Future Diary Tournament Contestants:
Yukiteru Amano - The First Diary User
Yuki is a 14-year-old middle school student who has been chosen by Deus, the god of space and time, to participate in a battle royale. Yuki must fight with eleven other contestants in order to determine Deus's successor before he dies. Each player is given a diary that predicts the future in its own unique way. Yuki's diary is the Random Diary, which records everything he observes throughout the day. While this diary seems to be superior to the others in the game, it has two fatal flaws. First, it doesn't record anything that happens to Yuki directly, and second, since it is recorded from Yuki's perspective, a lot of the entries are not facts, but Yuki's perception of events. Both of these flaws can and will be exploited by the other diary contestants.
In order to stay alive, Yuki partners with Yuno, his psycho stalker who loves him to the point of madness and has a diary that records his every move. Yuno is the embodiment of a yandere character (a character that is violently in love with another character), while Yuki is the definition of a weakling. To gain insight into the inner workings of Yuki and Yuno's relationship it is important to remember that Yuki is modeled after the Roman god Jupiter. And while Jupiter is the king of the gods he rarely gets his hands dirty. Rather he dispatches underlings to do his dirty work for him or else he kills long range using lightning bolts the same way that Yuki kills with darts. Jupiter's wife Juno, who is the inspiration for Yuno, is far more warlike in most of her myths and frequently gets her hands dirty. And while there are several instances where Yuki does rise to the occasion such as when he saves Yuno from being violated by the cult members. Many Mirai Nikki fans would have been infinitely happier with their overall viewing experience if Yuki wasn't always such a sniveling spineless ball of goo.
It is not until the death of both of Yuki’s parents that we see him start to fight his own battles. He tries to win the game all in the name of reviving his parents and all the people he had to kill to win the competition. However, he soon learns that Yuno lied to him, and there's no way to revive the dead not even if you are the god of space and time. We later learn that Yuno knows this because she was unable to revive Yuki's first dimension self from death after winning the first version of the survival game.
By the end of the series, Yuki starts to embrace his love for Yuno and tries to save her, rather than spend a day with his third dimension parents. Yuki eventually succeeds in winning the competition and becomes the god of space and time, thanks to Yuno sacrificing her life for him. But because the second world would be a world without Yuno, Yuki chooses not to create a world at all. He lives in solitude and misery for ten thousand years until Deus breaks through the time-space barrier and allows third dimension Yuno to be with Yuki.
Yuno Gasai - The Second Diary User
Looking for the yandere character to end all yandere characters? Look no further. Yuno totes a great big wheel barrel full of crazy around with her no matter where she goes all in the name of loving and protecting Yuki. Yuno is in possession of the Yukiteru Diary, which updates her on everything about Yuki every 10 minutes. This makes her the perfect ally for Yuki because his diary tells him about everything he observes, but nothing about what happens to himself.
Yuno's past is filled with darkness. She was severely abused by her clinically depressed mother and her neglectful father. They routinely locked her in a cage and starved her. One day, she's able to turn the tables and lock her mother and father in the very cage that they kept her in, and she ends up starving them to death. She has an innocent conversation with Yuki in which he states that they will get married when they're older, which turns Yuno into an obsessed stalker who tracks Yuki's every movement. Because of Yuno's endless love and devotion, she often puts herself in harm’s way and does whatever she can to save Yuki from the other diary users. While Yuki is frequently freaked out by Yuno’s murderous and erratic behavior, he also is not above using her to save his own skin.
And while we can all agree that Yuno is several balloons short of a party, it's also true that her seemingly irrational behavior is often the most logical course of action to take due to the crazy circumstances of the survival game. For example when she wants to kill the sixth diary user right away, Yuki promptly calls her crazy, but we later learn that killing him actually would have been an advantageous choice because he was planning to kill them both all along. In this way, the one who tries to apply rational thought to an irrational world is the one that ends up looking the craziest. The reason Yuno excels at playing the future diary game is because she has already played it once before and won in the first version of this world. She and Yuki won it together and chose to die together.
