Tawaraya

"'Give and Take', the ABCs of business."

- Tawaraya

Tawaraya (俵屋) is a Shadow Warlock from .hack//Roots, and a powerful member of the Guild TaN.

Appearance
Tawaraya is dressed like an Edo-period Japanese merchant, with "Tawara" ("Sack") written on the back of his happi coat. He carries a PDA like device in his left arm, which allows him to quickly check the relative value of items.

Personality
He is a man who is usually needlessly jolly, but is very good at getting others at what he wants them to do. He is an ideal merchant type for these reasons. He plays dumb often and is not surprised easily, though he does believe that the game world and the real world should be kept separate. Tawaraya is very obedient to Naobi and will follow orders from him without question, he is less friendly towards Ender who he believes is needlessly violent.

Basic Info
In the real world, Tawaraya is a 22 year old college student named Junya Murakami. Near the end of Roots, he goes to study abroad in Australia.

.hack//Roots
Tawaraya acts as the public face of TaN. While Naobi is the actual leader of the guild, Tawaraya runs most of the day to day business that the guild deals in. Due to the nature of his job, Tawaraya maintains a large web of connections which keeps him informed of almost anything of interest going on in The World R:2. Because of his skills at intelligence gathering, as well as his ability for manipulating others, Naobi partnered him up with Ender to monitor the Twilight Brigade guild, most notably their newest member Haseo.

Tawaraya did his best to turn Haseo to TaN's side, and although he failed in this endeavor, he was later able to paint the young Adept Rogue as a traitor to the Guild. This lie eventually fell apart after the real traitor Sakisaka revealed himself and cut off all ties to Tawaraya and TaN.

While Tawaraya did his best for his guild, he didn't realize that Naobi was setting him up. After TaN's illegal activities were revealed by the Twilight Brigade Tawaraya had his account suspended by the system admins, despite the fact that he had known nothing about those events. His final act as a player was to contact Haseo. Haseo agreed to fulfill his last request by naming the strange markings found in the Lost Grounds "Signs".

Much later Tawaraya would create a new account and return to The World R:2 using a character named Tohta.

Trivia

 * Tawara no Tohda (俵藤太) is a hero from Japanese folklore, and presumably the source of Tohta and Tawaraya's names.

Tawaraya