nickname: Tonma

Age at story start: 18

Occupation: Ronin student attending Kamizono Preparatory School

First-choice university: Keio University

Family background: Son of parents who run a hot-spring inn

Touma is a failed university applicant who spends his gap year aiming for Keio University because Mieko Yotsuba, the woman he fell in love with at first sight, studies there.

He boards at his uncle's house in Tokyo and begins living with his childhood friend and cousin, Urara Kasuga.

The story is largely framed through Touma's monologue.

His narration often sounds as if he is looking back on events from the future, though this impression is frequently undercut by how self-deluding and presumptuous he is.

By the ending of the original story, he is indeed depicted as entering Keio University.

That outcome, like Urara's return to Sophia University, is treated almost like a dream.

Touma is portrayed as selfish, shallow, and impulsive.

He is especially fixated on women's looks and breasts, while showing little self-awareness about his own unimpressive appearance.

He frequently judges women by appearance alone and shifts his attitude when a girl turns out to be prettier than he assumed.

His internal monologue reveals a habit of reducing relationships to sexual convenience rather than emotional connection.

He is also described as crafty in a psychological test administered by Urara.

The result identifies him as someone prone to cunning and petty scheming.

His nickname, Tonma, reinforces his image as a fool, but he is not merely naïve.

He often acts with calculated self-interest, then rationalizes his behavior afterward.

Touma's parents run a traditional inn, but his relationship with them is poor.

He resents their academic elitism and pressure for high educational achievement.

On days when the inn is closed, he even takes over the empty bath facilities for his own private use.

The story does not frame this as sentimental attachment to the family business, but as another expression of his entitlement.

He sometimes casts himself as a victim of his parents' expectations.

However, the narrative also presents his own behavior as deeply inconsiderate, which weakens sympathy for him.

Urara Kasuga

Urara is Touma's cousin, childhood friend, and the central heroine tied most closely to him.

She supports him constantly, studies while helping with his meals, and repeatedly cleans up after his mistakes.

Touma's feelings toward Urara are one of the story's biggest mysteries.

He is shown reviving from near death while thinking of her, yet the text never clearly explains what he truly loves about her beyond her unconditional devotion.

Urara's own desire to bear his child is likewise left ambiguous.

Their bond is symbolized by a tanuki and rabbit drawing from their past, first seeming to represent cowardice and loneliness, but later carrying sexual implications as well.

Mieko Yotsuba

Touma chooses Keio University largely because Mieko attends there.

He is captivated by her beauty and starts dating her while hiding the fact that he is not a Keio student but a prep-school student.

When rival pressure threatens to expose him, he confesses the truth to her himself.

Even so, the revelation does not produce the kind of moral reckoning one might expect.

At one point, Mieko rejects him after getting into university and gives him a false phone number.

This becomes one of several humiliations he suffers, though it does not fundamentally change his outlook.

Other women

Even after becoming involved with Urara and Mieko, Touma continues to have relationships with multiple women.

He often assumes he understands their feelings after sleeping with them, without actually asking or caring.

He rejects an invitation from the adult woman Etsuko, who already has a boyfriend, saying that he has Urara.

The story leaves open whether he would have acted differently if the other woman had fit his ideal preferences more closely.

He also once compared Etsuko unfavorably to Urara.

In another case, he nearly assaulted the middle-schooler Momoe but stopped before carrying it through.

Touma's sexual outlook is one of the most criticized aspects of his characterization.

He is depicted as seeking a convenient way to lose his virginity and treating the idea of a girlfriend as little more than a substitute for paid sex.

He complains that sex workers cost money and operate like an assembly line, then looks for an ordinary woman who will satisfy him on easier terms.

This mentality is presented in his monologue without meaningful self-correction.

He also treats marriage as a pretext for having unprotected sex.

The text does not attribute this to ignorance, trauma, misogyny born from a specific event, or youthful confusion, making his attitude especially stark.

Rather than simply being woman-hating or promiscuous, he often seems to trivialize sex and procreation themselves.

He belittles girls and younger people more broadly, not only romantic partners.

In the original version, Touma is often regarded as a protagonist with few redeeming qualities.

He shows little concern for others and rarely faces direct criticism for the full extent of his behavior.

One especially harsh example from his past involves breaking school windows in anger and allowing Urara to bear the consequences, which contributed to her giving up university admission.

Despite this, he later laments being treated like a tool by his parents, creating a strong sense of hypocrisy.

He lies about being a Keio student, jumps to selfish conclusions, and often fails to reflect after harming others.

Even when confronted with serious situations, he tends to return quickly to self-centered thinking.

A notable example occurs when he wrongly assumes that Koji's efforts to take Mizuki to the hospital are driven by sexual motives.

He indulges in crude speculation, tries to surprise them for frivolous reasons, and shows little remorse after learning the truth that they are siblings and that Mizuki has leukemia.

In another ethically murky contrast, Touma condemns Koji for shoplifting to pay medical costs for Mizuki.

The scene leaves open the question of who is truly the worse person.

The entire story is filtered heavily through Touma's internal voice, but many readers are far more invested in the heroines and rival male characters than in him.

His long monologues are therefore often seen as tedious rather than compelling.

The original story's premise depends on a selfish male lead being embraced unconditionally by the main heroine.

Because of that, many readers stop early, while others see this discomfort as an intentional feature of the work.

His exaggerated expressions and visual gags are also unusual.

Rather than making him more charming, they often seem designed to make him look unpleasant or ridiculous.

Unlike other characters whose comedic faces create contrast with their normal behavior, Touma's distortions often function as direct visual mockery.

His appearance can even seem inconsistent from chapter to chapter.

Touma repeatedly goes through extreme, almost game-over-like ordeals between story arcs.

These include being rejected by Mieko with a fake number, having an apartment set on fire during sex, being driven onto a highway and nearly killed, and being drugged through a scheme involving Komi Natsuki.

He is also subjected to severe emotional and physical crises connected to Urara.

At one point she forces him through a punishing devotional ritual, and at other times he confronts her self-harm and miscarriage.

Even when he cries during these events, many readers feel his emotions do not come across clearly.

The text often withholds a satisfying explanation of what exactly he is feeling and why.

Because he seems to die and recover so many times, some readers jokingly interpret him as having actually died more than once.

This recurring pattern contributes to the surreal and unstable tone surrounding him.

The original manga depicts Touma in his harshest form.

He is not simply indecisive or unlucky, but actively selfish, sexually exploitative in outlook, and emotionally negligent.

The manga does not give him a strong tragic backstory beyond pressure from academically obsessed parents.

As a result, his flaws stand in the foreground without easy excuses.

Yet the story also uses him to probe uncomfortable questions.

Would readers react differently if he were already a Keio student rather than a struggling prep-schooler, or if the gender roles in his dynamic with Urara were reversed?

The work suggests that part of its purpose is to unsettle assumptions about romance, devotion, and reader identification.

Touma's unpleasant individuality is central to that effect.

In the OVA and Sega Saturn adaptations, Touma is heavily softened.

Most of the original's nastier traits and scandalous implications are removed.

These versions present him as a more standard indecisive and plain romantic-comedy protagonist.

He becomes a far more generic lead, easier to tolerate but much less distinctive.

His backstory with Urara is also simplified.

Instead of a deeper and more loaded shared past, he merely cheers up a young Urara by showing her how to cool takoyaki before eating it, creating a modest summer memory.

As a result, adaptation-only versions of Touma are essentially just a bland underdog protagonist.

The dense, abrasive, and controversial character found in the original manga is largely absent.