Keiko Numata

""Send the dead back to death!"

- Mantra repeated by Keiko Numata and several others in the final episodes of Another

Spoilers in black, highlight to reveal.

Keiko Numata is a character in the horror novel and later anime Another. Keiko is the co-owner of a hotel and restaurant along with her husband, and the grandmother of a member of class three of Yomiyama North Middle School in Yomiyama, Japan who falls victim to the "curse of class three", a curse started when students acted as if a student who died in 1972 was still among them since 1972. Since then, students and people connected to them by less two degrees or less (parents, siblings, grandparents etc), die in a series of mysterious accidents. The students of later years discovered the deaths could be avoided if they acted as if one student did not exist. In 1998, that student was a girl named Mei Misaki, however, in the middle of the year, a boy named Kouichi Sakakibara transferred into the class, and became friendly with Mei, restarting the chain of deaths. In the end, Kouichi and Mei discovered the cause behind the chain of deaths from a tape left by a previous class-  That one member of the class is in fact a person who has come back from the dead, and that in order to break the curse, they must "send the dead back to death".  Takako Sugiura plays this tape over the intercom field trip, they panic and both Keiko and the students of class three start  accusing each other of being the dead person , and start attacking each other with improvised weapons. Keiko murders her husband by stabbing him repeatedly with some sort of metal spike, possibly a meat skewer, and sets fire to the lodge they are staying in. Keiko then arms herself with a kitchen knife and a meat cleaver and murders five students of class three, before  she is herself killed by Chibiki, the school librarian.