However, Yuno did not take enough of the sleeping pills to commit suicide and could not revive Yuki even though she had succeeded in becoming the god of space and time. Because she was unable to reverse death, she reverses time instead so she can replay the diary game with a second dimension version of Yuki. She does so by killing the second dimension version of herself. Yuno goes out of her way to shield Yuki from this knowledge however Muru Muru exposes her dirty little secret. When Yuki goes back in time, he changes the course of the future for the better, and Yuno ends up with the caring and loving parents that she deserves. And when Deus breaks through the barrier of space and time, he allows second world Yuki and third world Yuno to be together for eternity.
Takao Hiyama - The Third Diary User
Takao is the first diary user to attack Yuki. He is Yuki's homeroom teacher and he is secretly a serial killer. He is in possession of the Murder Diary, which helps him learn the identities of his future victims as well as where and when he should kill them. The downside of his diary is that it does not give him any insight into whether his victims are going to fight back, which makes him an easy target for other diary users. He wears a long, bulletproof trench coat, a mask, and a large hat to conceal his identity. Unlike many of the members of the future diary game, we have very little insight into Takao’s background or what led him to become a serial killer. When attacked by Takao, Yuki follows Yuno to the roof in order to escape and uses a dart to pierce Takao’s phone killing him. In the third world, we see Takao get apprehended by Yomotsu, the twelfth diary user.
Minene Uryū - The Ninth Diary User
Minene is an anti-establishment terrorist with a particular disdain for religious organizations. She mainly uses bombs when fighting against her fellow diary contestants. She possesses the Escape Diary, which gives her future insight into what would be the best way to escape in any given situation. She first appears in Mirai Nikki when she takes Yuki’s middle school class hostage in an effort to kill Yuki, who she sees as a major threat. When Yuki’s classmates hand him over in an attempt to protect their own lives, Yuno flies into a rage and triggers Minene's bombs killing a fair number of Yuki’s betrayers. Yuki defends himself and ends up blinding Minene's left eye when he throws a dart at her.
Despite these facts, Minene and Yuki go on to become allies and Minene becomes a mentor figure for Yuki throughout the rest of the game. She frequently voices her opinion that Yuki is a weakling and needs to man up in order to survive the game and also points out that in many ways he is no better than Yuno. In many respects, she sees her younger self in Yuki and can relate to the fear that he is experiencing.
We learn that her disdain for religion stems from having lost both her parents to war in the Middle East. She later described it as three groups fighting over their different takes on the same God which seems to be an allusion to the Israelis and the Palestinians. It is because of her hatred of religion that Deus trusts Minene and bestows her with half of his power and all of his knowledge in an effort to bring balance back to the game. She uses her powers to bring the second dimension Yuki to the third world and in doing so alters the course of the future for the better.
Minene and detective Nishijima have an endearing love-hate relationship. Minene is always dismissive of Nishijima and his feelings for her, but she eventually ends up falling in love with him. At the end of the anime, we see them in the third world together as a couple and in the manga, we see them married with children who have inherited Minene‘s godlike powers. She is named after Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and strategy.
Keigo Kurusu - The Fourth Diary User
Keigo Kurusu is the captain of the police force and seemingly has no interest in winning the diary competition. Rather his participation in the game is to prevent the immoral participants from making it to the end. It is for this reason that he ends up partnering up with Yuki and helping him through the better part of the competition. He possesses the Criminal Investigation Diary, which gives him foresight into any of the cases that he's working on. However, his objective changes when he finds out that his son only has a short while to live due to a heart condition that has him hospitalized.
He ends up double-crossing Yuki and Yuno and partnering with Minene to assure his victory in the diary tournament so he can save his son. We later find out that Muru Muru is the one that told Keigo of his son's condition in order to make the game more interesting. When Minene learns that Keigo will betray her, she forms a new alliance with Yuki and Yuno, and ends up taking Keigo’s family hostage. This culminates in a standoff between Keigo and Yuki, which ends with Keigo being fatally wounded. Keigo is placed under arrest which renders his Criminal Investigation Diary useless and rather than taking the life of a teenager, Keigo opts to take his own life instead. When Minene brings Yuki to the third dimension, she is able to warn Keigo of his son’s heart condition, and they are able to save him. Later we see Keigo, his wife, and his son living happily in the third world.
