Keiko Matsuda

> "Tune in next year for Danganronpa 56 to see if these losers can finally crack a real murder case! Until next time, I'm Keiko Matsuda, side character 9, and I'll see you on the flip side!"
>
> Keiko, Neo Danganronpa 55, Trial 2

## Keiko Matsuda

* Splash Art
* Sprite
* Report Card

### Appears in

Neo Danganronpa 55, Neo Danganronpa 56, College Game, Neo Danganronpa Chronicles

## Report Card

### Dislikes

Medicine, superstition

**Keiko Matsuda** is a student from Hope's Peak Academy's 4th class and a survivor of Neo Danganronpa 55. She is the Ultimate Mycologist. Keiko is now a member of the Future Foundation.

## Appearance

Keiko is 5'3" with a slim to average build and a small bust. She has dark brown hair, brownish-reddish eyes, pale skin, and East Asian features. She wears a set of wire-framed glasses, and her hair is cut in a short bob.

Her typical attire during her appearances in Neo Danganronpa 55 and the College Game includes a white lab coat, light blue dress shirt, brown tie, black skirt, dark tights, and black flats. Sometimes, she carries a brown leather briefcase.

### Future Foundation

When working for the Future Foundation, she typically wears a white dress shirt, a black suit jacket and black tie, a black pencil skirt, white or dark tights, and black flats. She also grows her hair out enough to be worn in a small ponytail.

## Personality

Keiko is intelligent, talkative, enthusiastic, and eccentric. She becomes easily engrossed in the world around her, often getting down on her hands and knees to pick through soil or observe insects crawling along the floor. When working in the lab, she often loses track of time, and it is not uncommon for her to spend 14 to 18 hours a day at work.

Despite her outgoing nature, Keiko sometimes has difficulty connecting with her peers. She can be careless or overly blunt with her words, dismissive of those she deems unintelligent, and the intensity of her passion for fungi and nature in general can be off-putting to others.

Over her time at Hope's Peak and working with the Future Foundation, Keiko begins to mature. She develops greater empathy for others, as well as improved self-awareness, and after being put on academic probation for poor grades, she became less snobbish and judgmental about others' intelligence.

## Talents & Abilities

Keiko is the Ultimate Mycologist. Mycology is the study of fungi, and Keiko's specialty prior to her enrollment at Hope's Peak was airborne mold. In particular, she isolated and selectively bred a strain of verticillium to be used as an antibiotic. Her papers, published in prestigious academic journals, and the medicine itself were what led to her being scouted as a talent for Hope's Peak's fourth class.

After arriving at school, Keiko changed her focus to developing lichen that could change the carbon content in soil as a way to counteract climate change. Prior to the tragedy, she had suggested collaborating with Evad Winston, the Ultimate Farmer, on a fertilizer that contained this lichen.

During Neo Danganronpa 55, Keiko's boon was **night owl**, a stat boost during the second half of the game day. Her bane was the reverse; for the first half of the game day, her stats were lowered.

## History

Keiko was born in Japan as the only child to a successful couple. Her mother was an executive at a pharmaceutical company, and her father was a psychiatrist with a flourishing practice. The family of three lived in a large house with several acres of grass and woodlands on their property, and Keiko spent long hours outside, playing by herself as a young child.

Keiko was homeschooled by a rotating staff of tutors. She received little attention from her parents and even less contact with other children. As a result, she viewed the natural world she so loved to explore as her friend. She learned to value non-human life highly.

When she was around age eleven, Keiko's parents took notice of her interest in fungi. They encouraged her hobby of collecting samples to study and converted their basement into a laboratory for their daughter's research. As time passed, Keiko was pressured more and more to find a practical application for her studies. Ultimately, her father insisted she develop an antibiotic that could be marketed and sold by her mother's pharmaceutical company. At around this time, her father also began to prescribe her large doses of stimulants, encouraging her to study without breaks and overmedicate to avoid wasting time. These experiences led to her disillusionment with modern medicine, though she attempted to frame her distain for it in evolutionary terms.

## Neo Danganronpa 55

### Chapter 1

Upon waking in her dorm room in the Underground, Keiko had no memories of her time at Hope's Peak Academy or of her time with her class since the Tragedy. In her room, Keiko found a glass ball containing a poisonous mushroom. She carried this with her to safeguard it.
Work in progress.

## Relationships

### Hitoshi Akazawa

Keiko and Hitoshi met the summer before beginning their tenure at Hope's Peak. Having found each others' names and realizing they didn't live far apart, they decided to meet up and introduce themselves. Hitoshi was very intimidated by Keiko's apparent confidence and presence of being, and Keiko made it clear that she was not impressed by his toymaking talent. She offered him a tour of her lab, during which she stopped to get some work done and requested Hitoshi's assistance in gathering materials. After this, Keiko came to regard Hitoshi as her "lab goon".

Over the course of their year at Hope's Peak, Keiko roped Hitoshi into helping her with numerous experiments and fact-finding missions. She was often rude and demanding of him, and Hitoshi started avoiding Keiko when he could. After the end of the year beach party, the two went to Hitoshi's dorm room. There, he snapped at her, calling her out for her poor treatment of him. He also told her that he did not plan to return to Hope's Peak the next fall, saying he felt out of place there. Keiko was not a very sympathetic listener, prompting Hitoshi to wonder why he bothered talking to her about this. When Keiko pointed out to him that she was his only friend at the school, he became upset and demanded that she leave, saying he never wanted to see her again.

