#kazuya shibuya

[daevolloqui]

birthday art for the twins! i'd like to imagine it's in a world where they both lived to reach their twenties, but naru still dresses like he's ready to solve a murder mystery

(based off of CHEN ZHEYUAN 陈哲远 for Madame Figaro 2022)

[witchhuntress]

Oh God, don’t get me started how Naru looks so down bad when it comes to Mai. They argue a lot BUT THAT BOY WOULD HOLD MAI’S HAND INSTANTLY WHEN SHE’S SCARED LIKE BOY YOU TOUCHY TOUCHY.

Also, I don’t know how many times he’s laughed with Mai. Like, she’s not even trying to be funny. HEY HO OLIVER DAVIS YOU LOOK IN THE MIRROR SOMETIMES.

Also the stares, the silent gazes. Bro, is it any wonder we ship them for years????

[autumnmobile12]

I like to think that 10+ years into the ghost hunting career, Mai and company are all scarily efficient in a crisis.

The anime takes place over the course of a year, and there are three separate fires that take place:  the kitchen fire in the dollhouse case, the fire that broke out at Yasu’s school, and the fire at the Yoshimi house.  There’s a high probability that those fires weren’t the last ones they ever had to put out.  Combine that with various injuries, the ambulance rides, the near drowning of a child, a murderous family, a horde of drowned corpses, and other assorted emergencies, there has to come a point where a crisis is just another Monday.

...

“There’s a fire?  Is it small enough that a fire extinguisher can handle it or do we need to call the fire department? Fire extinguisher it is. I saw one in the hall, I'll go get it." If the site doesn't have one, they grab the one they keep in the company van.

...

“Naru’s gone into cardiac arrest again?  Call an ambulance and find the AED kit we saw earlier.” (If they weren't all trained in CPR or BLS (Basic Life Support) after the Yoshimi Case, they probably were afterward. At this point, I imagine all of them have done a round of CPR on him and it's not even weird anymore.)

Everyone's medical information is probably on file and/or memorized. Every investigation briefing goes over the nearest emergency room locations, makes sure the first aid kits are stocked, and goes over if anyone is taking any new medications that may or may not react badly with anesthetics, anti-inflammatories, etc.

...

There is a sign on the door that says, "Unless your life is in immediate danger, do not leave the base unattended under any circumstance."

...

Basic self-defense became a necessity after too many close encounters with a violent, possessed person. That and carrying pepper spray. Masako straight up has a stun gun.

...

And the poor client's just standing there all like, "Um...can I ask how you people are all so calm about this?"

Mai: *casually trying to decide if a serious-looking cut is deep enough to warrant a hospital visit* "Listen, when you've been doing this as long as I have, there isn't much left that's a shock anymore."

[ahsokamaigranger]

They arrived!! They re-released the light novels and they look gorgeous! 😍

[louistonehill]

Mai's working hard

[howdoyoudothedew]

decided to make some moodboards with queer headcanons this pride month. first off is ghost hunt:

row one: ayako-aromantic; eugene-genderqueer and gay; john-trans

row two: lin- asexual; mai- trans and bi; masako-lesbian

row three: monk-bi; naru-aroace; yasu-bi

[glitchy-anime-fan]

Detail I noticed in the Ghost Hunt manga

Spoilers for the first “arc”/case file!

So I’m a big fan of Ghost Hunt, I’ve reread the manga a few times, I’m currently trying to read the light novel, and I watch the anime at least one a year. It’s my Roman Empire, what can I say?

Anywho, while I was rereading the first case file in the manga I noticed an interesting little detail i hadn’t noticed before; Naru is playing with a nail in the late beginning, early middle of the case that’s brought up by the end.

What do I mean by this? Well, after we’re introduced to our main cast of characters there’s an incident roughly between pages 80-84 where Ayako gets trapped in one of the old school house classrooms. Takigawa ends up having to break down the door because it won’t open.

Followed by the scene where they’re trying to figure out what’s going on. At one point we get a close up of Naru as they’re talking about what each specialist theorised is happening. In this panel we actually see Naru holding the nail.

Mai even makes an offhand comment about Naru “playing” with the nail-

Before we see her thoughts on the matter, where she mentions the “locked” door on the next page.

Now why is this important? How does this tie into the nail detail/forshadowing? Well, the thing is that nail is actually why Ayako got locked in the room in the first place.

Pretty much, by the end of the case we find out that Kuroda (the one who was unconsciously causing the poltergeist in the building) was getting back at Ayako for being rude to her the entire case. So she pretty much closed the door behind Ayako and stuck a nail in the floor so it wouldn’t open.

