Miyo Takano

Miyo Takano is the central antagonist of the Higurashi no Naku Koro ni franchise, revealed across the original series and its sequel, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, though for most of the story she hides behind her role as a popular nurse at the Irie Clinic. She is officially listed among the curse's victims from 1983, her remains supposedly recovered after the Watanagashi Festival, when in truth she fakes her own death to operate freely. In Tatarigoroshi-hen, Keiichi Maebara rides in her car not long before learning of that reported death.

Behind her cheerful clinic persona, Takano is coldly manipulative, telling Hinamizawa's mythology differently to everyone she meets and treating the villagers as research subjects rather than as people. Keiichi Maebara, Shion Sonozaki, and Rika Furude all distrust her condescending manner well before her true nature is exposed, though she also has a genuinely childish side, growing giddy when Rika finally lets her into the Saiguden.

Born Tanashi Miyoko, she was orphaned in a train accident and abused at an orphanage before her father's old professor, Hifumi Takano, adopted her. She took her name in tribute to him and absorbed his belief that a great achievement could make someone a god. After his death and disgrace, she vowed to finish his research into Hinamizawa Syndrome, backed by the guilt-ridden Koizumi and commanding the black-ops unit known as the Yamainu, whose killings serve her and Hifumi's shared, self-destructive dream of godhood — a dream she even boasts of stealing from Hanyuu herself.