Naoko Yanagisawa is one of Sakura's classmates and friends at elementary school, and she's also part of the school's cheerleading squad. She's a bookworm who gravitates toward fantasy and ghost stories—the weirder and scarier, the better. Naoko genuinely enjoys mysterious situations and doesn't spook easily, which makes her the type of friend who'd probably drag everyone into a haunted house without hesitation.
The character gets her most memorable moment in episode 31 when she unknowingly picks up The Create card disguised as a regular book. The catch? Whatever Naoko wrote in the book would actually materialize. She has no idea what's happening, so naturally things spiral into absolute chaos—random mystical creatures, a fire-breathing dragon, the works. Sakura and the gang end up scrambling to make sense of the magical mess until Naoko finally goes to sleep and closes the book, stopping the card's effects long enough for Sakura to capture it. When Naoko wakes up and the book's gone, she just assumes it was all some genuinely supernatural experience, which honestly tracks given everything she's into.
According to CLAMP, they'd originally planned for Naoko to have a long-distance boyfriend subplot, but that storyline got cut before making it into the final series.
Naoko is voiced by Emi Motoi in the original Japanese. In the English adaptation Cardcaptors, her name becomes Nikki, voiced by Kelly Sheridan, and she gets a different voice actor, Sherry Lynn, in the second movie dub.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
