Yakunitatanai, who prefers to be called Yaku, is a tanuki kami that was formerly a human. As a human his name was Kazuma Kotaro and he lived in Kyoto with his mother. When Kotaro was seven-years-old he was diagnosed with leukemia, and spent a year in the hospital. Despite all of the doctors best efforts, no treatment seemed to work and he was given up for dead. A few hours before his inevitable end, the elder of the tanuki kamis came to him and transformed him, saving him from death.

Yaku has, unfortunately, been a rather ineffective kami. As a human he had autism and lacked an imagination. While becoming a kami took away that particular neural development disorder, there are still remnants of the disorder that can be seen in his personality and the way he interacts with others. For instance, since he never had an imagination before hand he never gained one, although he does have the potential to be taught by someone with an incredible amount of patience. He also previously lacked the ability to read facial queues or body language, and now that he has the ability to he has a hard time believing that an expression is illegitimate, hence his reliance on television and conversation as his means to learn. He also still speaks rather bluntly and takes most things literally. He has a hard time with idioms and abstract concepts.

Since imagination is so necessary for a kami to utilize their powers in an affective manner, the tanuki kami treated him as a failure and with a great sense of disdain. His creator, Origami, took to beating him whenever he had failed at a task. The scars he created are permanent because they were created using Origami's energy. Not only will they never fade, but they carrywith them two consequences. The first is that he is stuck physically and developmentally as an eight-year-old because he can never learn to age. The scars acted as a quasi-seal against him being able to. Secondarily, Origami can activate the scars' latent pain at his pleasure completely immobilize him. The other gift that Origami provided was his name, Yakunitatanai, which literally means worthless person.

Despite all of this Yaku is a very spirited and energetic boy. He is clumsy and immature, but he always tries to be happy and make as many friends as he can. He is very opinionated about things and is incredibly naive. He believes that anyone with a sincere face cannot possibly be lying, so he gathers most of what he knows about the world from television. He is also very loud, verbose and blunt, often unintentionally hurting others. Yaku can speak five languages due to how much time he spends watching television, although he tends to confuse some words and takes many statements and idioms literally. As soon as he finds that he has upset someone he apologizes sincerely and does his best to remedy the situation.

Yaku always has at least one bottle of glue with him at all times because of his clumsiness. Since he can't fix anything with his powers, he figures it's the next best thing. One thing he did figure out, however, is how to run very quickly. He can cover an area of 20 miles in less than a second. His special gift, being something that ever kami has, is activated by his emotions. When someone he loves is placed in danger and he becomes upset, he blacks out and his emotions then drive his actions. He has the capacity to kill anyone, but depending on their power it could potentially kill him. For an average person he might lose a toe or a finger, for an average demon he might lose a leg. For someone incredibly powerful, he would just die entirely. He has no idea that he has this gift.

Yaku currently resides in the United States after being banned from Japan by the tanuki elder Minato who took over after his creator, and former tanuki elder, Origami was killed.

Art by MonochromeAgent from FA.