What is the work?[]
Higanbana no Saku Yoru ni is a horror visual novel and manga series written by Ryukishi07 of 07th Expansion fame. It revolves around a nameless school where urban legends are spread about yokai of which there are seven in total where each yokai takes ownership of. Each story is self-contained but the most common trait of all of them is that the characters Higanbana and Marie often appear in them. Another major theme is bullying and how some would face the consequences for it.
Who is he? What has he done?[]
Yoshihito Kanamori is a schoolteacher who served as the homeroom teacher of Marie Moriya. He started off as defending her against her bullies, but when the stress of his job became too much, he changed and began to molest Marie under the guise of them being supplementary lessons. He did this daily as well as blackmailing her into keeping quiet about the abuse and snapping pictures of it. When Marie grew a backbone, he strangled her to death whilst singing a song about graduating from life to death before disposing of her body in an old septic tank. He thought that other students were also in the old school and was seriously considering killing them to cover his tracks, but it wasn't.
He then develops a god complex before continuing to go about his life. Marie becomes a ghost and is given the chance to become Mesomeso, an urban legend circulating the school, but she would have to square off against Kanamori. Kanamori is lured to the old bathroom and reunites with Marie. He further twists the knife into her insulting her as a failure in life because she was unable to confront the authorities about her abuse. He opens the door to the stall and strangles Marie a second time. Noticing that her body didn't disappear, he decides to rape her corpse. Higanbana arrives, but informs him that he failed the test to become Mesomeso because he failed the three rules: he directly talked to Marie; he answered her questions; and he identified her by name. With that, Marie transforms into Mesomeso and devours her wretched teacher.
Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?[]
None. He was getting overwhelmed with the pressure of his job, but that is not a valid justification for molesting/raping and murdering one of his students. Later on, he appeared in a non-canon side-story with another child molester Nafumi Shintani where they argued who was more perverted, but as I mentioned, it's an omake, i.e. non-canon to the rest of the visual novel.
Heinous standard[]
That was where I was contemplating. Early into the visual novel and manga, he was the most heinous character within it. But the heinous standard evolved over the course of the series' run with the aforementioned Nafumi herself being a prolific child molester who drugged her male students so she could torture them and then make sketches of their bodies. She also indirectly murdered one of her main victims on accident, but nevertheless, she felt no remorse for what she did. It should be noted that Shintani had molested numerous boys throughout the years enough to fill her teaching desk full of sketches of the tortured bodies. But I think Kanamori can stay because even though he had one victim, he otherwise molested and raped her every day as in months, an entire semester, etc.
Conclusion[]
Leaning on keeping Kanamori.