Ichiryusai Madarame

Ichiryusai Madarame is a character from Persona 5.

Appearances

 * Persona 5: Major Character

Design
Madarame wears traditional Japanese clothes, with his hair tied in a ponytail.

His Shadow Self wears traditional yellow kimono with make-up on his face (which Ryuji Sakamoto compares to a daimyo). With his hair being styled in a Japanese topknot look that is closely resembles a paint brush, as well as his eyebrows, which are bushier than his normal ones. When he transforms into Azazel, he becomes a set of four paintings that show different parts of his face (two eyes, his nose, and his mouth).

Personality
While he initially comes off as polite and soft-spoken, in truth Madarame is an amoral, greedy con man with an extremely self-centered view of the world. He believes his advanced age and skill as a tutor gives him the right to treat his students as unpaid labor and a source of artwork to keep his fame and income (Shadow Madarame even refers to them as his livestock at one point). He has a very cynical view of art and beauty, seeing both primarily as an avenue to profit, and is extremely bitter about his lack of personal inspiration as an artist. He has no compunction about hiding artwork of his or his students and creating forgeries to sell as the original version.

Persona 5
Madarame is a famous Japanese painter that adopted Yusuke Kitagawa when his parents died. He was also once the tutor of Natsuhiko Nakanohara.

As later revealed, he has ceased being an artist and actually bullies his students into passing off their art as his own to support his fame, and then crushes their reputation as soon as they slip from his tutelage to remove them as a potential competitor. He was capable of preventing the death of Yusuke's mother, but willingly chose otherwise to plagiarize her own artwork and take control of her son and his inborn talents.

His sin is Vanity, which forms the basis of his Palace, decorated with golden statues and ornaments, as opposed to the modest, old house he lives in in the real world. The Phantom Thieves of Hearts plan a heist at Madarame Palace to steal his heart in order to change his mind of stealing Yusuke's painting.

His boss form, Azazel, takes the form of four floating paintings. Each represents a target: right eye, left eye, nose and mouth. He can revive parts of himself if at least one remains active, and rather than be defeated outright if all parts are knocked out, he is forced into human form while he regains his bearings. Defeating his human form is the only way to stop him changing back into Azazel, though Shadow Madarame does not recover health between vulnerable phases.

Etymology
Ichiryū (一流) means "top-notch". Sai (斎) is a suffix for male given name or title which more commonly appears in classical literature. Madarame (斑目) means "speckle-eye".

Trivia

 * Madarame's Shadow is widely regarded by players to be the personification of Sloth of the Seven Deadly Sins, but the game's trophy for clearing his Palace states that his Palace (hence his sin) is based on Vanity of the Nine Deadly Sins. Sloth is instead represented by something else in-game.