Reisuke Houjou

Reisuke Houjou (豊穣 礼佑, Hōjō Reisuke) is the Fifth diary owner and the youngest of the twelve. Ostensibly appearing as a harmless five-year old, Reisuke is a master strategist and forces Yukiteru Amano and Yuno Gasai into a deadly match in Yuki's own house. He is often accompanied with a pair of hand puppets, and owns the "Hyper Vision Diary".

Personality
To the unsuspecting eye, Reisuke appears to be just an ordinary toddler - innocent, bright, curious and polite. However, Reisuke is really a complex individual despite being a five-year old. His parents were implied to be either abusive or neglectful, often fighting and more interested in their own personal hobbies (shopping and gambling). Because of this Reisuke seemingly grew to dislike his parents and learnt to take care of himself. However, his parents were at least on one occasion nice enough to buy him a pair of handpuppets, both stylised to resemble a man and a woman, seemingly becoming faux replacements for Reisuke's parents. Reisuke often talks through the puppets and use them for other means, and he portrays them as the ideal parents he would have preferred to have had.



Reisuke uses his young appearance and age to fool people, acting like the normal toddler he should be. However, beneath that he is really a sadistic, creepy and cruel person, and very intelligent for his age. Despite this, he still has the mindset of a child, referring to Yuki and Yuno as "big brother" and "big sister". He is particularly enthralled by the survival game, seeing it as just that, a game, and has great fun in "playing" against Yukiteru Amano and Yuno Gasai.

Reisuke's goal to win is to become a "super elite", presumably his view of a God or a better person than his parents were. Despite his goal and behaviour, Reisuke does show some signs of kindness. He spares Yuki's mother Rea Amano from being killed, having enjoyed his time with her and even considered his whole time with Yuki, Yuno and Rea to be the family life he had desired. While at first he considers killing Yuki and Yuno to avenge his parents, he quickly ditches the idea. However, as revealed in Future Diary: Mosaic, a spin-off story focusing on Minene Uryu, Reisuke is revealed to be upset by his parents' death and even abandons his handpuppets at one point after Minene points out to him how he should act like a child. Reisuke eventually visits his parents' corpses, realising he did love them despite their negligence and sleeps in-between their bodies, Minene delivering the puppets back to him.

Diary & Abilities
His Diary is the Hyper Vision Diary, which takes form of a colouring book. The diary is limited, only able to make three predictions a day during the main times of the day (morning, afternoon, evening). However, this gives Reisuke plenty of time to plan out his strategies for the survival game and carry out three attacks once for each event which given his appearance, he is also successful to mask. Because his diary is unable to predict immediate events, that means he can at most carry 3 attacks per day without any sort of potential risk. Despite this his Diary entries reflected as pictures with a small summary do change when the future changes.

While his Diary itself may seem limited, Reisuke can more than make up for it with his great intellect for a 5 years old boy. He has proven himself an expert of chemistry and physics, being more than capable of manipulating a wide array of substances to create poisonous material, which he can either inject or booby trap in the form a gas trap, which he once used to trick Yukiteru to open. Along with his use of poisons he's cautious enough to carry and use a Gas Mask and also the antidote. Reisuke is also smart enough to use electricity with rubber gloves to avoid the danger, and was almost successful in electrocuting Yuno while bathing, having previously filled the bathub with salt to increase the conductivity.

During his time in the Amano House, he proved himself a skilled infiltrator who uses his looks to deceive others as well as study the house so carefully that he booby-trapped the whole house before filling it with poisonous gas, with tacks on the floor, or using decoys to fool Yuno into where he was hiding while she ventured the house, and almost killed her by mixing water and electricity into the stairs as she was barefoot.

Being the kid he is, it is really dificult to truly measure his chances of winning the game when compared to other participants. He's however comparatively speaking given his age, the smartest of the participants.

Trivia

 * Reisuke is named after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. His surname 豊穣 means 'rich harvest'.
 * Reisuke's character theme song is "Perfect Trap" by singer Annabel.