"I get really excited when I see scary things" Sakiko Matsuoka in Episode 3
Sakiko Matsuoka (松岡 咲子 Matsuoka Sakiko) is a student at Kamohashi Elementary and she may be the strangest kid in class 6-3. She is obsessed with ghosts and the occult.
Attributes
Appearance
She wears her hair in loose twintails. In the manga, she wears casual clothes, but she most often wears a white shirt with a red and blue tie and a skirt. She is often seen with prayer beads of various sizes.
Personality and Interests
Matsuoka is generally a friendly and polite girl, but her major personality quirk is her occult obsession. She becomes overly excited whenever the topic of ghosts or spirits arises, and she very frequently misinterprets mundane things as being the work of supernatural forces. She enjoys anything to do with the occult, including occult games like the kokkuri game.
In the manga, Matsuoka is fairly normal at first and even seems a bit reserved and perhaps shy, but as time goes on she gets more and more excited when ghosts are mentioned. In the anime she is a cheerful, energetic and frankly strange girl who is obsessed with ghosts. She has the habit of sticking her nose into others' business, believing that everything that happens at school is caused by spirits (things which actually seem to be caused by the triplets, more often than not). Matsuoka is at her most extreme when she wants to make friends with or have a romantic relationship with a spirit or demon. She sometimes even expresses a desire to be cursed or harmed by a spirit. She is so consistent with this behavior that her classmates are often genuinely surprised when she behaves like a normal person.
Relationships
Hitoha Marui
"It's a busy season for a smart and beautiful exorcist like you, right?" Matsuoka in Episode 3
Matsuoka mistakes Hitoha for a novice exorcist and after that Hitoha formed a reluctant friendship with her, mostly due to the fact that Matsuoka refuses to leave her alone. The twosome often misunderstand each other. Compared to how Hitoha treats other people who try to get her attention (Miyashita, for instance), she often treats Matsuoka quite mildly. Even so, she frequently gets irritated by Matsuoka's obsession with ghosts and her insistence that Hitoha is a medium. Matsuoka stays at Hitoha's house after she runs away from home after being scolded by her mother for her camp in graveyard during summer. After another misunderstanding with ghosts, she stays at her house for all summer, in which Matsuoka befriends Futaba and Mitsuba. Hitoha has started to care about her, despite her antics, like in Chapter 221, when Hitoha unconsciously calls her "Sacchan", after Matsuoka went blank when Hitoha was about to sing. In the end, Matsuoka believed it was a ghost, since Hitoha always calls her by her last name. Even though Hitoha managed to grow fond of Matsuoka over time, she is too proud or too embarrassed to admit or let it seem like Matsuoka is her friend.
Miku Sugisaki, Yuki Yoshioka and Miyashita
Matsuoka has been friends with them since childhood, although this is seen more in the manga in which she is often seen among Sugisaki’s circle of friends. Yoshioka even affectionately refers to her as "Sacchan". Matsuoka sometimes plays the kokkuri game with Yoshioka, too. In the anime, Sugisaki and Miyashita both think that she is weird.
Appearances
Manga
Matsuoka in the manga
Matsuoka appeared along with her classmates in class 6-3 in Chapter 1 of the published manga. She debuted in Chapter 7, where she was left behind in the classroom by Sugisaki and her other friends. She was scared when she saw Hitoha practicing talking to others (Matsuoka believed she was talking to a ghost). They reluctantly walked home together and Matsuoka refers to an incident in which Hitoha was attacked by a mosquito, which she believed was a ghost attacking her. Hitoha becomes uneasy when Matsuoka mentions that she is enjoying herself and that she is happy to walk home with her. It becomes worse when she mentions that she watches ghost videos at night, which Hitoha misunderstands to be porn videos. After seeing that Hitoha is pale and shocked, Matsuoka believes she is possessed and tries to exorcise her by hitting her on the head while chanting (an incident that Hitoha blames Yabe for).
Initially, her personality is cheerful and fairly normal, but she gets excited when ghosts are mentioned. However, as the story progresses, she loses those traits and becomes more obsessed with ghosts, like her anime counterpart.
Anime
Matsuoka in the anime
Matsuoka first appears in Episode 1, playing the musical chairs with her classmates of 6-3. She finally makes her speaking debut in Episode 3, where she is cleaning the classroom. Unlike the manga, she is excited and surprised when she sees what she thinks is Hitoha trying to exorcise a spirit, though she was actually just trying to squash a mosquito. After misunderstandings, Matsuoka believes that Hitoha is able to see ghosts (while Hitoha believes that Matsuoka wanted more than friendship with her). It ends up with Matsuoka trying to exorcise Hitoha after seeing how shocked and pale she is.
In the anime she isn't part of Sugisaki's circle of friends, and she is often seen alone due to her behaviour.
Songs
Trivia
Matsuoka as a child
- According to Yabe, Matsuoka can be as shy as Hitoha, but only in the manga.
- Her obsession with ghosts is so strong to the point that she even went camping in the cemetery during summer because of the Obon. Her mother later scolded her for this, which led to Matsuoka staying at the Marui's for a month.
- In her character song she asserts to Hitoha that she has friends from the Underworld.
- It is revealed in the manga that she has known Yoshioka since she was young.
- She calls Hitoha "Youngest" because she doesn't know her first name.
- She typically only shows up when ghosts are mentioned. There is a running joke that Matsuoka can sense when some occult thing is mentioned.
- In a readers poll celebrating 300 issues of Mitsudomoe, she came in 5th place.