WHO IS MAYA NATSUME?

The current head of the Natsume family and captain of Toudou's Juken club, Maya is a high school senior who immediately appears as one of the most intriguing female figures in the manga. When we first meet her, she looks like an annoying little girl who claims to be one of the strongest warriors in the school. This wily shapeshifter is actually a gorgeous tall girl who adopts this shape to preserve her spiritual energy (ki). Needless to say, Maya turns out to possess an extraordinary fighting technique and quite an impressive physical strength. Although she has no special powers —while both her siblings instead were born with the Dragon's Eye— she's much more skilled with the katana than her sister Aya.

Her personality usually reflects her role as a leader and as a typical onee-chan. Just like one would expect from an older sister, Maya tends to protect Aya from doing something bad and getting hurt. She doesn't want her sister to be spoilt by the internal war between the school's factions but in doing so she may seem too intrusive and bossy. Aya says that Maya wants to have everything under her control, but the most important matters are always beyond her grasp.

Her principles certainly reflects the virtues of a traditional (Feudal era) Japanese woman. Being the heiress of a prestigious household, she takes pride in herself and in her family's reputation and values physical and moral integrity very much. Furthermore, she often talks in an extremely formal and sometimes obsolete Japanese. One of her usual utterances is "umu", as an affirmative.

As a team leader, she has great charisma (let alone actual fighting skills) and demonstrates surprising guiding abilities. She's a motivated person who is recognized as a true "general" by her kohai. Just like an army general, she is very stiff and demanding (especially of Soichiro).

She is generally seen cool, calm and collected, yet she is known for having done (and for doing) things on a whim, causing great damage to both her and her closest ones. One might assume that her confidence, which she blatantly shows off to her club's members and opponents, hasn't fully developed. If we look back just two years before the main story, we see a rather different Maya. She acts bold, but we know this is only a façade to cover up her own insecurity. She's almost suffocated by her older brother's overpowering presence and would like to break free from him, thus acting irresponsibly.

We can state that although at the very beginning Maya seems to stick to her role's characteristics, she undeniably grows, or, we'd better say, Maya reveals she's far from being a tough, granitic general who only acts the way she's supposed to act, but instead she unfolds a more faceted personality. Her own complex nature and the twisted web of relationships she's involved in lead her to operate in a manner some critics (mostly Aya fans) find deceitful and hypocritical. Actually, unlike Aya who is a very straighforward person, Maya doesn't directly express her feelings and thoughts, but this doesn't mean she's less sincere than her younger and inexperienced sister.

To sum things up, this amazing lady is certainly an interesting character who has the ability to appeal equally to boys and girls. With her charismatic and dominant personality, mixed up with an intricate past and some unresolved romantic situations, and a final touch of a truly stunning beauty that she likes to show off by wearing revealing clothes, it's no wonder that this girl is possibly the most popular character in the series. We are sure many Tenjou Tenge fans just wish to be like her and regret she's just a fictional character.

analysis by Esso