Tsubaki Kasugano - The Sixth Diary User
Tsubaki is a seemingly meek and frail girl with poor eyesight. She is currently the leader the Omekata cult. The cult was founded by her parents, and she was made the chief priestess because of her ability to see the future. One day, her parents are killed in a car accident that we later discover was an act of foul play perpetrated by the cult’s second in command. Once her parents were out of the picture, the second in command seized control of the cult and allowed all of the male cult members to rape Tsubaki repeatedly. She is in possession of the Clairvoyant Diary which allows her to see everything that her cult followers see. This, of course, leaves her vulnerable because if her followers are incapacitated or being controlled, it renders her diary useless. When the twelfth diary user hypnotizes her followers in order to kill her, Yuki comes to her aid despite being warned against it by Yuno. Later we learn that Tsubaki lied to Yuki when she said she was not interested in the diary competition at all. She actually wants to win in order to destroy the world that she has grown to hate because of the loss of her parents and her brutalization. Her personality changes from sweet and ladylike to violent and sadistic in an instant. She captures Yuno and threatens to have her raped by her cult members if Yuki does not come to save her. Yuki attracts all of her followers attention with a ball and then breaks her future diary with one of his darts killing her instantly. In the third world, they're able to find the bomb that kills her parents before they get into the car, thus preventing their death and Tsubaki’s abuse. She goes on to live a happy life and in the manga we are told that she falls in love with Aru two years later.
Yomotsu Hirasaka The Twelfth Diary User
Yomotsu is a blind vigilante that fancies himself a modern-day superhero. His diary is the Justice Diary, which informs him of everything from future murders to minor crimes like littering. It also has the ability to hypnotize those around him. He uses his diary to hypnotize Tsubaki’s cult members in order to prevent her from winning the diary tournament and destroying the world. When this effort is ruined by Yuno killing most of the cult members, Yomotsu hypnotizes four other members and dresses them up just like him then states that he is wearing a bomb. Yuno is able to decipher which one is Yomotsu by his reaction or lack thereof to visual stimuli and kills him swiftly before he can detonate the bomb. We are not given any insight into how Yomotsu lost his sight or what led him to become a vigilante. In the third world, Yomotsu apprehends Takao, who is a violent serial killer and is able to send him to prison.
Reisuke Houjou - The Fifth Diary User
Reisuke is a seemingly harmless preschooler whose parents were Omekata cult members that were most likely killed by Yuno. Yuki's mother agrees to take him in until they can find him a permanent place to live. This provides the ideal opportunity to exact his revenge. We learn that he is a genius with an extremely sadistic train of thought and sociopathic tendencies. He has two puppets that he converses with, and his diary is the Hyper Vision Diary, which appears to be nothing more than a child’s coloring book, but lists a summary of Reisuke's activities for the day. Its only drawback is that it only gives him this summary for morning, noon, and night. Reisuke uses these predictions to form a strategy everyday. Reisuke later states that he never loved his parents and rather is attempting to kill Yuki and Yuno to prove that he's highly elite and, therefore, independent and able to care for himself. We see that his parents would constantly fight while in the cult and that Reisuke was often left to his own devices. He attempts to kill the pair first by trying to poison them at dinner, then he tries to electrocute Yuno in the bath but is interrupted when Yuki shuts off the power. And when Yuki opens a package containing Reisuke’s future diary, he unwittingly releases poisonous gas all over his home. Yuno eventually kills Reisuke with a knife, and he hands over the antidote for the poison. In the third world, Reisuke is living happily with his parents because they never joined the cult.
Karyuudo Tsukishima - The Tenth Diary User & Hinata Hino
Karyuudo is an extremely wealthy dog breeder who spends all of his time pampering and caring for his dogs. Karyuudo is quite cold and calculated and comes off as though he loves his dogs more than his family. His diary is the Breeder's Diary and it enables him to control his dogs with simple voice commands over his phone. The one drawback of his diary is that the more dogs he commands, the more concentrated he has to be, or it won't work which leaves him open to attack by other diary users. He outfits his dogs with razor sharp metal teeth and uses them to kill innocent victims. When he notices Aru staking out his mansion, he becomes suspicious that Aru has figured out that he is a murderer or that Aru is another diary user. Because of this fact he pretends to form a bond with his teenage daughter Hinata in order to manipulate her into becoming a surrogate diary user and capture Aru. After trapping Yuno, Yuki, and Aru, Hinata discovered that Aru is not a diary user but a skilled would-be detective. Karyuudo admits to deceiving Hinata in order to get her to do his bidding and begs her not to end up like him right before Keigo puts a bullet through the back of his head. In the third world, we see Karyuudo and Hinata talking about the dogs and fostering a true and loving relationship with one another.
