As a core character in one of the largest side quests in Majora’s Mask, the purple haired Kafei is nothing if not memorable for those who have gone out of their way to aquire the Couple’s Mask. This suspicious young boy wearing a Keaton mask is one of the unfortunate victims of the Skull Kids meddling and is, in fact, not very young at all! Kafei is actually a man who was to be wed to the Innkeeper Anju during the Carnival of Time, but had an encounter with the Skull Kid who turned him into a child and caused him to avoid his fiancée out of fear of scaring her. Since the Couple’s Mask quest in Majora’s Mask revolves around helping Kafei after he has already been turned into a child, we never actually get the chance to see Kafei’s true form as an adult within the game. However, due to how popular the Couple’s Mask side quest is, it turns out there are several places where we can see Kafei portrayed as an adult in official Zelda media!
To address the smaller elephant in the room, there is, somewhat, of a window into Kafei’s adult form during the Couple’s Mask quest in Majora’s Mask. Kafei happens to be the son of the Mayor and his wife, Madame Aroma. When Link speaks to Madame Aroma, she’ll explain Kafei’s dissapearance to Link and give him Kafei’s Mask to assist Link in searching for the missing man. While this mask looks strikingly similar to Kafei’s face as a child, it is technically modeled after his appearance as an adult since no one at this point knows what happened to Kafei except for the owner of the Curiosity Shop. The mask isn’t terribly detailed, so we’ll have to check out some official art of Kafei as an adult, courtesy of the Hyrule Encyclopedia, to get a better picture of the man in his true form.
These particular drawings of Kafei do a great job of making a distinction between his child form and adult form, looking like a mischievous child on the left and like a man ready to be wed on the right. Since this official art exists, it’s possible that there were scrapped plans to include an adult model of Kafei for his wedding during the credits of the game. Unfortunately, in the final version of the credits of both Majora’s Mask and Majora’s Mask 3D, we only see Anju in her wedding dress with the implication that Kafei is about to enter the scene before we leave it.
This isn’t the only time we’ve seen an official drawing of Kafei as an adult, though, as the Majora’s Mask manga by Akira Himekawa features a brief flashback segment with adult Kafei detailing his encounter with Skull Kid.
Although the events of this flashback are not neccessarily canon, there are a handful of panels in the manga featuring Kafei as an adult before Skull Kid transforms him into a child. It is worth mentioning, however, that we never see adult Kafei’s face in these panels, keeping it seemingly intentionally hidden behind the framing of the panels or the angle of the drawing. In the manga, Kafei looks pretty similar to his adult art from the Hyrule Encyclopedia, though its hard to say exactly due to the very limited amount of panels we have as reference.
It’s always been a little strange to me how rare depictions of adult Kafei are to come by considering it’s meant to be his true form. I remember reading the Majora’s Mask manga as a kid and being so excited that adult Kafei was included, even if it was only for a brief moment. The Couple’s Mask quest as a whole is easily one of my favorite parts of the entire Zelda series and I highly reccomend it, no matter how hard it is to find official art of adult Kafei.
