Misaki Fujioka's death is the April 27, 1998, death that inaugurates the year's disasters surrounding Yomiyama North Middle School Third-Year Class 3. She dies suddenly while recovering from a successful kidney transplant, and her death is later recognized as the class's first casualty—the event remembered as the “death of April.” The tragedy therefore joins intimate grief, medical uncertainty, and the hidden mechanism of the Yomiyama phenomenon: a death outside the classroom becomes the first sign that the class has entered an on year.

Medical Background and Recovery

Misaki Fujioka had been seriously ill with kidney disease during the previous spring. Without a transplant, she would have required dialysis for the rest of her life; transplantation was presented as the only way to avoid that outcome. Her mother, Mitsuyo, donated one kidney, while Mei Misaki, her fraternal twin sister, wanted to donate her own. Mei and Misaki were the same size, which seemed to make Mei a natural donor, but the hospital explained that children under fifteen could not serve as live organ donors. An adult kidney could also be difficult to transplant into a child because of the difference in size. Even had an exception been possible, Mei believed that Kirika Misaki would have firmly refused permission.

The operation took place at the beginning of the year at a major hospital in Tokyo and was described as a complete success. Misaki was then transferred to Yumigaoka Municipal Hospital so that doctors could monitor her progress. Her recovery continued on schedule, and she was expected to return home soon. Mei secretly visited her after the transfer without telling Kirika. During those visits, the sisters spoke about Mei's collection of dolls. Mei showed Misaki a photograph of the dolls in her room and promised to give her whichever one she liked best as a gift when she left the hospital.

The Sudden Death

The apparent success of the surgery made Misaki Fujioka's death especially abrupt. She had not been experiencing difficulties in her recovery, and the expectation was that she would soon be discharged. Instead, her condition suddenly worsened, and she died before anyone could do anything. The death occurred on Monday, April 27. Her parents, described as having been incoherent with grief, were left to absorb the loss of their only child.

The doll associated with the tragedy became a material reminder of the promise between the sisters. Mei brought the promised doll to the memorial chapel, transforming an ordinary gift intended to celebrate recovery into an object of mourning. The reversal gives the event its particular emotional force: the same recovery that should have led Misaki home instead ends with a memorial observance, while Mei's private act of care survives only as an offering to the dead.

Connection to Third-Year Class 3

Mei later identifies Misaki Fujioka's death as the first casualty of the 1998 disasters. The disasters began in April, as they had for earlier classes, and Misaki's death therefore precedes the later deaths and violence associated with the class. It is not merely a death that happens during the school year; it is the opening temporal marker of the year's calamity. Once the date and circumstances are assembled, the apparent coincidence becomes a pattern: Misaki died in April, and the disasters began in April.

This connection also clarifies why the class's response is governed by concealment and altered recognition. The “extra person”—also called “the casualty”—can hide within the class while records and memories are tampered with, making contradictory details appear normal. The class attempts to respond through the “not there” strategy, including a period when both Mei Misaki and Koichi Sakakibara are treated as if they do not exist. After Mr. Kubodera's death, however, the attempt to increase the number of students regarded as “not there” is abandoned, and classmates gradually begin acting as though Mei really exists. Misaki Fujioka's earlier death thus belongs to the same system of unstable recognition in which ordinary records, memories, and social behavior fail to provide reliable protection.

Grief, Perception, and Significance

For Mei Misaki, the death is inseparable from the experience of being one half of a divided family history. She explains that Misaki had grown up with her biological parents, while Mei had been sent to a foster family and had lost an eye as a young child. Their reunion and sibling bond therefore carry an unusual sense of proximity and difference, intensified by the knowledge that Mei wanted to save Misaki but was prevented from donating a kidney. The successful transplant briefly appears to resolve the medical crisis, only for death to return without warning.

Mei's later account also connects the death to her perception of the “color of death.” Over the years, she has come to understand that sensing this color means death is present. She has recognized it not only in the face of a person who has died but also at the scene of a fatal car accident. In this context, Misaki Fujioka's death is both a documented medical event and the origin point of a supernatural recognition system: the loss teaches Mei to read death as a visible presence, while the class's records and memories conceal the larger catastrophe beginning around it.

The event's decisive significance lies in its double status. To Misaki's family, it is the sudden death of a child whose operation had succeeded and whose return home seemed imminent. To the narrative of Third-Year Class 3, it is the first victim's death and the beginning of the 1998 disasters. Its horror comes from the collision of those scales: a private hospital tragedy is simultaneously the first movement of a collective curse, and the ordinary language of recovery cannot explain why the class's catastrophe has already begun.