Tou Kaori

Name: Tou Kaori 糖香 (surname forename structure) Age: 26 Appearance: Not a terribly striking woman, Kaori stands at 160cm and has somewhat dull brown eyes behind glasses and extremely dark brown, almost black hair that she keeps up in a practical little ponytail. While not heavy-set, she is also not particularly slender, and has a sturdy frame. She has small, somewhat pert, round features, but her eyes take on a shrewd glint when she finds something she considers interesting or exciting.

Personality: Kaori is a no-nonsense workaholic with what most people would consider a terrible personality to those who don't know her very well, mostly because she feels the need to control her environment and decided somewhere during her school days that people she wasn't close to were annoying and not worth the trouble they caused. Those she is friends with find her constant and loyal, but prone to personal clumsiness, both physically and emotionally. She hates losing and only confides in others when she breaks down, which her few friends fear is starting to happen now. She can be at times unkind in her honesty, but is surprisingly enough a very thorough and evaluative people-watcher who takes it as perhaps a scathing hobby.

General Biography: Kaori grew up in a relatively rural area of Japan, living with her grandfather, as her parents occasionally had to spend long periods of time away from home as both where hard-working business people who spoke fluent English and were sent on business trips often. They did spend a lot of time together, and the family was close, but they didn't want her to be subject to their schedule if they had to both be away at the same time. Her grandfather ran a western cake shop that used sugar sculptures as fancy specialized features. She grew up loving sugar sculptures, though less so conventional baking, but after her parents' death in a car crash in her second year of high school, she abandoned her dream to become a cake person professionally and sought instead to find a profession that made money quickly so that she could support her grandfather, as he was getting too old and his business was starting to fail as a result (and most definitely couldn't pay for a specialized cooking school). She worked hard, got a job in the city, and made a good enough living for a while, but a year and a half ago, her grandfather died. After returning and starting to get into his accounts, she realized that his cake shop was worse off than she had expected. The money she'd been sending him over the years had gone into his medical bills and fixing bits of their old house out of sheer necessity. In order to support the shop, he'd started borrowing heavily (and probably illegally) from the Yakuza. He was deep in debt. Kaori made a choice, quit her job, and spent almost all of what she had as excess to update the interior of the shop and satisfy the yakuza for now. She had nowhere near enough to pay it all off, but they could tell she would pay up, so they gave her a grace period (of course with a ridiculous interest rate) to try and make more money. Since then, she's been desperately looking for someone to help her run the shop and bake the cakes. She can only afford one employee, but even she can tell she needs the help, so whoever it is better be sort of good.