History
Namatame was a politician who, in his words, just wanted to be useful to society. This ended up failing when he had relationship difficulties with his wife, whose career as a singer had been more successful than his own, and fell in love with television reporter Mayumi Yamano. Eventually his affair with Mayumi turned into a public scandal. Both of them lost their jobs, and Namatame lost his marriage.
He returned to Inaba, his hometown, to escape but there things only got worse. He saw Mayumi on television at midnight as per a local urban legend (the Midnight Channel), and discovered that he could put his hand through the TV. The next morning Mayumi was found dead, hanging from a TV antenna. Guessing that the TV had been involved, he tried to take action and warn the girl who next appeared on it, but she was unconvinced by rumors and the girl was killed the same way. Believing that the foreknowledge meant he should have been able to save her, he grew even more desperate to save the third person who appeared, enough so that he tried to warn the police.
As it so happened, the officer he got believed him...because he had the same power and had been the one to push the victims into televisions towards their deaths. For some amusement, the officer suggested that Namatame shelter the potential victims inside the TV world for safety, and Namatame fell for it. (Later he would remember this as his own idea, thinking the police hadn’t believed him. There is no real explanation for this, but heavy drinking following the scandal may have had something to do with it.)
Namatame’s father had given him work in the family delivery business, so Namatame used that to abduct the victim-to-be and throw her in a large television stored in his truck. When she reappeared alive a few weeks later, he guessed it must have worked. So he went on with that for the next two people who appeared on the Midnight Channel, and as it seemed to work, he grew more convinced that this was the right thing to do-that Mayumi had given him this power to prevent others from following her and Saki's fates, and that it was his true mission to save all these people from certain death.
The next one to appear on the Midnight Channel was suspected to be the murderer. Eventually he was caught, but at least one detective thought that wasn't the end of it. When the detective appeared on the television, too, Namatame resumed his activities and that one lived too. The last one to appear was a little girl, and the fact that she was a little girl just made Namatame even more desperate: by this point, saving the people on the Midnight Channel had become the driving force of his life since Mayumi's death. This time he was pursued, and had to escape into the other world along with the little girl he'd already pushed in.
He soon realized that the other world was nothing like the safe haven he'd imagined. He took shelter with the girl in a paradise full of monsters, and having never seen anything of the sort he thought he was going insane. When a group of teenagers (including the four he'd saved) followed him into that world to take the girl back Namatame believed that they were the ones trying to kill her. Eventually they stopped him, and took him and the girl back to the hospital outside.
To everybody else, he was a kidnapper and a murderer-the police and the kids thought he had been the one to kill Mayumi and Saki. When the little girl he'd taken took a turn for the worse and supposedly died...well, everyone wanted payback and when it was just him and those kids alone in his hospital room Namatame just barely escaped death by TV himself. The kids left soon after that was resolved, and it turned out that the girl had managed to live after all: a small miracle, in a life rapidly turning into a nightmare.
The kids returned the next day to hear him out, and Namatame was finally able to share everything. This time they believed that he really did have good intentions, and went on to pursue the true murderer-who, weeks later, turned out to be a police detective who was eventually found and imprisoned. Namatame's fate is unspecified aside from that he was transferred to a second hospital and eventually sentenced to prison time.