Name: Izaya
Surname: Orihara
Age: 23 (he affirms that he'll be forever 21)
Seiyuu: Hiroshi Kamiya
Peculiarity: He TOTALLY loves Humans
Job: Informer
Known as: -
Nickname: Kanra
Relatives: Orihara Kururi, Orihara Mairu (twin sisters)
Birth Place: Japan

    Izaya is a crazy and unmatched man.
He affirms to love humans with all himself, and all his actions are made for them. The major aspects of his personality are his philanthropic and cynical vision of the world, his arrogance, his "particular" way to indend what's right and what's not, and al least, his enmity for Shizuo.

    Izaya is cunning, he's a very charming man but he's not that interested in women and women are not interested in him.
It seems that even if Izaya tries to love all humanity, no one requits him.
Until the 6th novel we can see the usual, semi-evil and ironic bastard that lives to make Shizuo's life as hell, but his hate isn't real, because Shizuo made nothing against him.
Izaya hates him and is envious of Shizuo because the blond man is surrounded by friends, and many of them are persons that Izaya met when he was a student of Reira's Academy, together with Shizuo and Shinra.
But in difficult moments Shizuo has his brother beside him, has Shinra, has Certy, Tom and a lot of people that really love him.
Izaya is alone. An example is the episode in which he's hospitalized and there's not even one person beside him. He tries to call Shinra but this one puts off the mobile because he doens't want to hear him.
When all the users of the chat that he frequents decide to eat together, he is not invited and this fact makes him very sad.
The only person that he decides to keep beside him is Yagiri Namie, who hides Certy's head according with Izaya. Her wage is pretty high and Izaya justifies it with simple, stupid reasons. Namie isn't just his assistant but she's the one who thinks to do all the houseworks and to cook the meals for him. Maybe she and Izaya knew that their situation is more similar to the one of husband and wife than the one of a secretary and her head. But they don't care about the importance of this, because they're too worried to reach their goals.
Izaya's real intent is createing a war between gangs, and he works to do it.
He also plays along a lot of other characters (Masaomi, Anri, Vorona, Shizuo, Mikado and many less important ones), so no one really believes in him and nobody loves him.

    Is discussing with Namie that he shows many unexpected sides of him, and we know that he's graduated and he has two younger twin sisters, Kururi and Mairu.
He explains to Namie that he was a normal student until he ended the school, and after it, he became insane. In this way, his sisters were normal but he made them insane.
Also, talking with her, he's able to explain his real feelings about the world and his envy for who is loved, because he wants to be loved too (and be considerated a friend, but this is utopic, he's too false with all >.>").

    He affirms to consider Masaomi as a younger brother and he's a sorta of mentor for him, but what Izaya considers important for him aren't the persons, it's just himself.
He's the one that considers Shizuo the most powerful in Ikebukuro (when people ask him "Who is the strongest in Ikebukuro?" he always say "Shizu-chan or Simon", but Shizuo is always his first thought and his obsession (so Namie and him are very similar under this point of view XD).
Since Reira Academy's days, Izaya's major entertainment was making Shizuo angry and constrincting him to become crazy, throwing everything against him and all the world, also Izaya is guilty of Shizuo's troubles with police (so it's normal that Shizuo hates him, isn't it? XD).
Simon seems to know him well and he makes him able to admit that he really can't kill anyone, so we can say... what's the real face of Izaya?

    Izaya can seem a schizophrenic character, but we can explain him with his words: "nobody is just the one that you can see, anyone is all the faces that all the people see everyday".
He's not totally evil he's not totally good, and this is the point that Narita is better developping in the last novels released.