Sai Arawan, a 12-year-old girl living in the Kingdom of Mangkon, is the protagonist of The Last Mapmaker. Her real name is Sodsai Mudawan, but she goes by the nickname Sai. Her choice to use a false last name is a testament to the shame she feels about her lower-class family background, but this attitude will reverse over the course of her Hero’s Journey. Sai embodies the archetype of the denied hero—a protagonist whose lowly status, or otherness, makes her accomplishments heroic. At first, Sai’s high-seas adventure takes on the guise of the epic journey archetype—a journey to find the promised land, or in this case, to find the Sunderlands for the glory of Mangkon. Her real journey, however, represents the quest for identity and a deeper search for knowledge.

Sai is characterized by her ability to deceive others. She says of her skilled forgeries, “Watching my hand form words that weren’t mine made me feel like I was someone else, and there was nothing better than being someone else” (47). This thought demonstrates that Sai’s deceptiveness is a product of her underlying desires to be someone else and to live a different life.