Hideki

Hideki is Maya Ishii-Peters' father, a steady presence in the family's suburban household as PEN15 follows his daughter through the humiliations of seventh grade. He appears mostly at the margins of Maya's chaotic adolescence, offering the kind of quiet, undramatic parental support that a thirteen-year-old barely notices and rarely appreciates.

The show's whole conceit is grown women playing thirteen-year-olds among actual child actors, and the parents are the tether to reality that makes the joke land. Hideki's low-key, unshowy warmth gives Maya's spiraling embarrassments a home to return to, and that contrast is where the comedy gets its quiet, aching undertow.