Manami Kobayashi (小林 真奈美 Kobayashi Manami), neé Manami Midorikawa (緑川 真奈美, Midorikawa Manami), is a supporting character from the first Ju-On films. She was the pregnant wife of Shunsuke Kobayashi and the second victim of Takeo Saeki's insanity after finding out his wife Kayako Saeki is in love with Kobayashi.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Manami attended college with her future husband Shunsuke Kobayashi and Kayako Saeki.
Adulthood[]
Manami married Kobayashi and later became pregnant. After she is asked by her husband about Kayako, Manami remarks that she was in some way "weird".
A pregnant Manami speaks with her husband
Takeo Saeki discovers his wife’s (who happens to be Kayako) secret love for Manami’s husband. After Kayako is killed, Manami is brutally murdered by Takeo and has her fetus extracted from her body afterwards. Takeo later has a conniption in the streets and throws her unborn child onto things, leaving a trail of blood behind. He is then surprised by a moving figure coming out of a plastic trash bag, and is made the second victim of the grudge curse he himself created.
Afterlife[]
Manami is murdered.
The apartment where she lived with Kobayashi also becomes cursed by the grudge. Manami, however, never takes on a visible form as Kayako and Toshio do, at least on screen, and remains completely invisible to human eyes. The couple's apartment is bought by a real estate agent, Tatsuya Suzuki, who moves there with his son Nobuyuki Suzuki. Nobuyuki is gradually affected by the curse and Tatsuya asks his sensitive sister Kyoko for help. Already disturbed, Kyoko visits her nephew at Kobayashi's apartment. She is told by a worried neighbor about a baby crying sounding off that room. Kyoko declines that there is any baby. She and Nobuyuki then see Manami's murder and Takeo ripping her fetus off. As Takeo turns to Kyoko, she dies, possibly killed by Manami who then possesses her. Manami in Kyoko's body is later found with Nobuyuki in the apartment and taken to their parents' house by Tatsuya. She is later shown lamenting her lost child, holding a baby doll and eerily moving back and forth, rocking it as if it were her child. She probably is the one who kills Kyoko's mother, Fumi, but she explicitly ignores Nobuyuki who sits by her the whole time. Eventually, she leaves Kyoko's body and Nobuyuki alone at their house and her fate afterward is unknown.
Etymology[]
- The name Manami means "real, genuine" (真) (ma), "apple tree" (奈) (na) and "beautiful" (美) (mi).
- Manami's surname Kobayashi means "small" (小) (ko) and "forest" (林) (hayashi/bayashi).
- Her maiden name Midorikawa means "green" (緑) (midori) and "river, stream" (川) (kawa).
Trivia[]
- Differently from Kayako, Toshio and Takeo, Manami as a spirit never takes on a visible form, at least on screen, and remains presumably invisible to human eyes, though a hand that appeared on Nobuyuki's back when he was sitting alone at the apartment, could be hers.
- Beyond the first two Curse films, Manami is completely absent from the remaining Ju-On films and from the American film series until she is referenced in The Grudge (2020), as the character Nina Spencer is directly based on her.
- Manami and the other spirits seemingly had something of a soft spot for Nobuyuki as they took an unusually long time to kill him. Kayako possibly identified him to her own son Toshio and Manami, to her lost child.
- Even though Manami's background and her character are totally made absent in The Grudge, Kobayashi's american counterpart Peter Kirk also has a wife (Maria Kirk) that is not affected by Takeo's insanity nor the curse whatsoever. After killing both Kayako and Toshio, rather than taunting Peter by murdering Maria, Takeo supposedly hangs himself still in the house (though it is later revealed that he was killed by Kayako's ghost itself).
