Saki Konishi

Saki Konishi is a character in Persona 4. She is the sister of Naoki Konishi and the second victim of the bizarre murders surrounding Inaba.

Appearances

 * Persona 4 / Golden: Minor Character
 * Persona 4 Manga: Minor Character
 * Persona 4 The Animation: Minor Character
 * Persona 4 The Magician: Major Character
 * Persona 4 The Golden Animation: Cameo
 * Persona 4 Visualive: Minor Character
 * Persona 4: Kiri no Amnesia: Major Character
 * Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth - Side:P4: Cameo

Design
Saki has thick, long, wavy light-brown hair and brown eyes. At school she wears a standard school uniform with black stockings and brown shoes, yet with white knee-length socks in the anime. When she works at Junes, she wears a long-sleeved white shirt, faded navy jeans, navy sneakers, and an employee apron.

In the first Golden anime opening, she is briefly seen wearing a pink blazer and dark grey shirt with grey blue jeans and black shoes.

Personality
"Parents are parents. You're you..."

- Saki to Yosuke when she meets him for the first time

Since Saki dies quite early into the game, most of her personality and daily behavior is unknown, and she was unable to provide any first-hand accounts herself. The only information that the protagonist gets about her is from Yosuke and Naoki Konishi, the former being her co-worker and the latter being her brother. Yosuke notes that she was nosy around him yet worked hard at Junes, despite not appearing to have. Naoki sees her as a playful yet surprisingly mature individual, and after coming to terms with his feelings, realizes that he misses her dearly.

At first, she seems like a kind person who was nice and supportive to Yosuke. However, it is revealed that she was actually annoyed with Yosuke and quite stressed about her life, with a lot of pent-up angst and a desire to get away from it all. It is also revealed that she believed her family, friends, and neighbors had resented her all along because she worked at Junes, the giant store that was slowly driving her family's liquor shop out of business.

Persona 4
A senior to the protagonist and Yosuke Hanamura, she works as a part-time worker in Junes. She is the eldest daughter of a family who owns the local liquor store Konishi Liquors, who failed to compete with the nearby Junes Department Store and lost sales nearly to the point of getting shut down like many other stores. Her brother Naoki is a junior of the protagonist.

She was first seen talking with her brother Naoki about some leftovers of his that she ate on the first day the protagonist came to Inaba.

The protagonist meets her as she takes a break from her part-time job working in Junes. She informs the protagonist that Yosuke's father is the manager of Junes and that she is Yosuke's co-worker. She sees Yosuke as a nosy little brother and calls him "Hana-chan" as a way of playfully teasing him. Yosuke harbors romantic feelings towards Saki, but fails to confess to her and this love is unrequited as a result. Saki is later revealed to be the person who first found Mayumi Yamano's body, making her nervous and scared.



Later, when the protagonist, Chie Satonaka, and Yosuke watch the Midnight Channel, the trio observes a blurring image of a female student resembling Saki Konishi, who appears to be writhing in pain. The next day, the Yasogami High students are tragically informed that Saki Konishi was found murdered. Her corpse was hung upside-down on an antenna. Devastated by her death, Yosuke requests the protagonist take him into the Midnight Channel, as the protagonist is the only one capable of entering the TV.

Saki's inner thoughts are later revealed when the protagonist and Yosuke investigate the Midnight Channel's Twisted Shopping District. In reality, Saki despised Yosuke because her family liquor store's sales were falling because of the opening of Junes' Inaba Branch, whose manager was the father of Yosuke. Furthermore, her decision to take a job as a part-time worker in Junes greatly irritated her family, and such, her father would often scold her for her decisions. After being a witness of the murder case, her dilemma grew worse as her classmates and friends talked behind her back. She confessed that, in reality, she was greatly irritated by Yosuke and only befriended him because he is the son of the manager of Junes. It is also unknown if she encountered her Shadow Self, although Persona 4 The Animation implies it with two figures seen in the Midnight Channel. After dealing with Shadow Yosuke, Yosuke accepts his inner feelings.

If the protagonist levels up the Magician Social Link to rank six, it is revealed that Saki Konishi was rumored to be having a relationship with a college student, and planned to leave Inaba with him until she backed out with the decision to save up for leaving Inaba on her own, assumably part of the reason she decided to work at Junes. Naoki, however, suggests in rank seven of the Hanged Man Social Link that Saki believed her work for Junes would one day be of some benefit to her family's business.

Despite her distaste towards Yosuke, which Yosuke himself is forced to acknowledge, Saki Konishi is arguably the main motivation Yosuke has for venturing into the Midnight Channel and solving its mysteries. Even after seeing her thoughts, Yosuke still considers her a good person at heart, and gets angry when people badmouth her.

In the final stages of their investigation, the group is able to hear Taro Namatame's story and Saki's involvement in it. After he observed Yamano die following her appearance on the Midnight Channel, he then saw Saki on the channel. Fearing that a similar fate awaited Saki, Namatame attempted to warn her to be careful, but this failed to keep her from dying, thus instigating his efforts to save people by forcibly throwing them into the TV under the impression that what he was doing was not dangerous.

Shortly afterwards, the group is able to hear the account of the true culprit, Tohru Adachi, about what really happened to Saki. He questioned Saki as a witness much more than was normal for a person with such a strong alibi. The night they saw her on the Midnight Channel, Saki was questioned by Adachi at the police station. Adachi aggressively tried to flirt with her and she slapped him, causing him to react violently by picking her up and throwing her into the TV, causing Shadows to kill her the next day, which Adachi justifies by calling her a "gold digger" trying to get Namatame's attention. Unlike the previous case with Yamano, Adachi deliberately threw Saki into the TV knowing full well not only that he could but that she would be in mortal danger.

Persona 4 The Animation
In the animated adaptation of Persona 4, when she was cast into the Midnight Channel, she did not panic nor get afraid when her "other self" appeared. The only reactions she experienced were confusion and disorientation. Then in Namatame's flashback, she is last seen with her shadow about to transform into the black smoke and finally killing her through suffocation.

Persona 4 The Magician
On the Yasogami Culture Festival of 2010, Saki overhears gossip about Yosuke as the local Junes manager's son while seeing him walk by to the school rooftop, so she follows him to start a short conversation and advise him not to listen to people talking behind his back about him. About 2 weeks after, she begins her part-time job at Junes and tells this to a surprised Yosuke while working.

When Yosuke sees Saki on the job at Junes on Valentine's Day, the situation where Saki comforted him after he listened to nearby people talk badly of him is realized to be happening to her instead, which prompts him to grab her without warning and move her away from the nearby customers gossiping. After listening to him complain about these people talking negatively without shame, Saki gives him chocolate for what she reasoned as out of sympathy before going back to work.

On the day the first goes to Yasogami High, Yosuke gives Saki a recent picture of them and other workers at Junes, followed by the events of the first game where Saki introduces herself at Junes and gets killed by her Shadow only for her remaining thoughts of despising Yosuke to remain in the Midnight Channel's version of her family's liquor store.

Persona 4 The Golden Animation
In the opening intro, Saki is seen going to her part-time job at Junes. The scene where Adachi gets slapped by her and throws her into the TV is recapped in Episode 6.

Persona 4: Kiri no Amnesia
Yosuke meets Amnesia, a character that takes on the form of Saki's Shadow. Her Shadow was created out of a desire to forget and escape the hardships of her reality.

Etymology

 * The name Saki means "already, now, fast, early" (早) (sa) and "chronicle" (紀) (ki).
 * Saki's surname Konishi means "small" (小) (ko) and "west" (西) (nishi)