Maruki

Maruki is a tall, bespectacled man in his early 30's with brown, short unkempt hair and a small stubble underneath his chin. He wears a blue dress shirt tucked into his upturned khaki slacks with a checkered dark blue tie. He wears a white lab coat over the top. On his feet he wears open-toed sandals without socks. In his suit's chest pocket, he has a yellow pen and a staff ID that's further tied around his neck with a red strap.

Maruki is a voluntary counselor who cares about the students in the school and sympathizes with Suguru Kamoshida's victims. As a counselor, he is quite friendly to those who reach out to him and is extremely patient, allowing them to control the flow of their conversation. He is alert and quick to pick up on minor comments made by his patients that helps open them up. He is also highly clumsy, quirky and is prone to messing up in comedic situations, unlike most of the other teachers who have no-nonsense, regular personalities. According to Shibusawa, he also has a tendency to charge into things rather impulsively. He is quite popular with the Thieves and even Yusuke from Kosei High School comes to Shujin Academy to take his counseling, making him a popular figure among students and one of the Thieves' greatest sponsors. He also appears to be a skilled cook. During his sessions, he regularly offers snacks and drinks to his guests as a way of making them comfortable. He can also lead students who go to meet him into speaking out their desires and inner thoughts very well, allowing him to better understand them.

However, Maruki was secretly bestowed the power to warp cognition thanks to his Persona, who reached out to him because of his extreme grief over his ex-fiancée's post-traumatic stress episodes. Once he began working as a counselor, he used this ability to temper or neuter crippling mental illnesses by granting things that they wanted that would cancel out their depression, although the extent of that power only applied to the cognition of the person themselves, instead of radically changing any qualities that person has, resulting in cognitive dissonance. According to him, this also only happened once during his counseling job, implying that this would only happen if Maruki interacts with a person who reminds him of his ex-fiancée.

In reality, deep down, Maruki is a torn and sorrowful man who was unable to process his own grief; as a result, he desires to stop others from experiencing similar pain. This leads to him assessing that all grief must eventually be removed, ignorant that his actions prevent people from moving forward. Despite his intentions not being fueled by malice as he genuinely wants to make people happy, this causes an ethical dilemma as he still retains his desire to let others decide if they want to accept his world or not.