Maho Hiyajo#
| Position | Senior researcher, VCU |
| Laboratory | Strategic Focus Laboratory |
| Project | Amadeus (co-creator) |
| Relation to Kurisu | Senpai, collaborator, closest friend |
| Self-identification | "Salieri" to Kurisu's Mozart |
| Age | 21 (routinely misjudged by a decade) |
| Height | 152 cm (see caption) |
| Instrument | Piano — Mozart, exclusively, when stressed |
| Status | Alive (all known worldlines) |
Maho Hiyajo is a senior researcher at Viktor Chondria University, co-creator of the Amadeus memory-model AI, and the person who knew Kurisu Makise best in the years America had her. On the Beta worldline she arrives in Japan carrying two things: the Amadeus build containing her dead friend's memories, and a grief she has decided to call a research program.
Maho's self-mythology runs through Antonio Salieri — the capable musician history remembers mostly for standing next to Mozart. She was Kurisu's senpai: older, earlier into the program, and then, permanently, second. The show treats her framing with more respect than she treats herself; the text is clear that ==Amadeus exists because Salieri built it==, and that Kurisu knew exactly which of them could.1
Watch her hands, not her dialogue. Maho states her positions calmly and then plays piano like she is trying to break it. The animators used the piano as her polygraph.
Sent to Japan for the Amadeus lecture circuit alongside Professor Leskinen, Maho collides with the Future Gadget Laboratory and with Okabe — the one person whose grief for Kurisu matches hers and whose reasons cannot be spoken aloud. Their wary alliance becomes the emotional spine of the Beta arc: two executors of the same estate, comparing inventories.
She is also, notably, the first outsider to reconstruct the truth of the Phone Microwave from evidence alone — Kurisu's surviving files, plus the lab's conspicuous silences.2
Central. She guards the Amadeus data through the SFL betrayal, burns what has to burn, and earns a place on the short list of people Okabe trusts with worldline truth.
A visiting researcher who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a Japanese undergraduate she has technically never met. Some connections appear to be attractor-stable. #lore
| Person | Relation |
|---|---|
| Kurisu Makise | The friend the whole page is about |
| Alexis Leskinen | Mentor — see his page's spoiler section before trusting this row |
| Rintaro Okabe | Co-executor of Kurisu's memory, eventually co-conspirator |
| Itaru Hashida | Mutual professional respect, expressed entirely in insults |
| Kagari Shiina | The case that shows her what Amadeus is for |
A partial SFL audit log, recovered during the Beta arc's endgame, records who actually talked to the Kurisu instance and how often. The wiki reproduces the non-classified rows because the sorted table tells the whole story by itself:
| User | Sessions | Total hours |
|---|---|---|
| M. Hiyajo | 312 | 208.5 |
| R. Okabe | 88 | 141.2 |
| A. Leskinen | 41 | 12.0 |
| SFL staff (aggregate) | 133 | 36.4 |
Leskinen built it and barely spoke to it. The two grieving people could not stop. Sort by hours-per-session for the bleakest column in the franchise.
- Her Amadeus access phrase is a Mozart Köchel number; Daru guessed it in four tries and has never let her forget it.
- Carries Kurisu's actual research notebook — paper, water-stained — through every scene where the digital copy is on screen. The show never comments on it.
- Coffee order: black, then three sugars added one at a time as the meeting gets worse.
Footnotes#
-
The historical Salieri–Mozart rivalry is itself mostly legend; see Antonio Salieri. Maho, characteristically, knows this and identifies with the legend anyway. ↩
-
Her reconstruction, recovered in supplementary materials, gets every load-bearing fact right except one: she assumed the machine had to be intentional. Nobody guesses the yogurt. ↩