Meiko "Menma" Honma

Menma is portrayed as the heart of the Super Peace Busters.

Although not the formal protagonist, she is the character most closely associated with the series and is typically used alone in promotional material.

She is a quarter Russian through her mother, Irène Honma, and inherits silver hair, blue eyes, and very pale skin from that side of her family.

Her appearance gives her a fragile, fleeting quality, while her personality is bright, innocent, and cheerfully open.

As a child, she served as the mascot-like presence of the group.

Her warmth and spontaneity made her unforgettable to the friends around her.

Personal Information

Full name: Meiko "Menma" Honma

Gender: Female

Birthday: September 18

Blood type: A

Height: 147 cm

Weight: 36 kg

Favorite color: White

Favorite food detail: In salt ramen, she prefers egg prepared as beaten egg soup-style ribbons.

Menma dies in a childhood river accident during one summer day.

That tragedy leaves deep trauma in the members of the Super Peace Busters and in their families.

In the summer of the year Jinta "Jintan" Yadomi begins high school, Menma suddenly appears before him in an older form as a spiritual presence.

Only Jinta can see and hear her at first.

Even so, she is not entirely intangible.

She can eat food and interact with objects to a limited degree, though to anyone other than Jinta, touching her produces only a chilling sensation.

Her body appears older, but her memory remains fixed at the age when she died.

Because of that, compared with Jinta and the others, her speech, behavior, and personality still show strong childlike innocence.

Menma appears because she has an unfulfilled wish, yet she herself cannot remember what that wish is.

Jinta spends much of the story trying to figure it out and grant it for her.

This search gradually brings the estranged Super Peace Busters back into contact with one another.

In that sense, Menma becomes the catalyst for the group’s painful but necessary reunion.

For an unexplained reason, she cannot write anywhere except inside the secret base.

After the others learn of her existence, she communicates by writing in a diary that Irène Honma had kept as Menma’s memento.

In the final episode, Menma’s wish is finally revealed.

It is tied to a promise she made with Jinta’s mother, Tōko Yadomi, who worried about Jinta after he forced himself to stop crying.

That promise was to make Jinta cry.

Once that promise is fulfilled, and once the emotional knots binding the Super Peace Busters are undone, Menma begins to fade.

She grows weaker and eventually becomes invisible even to Jinta, though her voice can still be heard.

Using the last of her strength, she writes a letter to each member of the group and shares her feelings with them.

At the end, her form becomes visible to all of the Super Peace Busters.

In the style of a game of hide-and-seek, she is finally “found,” and she passes on while being seen off by her friends.

Menma is cheerful, pure-hearted, and disarmingly sincere.

Her emotional directness contrasts with the guilt, grief, and awkwardness carried by the others.

She often feels delicate and dreamlike because of her appearance.

At the same time, her childlike honesty gives her scenes unusual warmth and humor.

Her presence is bittersweet throughout the series.

She is both a memory of the past and the force that allows everyone to confront it.

In the live-action drama adaptation, the detail that Menma is a quarter Russian is removed.

In that version, her mother is Japanese.

In the staged reading set ten years later, The August Ten Years Later at the Secret Base, Menma appears in flashbacks.

She also appears in Naruko "Anaru" Anjo's dream as a bottle of sweet potato shochu, though this is explicitly only a dream image and not her actual reincarnated form.

"Menma" is also the name of the seasoned bamboo shoots commonly found in ramen.

That food association is the source of her nickname.