[haguruma]

Originally Posted by Jimmy C

Spoiler:

I checked back to the voiceover in ep1, trying to see if I could spot any clues to the gender, despite knowing virtually no Japanese. Although I couldn't find anything immediately obvious, a thought did occur to me. The Japanese have a number of words that are more often used for one gender than the other. Are any of these used in the ep1 voiceover, and which gender are those words more commonly associated with?

Originally Posted by Extremesonic101

The gender aspect is really tricky when you watch with English Subs :P

In Episode 3 (I believe) when Mei tells the story to Kouichi in the English subs I believe she says it was a boy who said that Misaki was still alive, so can anyone check if she uses male clarification or is it also non-gender specific?

There was never any indication whether Misaki was a boy or a girl. The words they used when not refering to Misaki in name were "that person", "that student" or "that one". Japanese has this tendency that unless you clearly say HIM or HER, which is very unlikely to be used in a normal sentence, you never know the exact gender if it is not contextualized.

Additionally the novel (it is NOT a light novel) opened with the same discussion we had in episode 1 but was exceptionally longer also having among other things during the first few lines that:

Spoiler for beginning of the novel:

The students who talk about the rumor admit that it's unknown whether Misaki was the family name or personal name of that person or whether it was a boy or a girl.