Do we see where I’m going? That nail that Naru holds up, the one he thought “wasn’t important enough” to mention? Yeah, that’s the nail he’s holding earlier in the case! It’s such a small detail that on my first read I didn’t even make the connection at first, but it’s a pretty subtle foreshadow when you look back on it. I’ve definitely watched the anime more and I’m almost certain that Naru doesn’t have any nail on his person until the end of the third episode, which made this detail stick out when I actually caught it.

Idk I just love catching little details during rereads that I didn’t notice sooner. It’s such a fun little experience that makes me happy.

Fun fact: in the first case, Kuroda herself also kinda foreshadows the resolve of the story! We find out that Kuroda is the one behind the poltergeist, unknowingly, and if you pay close enough attention you start to notice that all the poltergeist activities only seems to happen when Kuroda is in the building. A lot of the earlier incidents are proven to be accidents until Naru gives his original theory on ground subsidence being the cause. After that Kuroda starts unconsciously creating the poltergeist activity, but either way the odd happenings - things that couldn’t be explained by the land sinking anyway- almost always happen when Kuroda is around. When she’s gone almost everything is else can be logically explained away.

If you stayed till the end of my little info dump on a series that I’m sure has been dead since the early 2000’s…have some tea and cookies!

☕️ 🍪🍪🍪🍪

[tsukareta15]

[fairydares]

Also Lin laid out his whole "I hate every single Japanese person" spiel and and Naru went, "that's stupid." and then never ever mentioned it ever again 💀💀

[ailius-suffers-through-art]

The ghost hunt fandom has been looking a little too dead for my tastes

[daevolloqui]

messing around with shoujo effects is fun

[witchhuntress]

Mai: Analysis of a Psychic (aka word vomit 😆)

The usual consensus of Anime Mai is that she’s stupid and often annoying😅 While she has the qualities of Light Novel Mai (who can also be stupid, yes), Anime Mai needed frequent particular explanations, w/c Naru usually singles her out for. She also often makes mistakes on idiomatic expressions for comedic relief. These don’t really often happen in the light novels, and it might be because of the usual shoujo trope to make female anime characters more clueless back in the days or the fact that the audience has to have someone as a layman’s guide, through that someone being the person who needs extra explanation. Hence, Anime Mai is an obvious foil to Naru and the others, but Light Novel Mai can feel less so because there are as many times that Mai knows more than Naru and the others as much as she doesn’t know some information in parapsychology.

I think it’s easy to cast Mai as uninteresting and annoying. After all, at the start, everyone else in SPR has extraordinary skills & knowledge that an ordinary high school girl like her does not have. However, as I said before, Mai does have a particular advantage in knowing urban legends, particularly where horror stories & the occult are concerned. While terminology can still confuse her and she makes blunders, she does have a great memory, and it’s also hilarious how Naru thinks her “jokes” can also be a case for study because Mai often says things lightly but what she says ends up as an important insight at the end.

Just think about it. Bou-san has his musician job and lives quite an isolated life outside of everything else. Ayako has other stuff to do in her life that keeps her busy. John is a translator while at the same time an exorcist and a helper at a clinic for less privileged foreign workers. Masako has school like Mai but she’s also a celebrity with her own duties and schedule. Yasuhara has college among other things. Overall, everyone else might not know all the current urban legends and or horror trends at present because they’re wrapped up with many other things. Naru and Lin have been looking for a certain place in their spare time, so they definitely might not take notice of all the occult practices in Japan as well.

This is where Mai comes in. Mai who’s sociable with everyone. Mai who has had many experiences telling horror stories after school. Mai who’s interested in learning about the latest urban legends & horror mysteries out there with her friends. Mai who actually has dabbled in the occult as a pastime. Mai who takes in information wherever she can get it, even knowing ventriloquism which she said to be rarely seen on TV. Mai has a curiosity for all things paranormal and unusual, so her knowledge for those can be as extensive as a common folk largely attuned to her neighborhood or society. She’s always carefree, but Naru has also paid attention to what she says more and more because she can say quite the most surprisingly inquisitive things.

This particular advantage of Mai has been set up from the very start when she was telling horror stories with her friends after her classes in the first ever Ghost Hunt case which happened at her school—when she asked Naru what he was doing there and when she noticed his demeanor and replies are weird. Throughout the light novels as well as the anime, we see bits and pieces of Mai’s knowledge subtly revealed—such as when she knew about the common patterns for Kokkuri-san or about Qi-gong. Her “muses” almost always end up leading Naru and even Lin to realize what curse or problem they’re dealing with.

While Mai’s perspective is how we learned about everyone & the cases, she’s not simply a bystander who works separately while others do the exorcisms. In fact, there’s much to be said about Mai’s development throughout the light novels, which the anime could only show partially due to its early end. Mai’s post-cognitive dreams have become more and more important in the anime too, but what the anime lacked due to its early season cutoff is that Mai’s growth as a psychic only ramped up from there.

