her from committing suicide, and with Nayuki, he remembers when Nayuki confessed to him 7 years ago with a snow bunny. He also tried to be there for her when her mother was in the hospital. Lastly, with Ayu, Yuichi tried to help her find her lost item, eventually finding it and repairing it with Nayuki's help. Ayu is the main heroine in Kanon, followed closely by Nayuki Minase who is the only Kanon heroine to appear with Ayu on three of the official game covers released by Key. Ayu was created by Naoki Hisaya who wrote her scenario for the visual novel, and designed by Itaru Hinoue. Hisaya commented on how he thought Ayu was the one character in Kanon that he felt he grasped the best, but noted it was very difficult to write her character due to Ayu being primarily energetic. After Hinoue drew wings on Ayu's backpack, Hisaya suggested that they remove them due to spoiler reasons, and while Hinoue went along with it at the time, the wings were later included once again. Yuichi meets a lively seventeen-year-old Ayu on the day after he moves to the city depicted in the game. As the story progresses, Yuichi discovers that she is trying to find something she lost, but she cannot remember what it is; Yuichi tries to help her in her search, but with no initial success. One of her most defining characteristics is the repeated utterance of her catch phrase which she mutters as an expression of various negative emotions such as frustration, anger, and fear, something Yuichi enjoys teasing her about. Ayu refers to herself with the masculine pronoun —Japanese for "I", a rare occurrence among females. Her favorite food is taiyaki. She is seen eating the confection many times throughout Kanon. She can be a bit of an airhead, and despite looking younger than her age, she is the same age as Yuichi. Seven years before the story begins, she fell out of a tree and hit her head on the last day Yuichi was going to be in town. At first, he believes she died, but Akiko reveals she is in the hospital and has been in a coma for the past seven years. In an epilogue, she comes out of her coma, and gets her hair inadvertently cut too short when she goes to a barber shop, leading him to