Megumi Noda

Megumi Noda is the main protagonist from the Nodame Cantabile anime and manga.

Also known as Nodame, which is a portmanteau of her family name and the first phoneme of her given name. Noda is, at the start of the series, a twenty-year-old free-spirited second-year music student.

Appearance
Megumi has a short brown hair and brown eyes with normal height. At first impression, Megumi can be considered cute by people such as Kuroki and Frank.

Personality
Megumi is depicted as a complete slob: her cooking and cleaning skills are atrocious to the point of having mushrooms growing on her clothes and poisoning anyone who dares to eat her food (yet she's never been poisoned). However, she is an incredibly talented pianist who primarily plays by ear, in a cantabile style.

In love with Chiaki, she follows him around constantly, claiming to be his "wife," and leans on him to help her get through sticky situations. She sometimes compulsively needs to play the piano, neglecting everything in order to do it. As well as that, she seems to enjoy childish manga and movies. She is constantly hungry, and is fed dinners by Chiaki; she also steals many lunches from her fellow friend, Maki. Nodame has a tendency to speak cryptically (sometimes she doesn't even understand herself), often refers to herself in the third person, and uses nonsense words like mukya and gyabo.

Nodame is initially very dependent on Chiaki in terms of ambition - she has little intention of becoming a professional pianist, despite her remarkable talent, and wants to become a kindergarten teacher, though many feel she is too reckless and lacks the appropriate sensibility to be responsible with teaching children.

Abilities
Her piano style is considered to be completely haphazard, diverting from original intent at both dynamics, rhythms and even themes. Realizing that her current attitude towards music will eventually drive her apart from Chiaki, Nodame gradually develops the necessary drive to pursue music for her own sake. Her attitude towards music is largely due to an incident in the past where she was hurt by a teacher who demanded her to play music "as it's written". Despite this, several people have commented on how captivating her piano is, and how she is able to draw rich, expressive notes from the piano.

Eventually, she goes with Chiaki to France for further education in music. Due to her carefree attitude towards music previously, she struggles to keep up with the rest of the class in terms of in-depth knowledge and techniques, but manages to overcome the trials laid before her and begins to "truly" appreciate music. Near the end of the series, she performed with Stresemann on stage (he was attempting to pull her out of an emotional slump), and was an instant world-wide hit.

Trivia

 * Nodame's character is based on a real-life counterpart with same name.
 * Juri Ueno received Best Actress awards for her depiction of Megumi Noda at the 2007 Japanese Drama Academy Awards and the 2008 International Drama Festival in Tokyo.