Marco Ikusaba & Ai Mikami - The Seventh Diary User
When Yuki and Yuno first encounter Marco and Ai they believe them to be separate apprentice diary users. Marco possesses The Unbeatable Brawler Diary that tells him the best way to win a fight where as Ai has the Flirting Diary, which tells her who she will be flirting with in the near future. However when Aru shuts down the nearest cell tower rendering the apprentice diaries unusable, we discover that Marco and Ai are actually the seventh diary user. They have the Exchange Diaries which updates each of them on the other's whereabouts, thoughts, emotions and movements at all times. They are deeply in love and want to become Gods solely so they can be together eternally. They tease Yuki and Yuno by saying that their love is superior, and Marco is constantly picking on Yuki for not standing up for Yuno. After the duo fails to kill Yuki and Yuno during battle, they instead take their phones hostage. Yuki and Yuno are told to meet the couple at Sakurami Tower in order to get their phones back. We learn Ai was abandoned at Sakurami Tower by her parents 14 years ago where she met Marco and his guardian Kamado who takes her in and raises her. Kamado is the eighth diary user and runs an orphanage called Mother's House. We also learn that Ai was gang-raped by a group of classmates and Marco killed them in her defense. When their plans to overtake Yuki and Yuno fails, they both end up mortally wounded and die together when the tower falls. In the third world, we see Marco and Ai living happily together, and Ai is pregnant with their first child.
Kamado Ueshita - The Eighth Diary User
Kamado is the head of the Mother’s House Orphanage and has been for many years. She has no interest in becoming a god. However, all of her orphans really want her to win the diary game and defend her against the other diary users. She possesses the Propagation Diary that is a server that turns any phone she allows on it into an apprentice future diary. Apprentice future diaries tell their owners the future in various ways, for example, the Detective Diary she eventually gives Aru feeds him information about the other diary users’ entries. All of her orphans/disciples use their diaries to defend Kamado. As a pacifist Kamado has not engaged in any of the future diary carnage, however, she does form a brief alliance with Yuki and Yuno in order to capture Mayor Bacchus. However, Yuki and Yuno double cross her, and Yuno kills all of her orphan disciples. Kamado flees with the mayor and they form an alliance. She hooks her propagation diary up to a supercomputer known as the Holon III and turns all of the cell phones in the city into apprentice future diaries. She is eventually killed by Yuki and Yuno, she remains kind hearted and selfless to the end and pleads with them to create a world where all the children will be safe and cared for. In the third world, Kamado is living happily with her orphans and is engaged in a romantic relationship with the the mayor, who has made a generous donation towards the orphanage.
John Bacchus - The Eleventh Diary User
John Bacchus is the mayor of Sakurami city and is the mastermind behind the future diary competition. Upon hearing of Deus's need for a successor, he approaches him with the idea for a battle royale using future diaries. He states that this will be the best way to determine which contestant is worthy to become the God of space and time. He is in possession of the Watcher Diary, which enables him to read all of the other diary users' entries which includes the apprentice diary users as well. The mayor is one of the most frightening diary users because he subscribes to Nazi ideology, and if he is appointed as Deus's successor, he plans to remake the earth based on his belief in a master race. While this point is explained more so in the manga, we never do get any background on the major or learn as to what led him to this line of thinking. Yuki's father is employed by John Bacchus and sent to destroy Yuki’s phone in exchange for having all his back debts payed off. When he fails to do so, the mayor has him killed. The mayor is ultimately killed by Yuno. When Yuki goes to the third world, he shows the mayor a diary entry of his impending death. Because of this, the mayor never creates the diary game or suggests the use of future diaries to determine Deus’s successor which drastically alters the future for the better. John Bacchus is named after Bacchus, the Roman god of ritual madness and religious ecstasy.
