This is a list of characters from the manga/anime series Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. All the students in Nozomu Itoshiki's class are named after controversial social issues in Japanese society with the exception of Kafuka Fu'ura, whose real name has not been revealed.

Itoshiki family

The Itoshiki are a prestigious family in Kuraizawa (蔵井沢), Shinshū Prefecture (信州県), a parody of Karuizawa, Nagano, where they reside in a 70 hectare mansion, and have great influence in local affairs. As a running joke throughout the series, when the characters for "Itoshiki" (糸色) are written closely together, the resulting kanji can resemble "beyond" (絶), which often undoes the next character it is appended to. Thus writing "Itoshiki house" (糸色家) resembles "extinct family" (絶家). The manga eventually reveals that they aren't the original Itoshiki family, but merely the descendants of look-alikes paid to masquerade for the real family while they fled from those who wanted them dead. After the family vanished from the face of the earth, the look-alikes decided to remain as the Itoshiki family.

Nozomu Itoshiki's students

Nozomu Itoshiki is the homeroom teacher for class 2-へ (2-He; the hiragana character へ is the sixth in iroha order, making it equivalent to "2-6" or "2-F" in more common terms). There are 32 students altogether, though many have yet to be introduced in the series. For a variety of reasons, the entire class ends up repeating their second year with Nozomu multiple times, but the characters themselves never age. It is eventually revealed that every character in the class has attempted suicide after falling into despair. Their lives were saved by transplants from Kafuka's corpse, allowing them to see her as a result. The manga version also reveals that the girls of the class have been possessed by the spirits of girls from the Showa era who had killed themselves, and that Nozomu is an exorcist that became their teacher so that the souls of the dead girls could finish their education and move on.

Female students

Male students

Other students

School staff

Others

Background characters

Trivia

There was a cameo of Akiyuki Shinbo (director of this anime) on episode 10 of the second season wherein he along with some people discuss on how this anime should end. The introductory "The Story Until Now" segments in Zan and Goku were voiced by Chiwa Saito.

Notes and references