The next day, Vivian alerted Class 4 of her brother's plans to bomb the school. As a group of students fled the school, Hitoshi turned back to retrieve plans for future projects. Keiko became distraught as he runs back toward danger, but reluctantly continued her escape with her other classmates. Between the continued small explosions and the eventual nuclear bomb dropped on the school, Keiko realized that Hitoshi had no chance of escaping alive. Because Hitoshi didn't get to know his other classmates very well over the course of the year, Keiko felt unable to discuss her grief with her other escaped classmates.

When Keiko's memories of her time at Hope's Peak were removed prior to her killing game, she forgot about Hitoshi's existence. After regaining her memories in the following months, she again remembered Hitoshi and quietly grieved for him and their other classmates who failed to escape the destruction of Hope's Peak. She also recalled her poor treatment of him, which has weighed heavily on her conscience since regaining her memories.

### Marielle Morley

Marielle is Keiko's classmate and a fellow survivor of Neo Danganronpa 55. During their tenure at Hope's Peak, Keiko and Marielle were friendly acquaintances. At one point, Marielle gave Keiko a moldy loaf of Swiss cheese, aware that she studied fungi. Besides that, they had few meaningful interactions prior to their escape from Hope's Peak on the day of the Tragedy, when they sat together in the getaway car.

Over the course of the killing game, however, Keiko and Marielle became very close. Their first meaningful interaction occurred when Marielle said she hadn't read the rules outlined on their Monopads. Keiko, concerned that she might break a rule and risk death, took the time to read the rules out loud to her, briefly under the mistaken assumption that Marielle was illiterate. Marielle was touched by the gesture and began following Keiko around. Keiko wasn't bothered by this, and the two became good friends by Chapter 2. From that point on, the pair spent much of their time together.

After Corin's murder, Keiko became suspicious that Marielle was her killer, both because her shoe size matched a bloody footprint at the scene, and because Marielle alone claimed to have been woken up by a noise in Commons 1 during the night the murder occurred. Keiko was distressed by this idea and avoided Marielle during the investigation, but as the trial commenced, it eventually became clear that she wasn't the culprit after all.

Work in progress.

### Ronnie Takayoshi

Keiko and Ronnie were on friendly terms throughout the College Game. Although Keiko offered them poor advice by suggesting Ronnie stop taking their medication if the side effects bother them, she quickly realized how irresponsible the suggestion was. She felt partly responsible when Ronnie had a breakdown in the rec center. Fortunately, Keiko was able to help them in this situation. She obtained Victoria's phone number from Ronnie and informed her of the situation before helping Ronnie upstairs and outside, where Victoria met up with them and rushed Ronnie to the hospital.

*Less* fortunately, this was not the only time Keiko was partly responsible for Ronnie's hospitalization. During the spring semester, when Keiko's dorm room became a biohazard, Ronnie wandered inside when Keiko left the room unlocked. They went temporarily blind and again needed emergency medical care. Keiko was able to see her part in this incident more directly, and as a result, she spent several days living in the rec center and hid from Ronnie for a few weeks, too ashamed to face them.

On Graduation Day, Keiko was disappointed to find that Ronnie had already left campus, as she had hoped to say goodbye. Sadly, they never met again.

### Ronnie Takayoshi (Android)

Because Keiko works with the Future Foundation and Ronnie has been remade as an android by Victoria and Ashley Spark, it is likely that the two have interacted. However, this version of Ronnie wouldn't have all of the real Ronnie's school memories, and Keiko more than likely sees them as two separate individuals.

### Vivian Tamochi

Keiko and Vivian are classmates and fellow survivors of Neo Danganronpa 55. During their year together at Hope's Peak, Vivian acted largely indifferent towards Keiko, and their relationship was often strained during 55 due to Keiko's close friendship with Marielle, who hated Vivian. In general, though, Keiko liked and admired Vivian greatly, considering her highly intelligent and emotionally reserved (a trait which Keiko viewed as a positive). During one exchange at Hope's Peak, Vivian sarcastically called Keiko her "best friend", and Keiko, not entirely sure if she was being serious, was immensely flattered, her mood improving for the rest of the evening.

When Vivian told her classmates about Nero's plans to destroy Hope's Peak, Keiko was among the group that believed her and fled the island.

During 55, Keiko and Vivian had a relatively cordial relationship, though as time went on, Keiko seemed to like Vivian more than Vivian liked her. In Chapter 4, it was the two of them who accidentally uploaded Nero's consciousness into a clone of Antimony, and Keiko helped Vivian escape the morgue after she was injured by Victoria and Abigail. The two then conspired together to trick Lex into committing murder. They used chloroform to knock Andrew unconscious and carry him to the greenhouse, where Vivian prepared explosives. After tricking Lex into setting off the explosives, Vivian and Keiko each felt immense guilt. During the trial, Keiko became angry with Vivian for hesitating to admit her role in Andrew's killing. Ultimately, both Keiko and Vivian's complicity in the crime was revealed, and the two avoided each other for awhile after the trial.

As both girls joined up with the Future Foundation, they continued to spend extended time together. Because Vivian spent most of her time developing the Neo World Program, Keiko took time to read the documentation on the program.

The two seem to have grown closer since joining the Future Foundation based on their interactions in Neo Danganronpa 56. There, Keiko joined Vivian and Aria in the Neo World Program where they helped put an end to Kyra's killing game.