Other Characters:
Deus Ex Machina
Deus is the god of space and time and is the overseer of the diary tournament. Yuki initially believes that Deus is a figment of his imagination and only comes to realize that he does exist when he receives his future diary. He started the future diary competition at the behest of John Bacchus, the mayor and eventual eleventh diary user, as a means to decide who will succeed him after his impending death. Throughout the diary competition, Deus favors Yuki and hopes that he will win the competition and succeed him. He created Aru to keep an eye on all of the future diary contestants for him, although Aru is unaware of this fact.
Once he figures out that the first Muru Muru is not his servant but actually works for the first dimension’s Yuno, he calls upon Minene, the ninth diary user to balance the scales once again. He gives her half of his power and all of his knowledge of space and time. By giving her this power, he hastened the end of his life. But with Minene’s help, Yuki is able to rewrite the events of the third dimension for the better and avert the need for the future diary competition altogether. Because of this, the third dimension Deus is able to break through the barrier of time and space to get to the second dimension Yuki and allow him and the third dimension Yuno to succeed him and be together forever. In addition, all of the diary contestants and Yuki's classmates are shown to be living happy lives.
Muru Muru
Muru Muru is a seemingly loyal servant of Deus and the resident moe totem (super cute and heart warming character) of this anime. She's the primary source of comic relief throughout the series, but becomes a major antagonist towards the end. We learn that she, like Yuno, originates from the first dimension. Having enjoyed the first diary survival game, Muru Muru is now working with Yuno as the new God to ensure that the game is played over and over again in multiple dimensions. She frequently does things to make the game more interesting such as informing Keigo of his son’s terminal illness.
In addition, she is the one that shows Yuki all of the events from the first world. And shows him that first dimension Yuno killed the second dimension's Yuno in order to take her place and be with him. Once Deus dies, Muru Muru declares herself God until the second world winner is decided. Her second dimension self escapes from the prison that Muru Muru had her locked in and overtakes her first dimension self. When second dimension Yuki succeeds Deus as the God of space and time, he mourns the loss of Yuno for ten thousand years with only Muru Muru to keep him company. When Deus breaks through the space-time barrier to retrieve Yuki from the second dimension so he can rule over the third dimension with Yuno, Muru Muru is also freed. Muru Muru is also a major antagonist in the manga side story Paradox which follows an alternative reality where Muru Muru and Aru are diary contestants.
Aru Akise
Aru is a new classmate of Yuki’s that we learn has been following him for weeks as well as the other diary contestants. Aru is one of the few characters that is brave enough to stand up to Yuno. And many times during the series argues with her, teases her, and even goes as far as to flirt boldly with Yuki in front of her. He uses his incredible investigative skills to get to the bottom of Yuno’s many secrets all in the name of protecting Yuki because he has fallen in love with him. Because of this, there are many times when he is the voice of reason throughout the series and tries to convince Yuki of Yuno’s negative intentions and the likelihood that she will one day kill him.
We later discover that Aru was created by Deus to be his observer and keep an eye on all of the game contestants for him. However, he receives the Detective Diary from Kamado, the eighth diary user and is able to return to the second world to try to save Yuki even after Deus tries to destroy him. While Aru’s diary is nearly perfect, it cannot decipher whether a diary is from a different dimension, which enables Yuno to trick him and land a deadly blow against him in their fight to the death over Yuki. However this actually helped turn the tables because he was able to figure out that Yuno is from a different dimension. He is able to warn Yuki of this fact, right before Yuno inevitably decapitates him. Most fans were surprised that she didn't decapitate him right after he kissed Yuki.
In the third dimension, we find that Aru is alive and well and with his friends from school still acting as Deus's observer and in the manga he is working as an apprentice detective with Masumi Nishijima. As the main protagonist in the manga side story Paradox, Aru is a diary contestant that tries to dismantle the game by befriending the other contestants and trying to get them to stop killing each other. He is named after and represent Apollo, the Roman god of prophecy.