If we think deeply about it, Naru actually hit the jackpot by employing Mai. After all, Mai’s psychic powers have been dormant for long and seems to have only awakened when she met Naru (and Gene) and started working with him. Of course, this is Ono-sensei’s plan for the story, but let’s just think of the implications for a moment. Since Mai started working with Naru, her psychic powers developed little by little. She does not only have post-cognitive dreams, she also has come to have precognitive dreams as well as ESP and astral projection ability. When you think about it, what are the chances really that Naru would hire a multi-faceted psychic like Mai? To see a truly latent psychic develop before his very eyes also can be quite interesting for a psychic researcher.

This leads me to the very thought that from the start of the story, it was actually Mai’s dormant powers that possibly led her to working with Naru. Once again, let’s trace back to how Mai actually injured Lin accidentally. She wasn’t supposed to go to the old building, but she did due to her curiosity & possibly “intuition.” In fact, from the first chapter of Volume 1, Mai clearly said that she had a “sudden” feeling of “seeing the old building.” I think what this inciting incident tells us from the get-go is that Mai has a really keen sense. She has always had it, but something called her to go nearer the old building at that instance as she was passing by. We can call it her ESP now, but at the start, it’s easy to think of it as her being stupid and curious.

Now, looking back at the following volumes, we see Mai’s keen sense and intuition being amplified and literally becoming crucial in Mai’s decision-making and solving the cases that followed. And the more cases SPR took, the more we see Mai grow into exorcism-lite to full-fledged purification in Forgotten Children.

Mai’s growth from being a simple assistant to someone who becomes more involved in spiritual activities feels so natural and meticulous. What really are the chances that this random girl Naru hired would suddenly show signs of being a latent psychic? It’s next to none to be honest. To see her growth can make anyone proud because while most of the characters are somewhat the same, Mai continues to grow with her abilities.

I think it’s no wonder why Naru continues to employ Mai. He’s actually getting more out of it in the long run lmao. Can you imagine how absolutely valuable it is to have someone who not only has post-cognitive dreams but also has precognitive dreams for every case? If you think about it, there are a lot of psychics and exorcists in the SPR team already (i.e., monk, medium, Catholic priest, etc.) that one or two are redundant, yet Mai still found a good spot in it where she ends up actually indispensable. As Gene’s messenger in a way, she is also getting information from a different source. Thinking about it, to be a consistent messenger of a medium’s ghost is also shamanistic.

Furthermore, Mai has also learned seals from Bou-san and Ayako, and she has also come to use them more and more throughout the series. In all honesty, isn’t that amazing as well? Because she’s always actually fusing Kuji-in (from Ayako) and Acala mantra (from Bou-san). The former can be taught in Shintoism as well as Shugendo while the latter is in Buddhism—different religions and practices overall. We see Mai go from not quite confidently fighting a Kodoku spirit in Yasuhara school’s infirmary to confidently saving Naru from a possessing murderer during Akumu no sumu ie. As Naru once said in After-school Hexer/Spellcaster, superior psychics can be “superior spellcasters,” and I think this applies to Mai now as she has grown so much as a psychic.

There’s another psychic ability Mai has that is rarely or hardly talked about. I like to call it her bat signal 🤣, but in parapsychological terms, it’s called emotive telepathy. Every time Mai is in danger, someone always comes to the rescue. In the anime, it’s always after she calls for someone to save her, but in the light novels, even if she doesn’t think so in her mind, her feeling of dread seems to always bring someone to her rescue. I believe this is a case of emotive telepathy.

I think this ability is closely linked with her “animal-like” senses as well. Recall that Mai has tested -100% in Naru’s ESP test for her. That’s a really interesting result because while you can think that she’s 100% always wrong, you can also think that 100% she always “chooses” the wrong answer—which, in other words, means she knows the right answers “unconsciously” but always goes for the wrong one. So to speak, it’s almost like she’s drawn to the wrong choice all the time, but we can also interpret this as her always being drawn to what her senses feel is wrong, like a negativity bias but stronger. In this way, she can tell a friend from an enemy, and to be able to tell an enemy with that 100% accuracy, that’s what I think makes her abilities actually impressive, although hilariously so.

There’s also this case where two people have a strong connection that makes this emotive telepathy possible. I think this is what Mai and Naru have. During the After-school Spellcaster/Hexer (Kasai Panic case) and Forgotten Children’s cases, Naru had sensed when there’s something wrong. What are the chances that Naru would pass by such a remote area that Mai had decided to explore when she was about to save a child in a manhole? The timing was impeccable, as we can say so. It could be a coincidence, as we can say so. But that’s not the first time it happens.

Recall that Naru also went to help her at Yasuhara’s school before a ceiling fell down again. Naru has strong psychic abilities, and because of that, I also think he and Mai could form a strong telepathic link, an emotive one at that. In Forgotten Children, when Mai sensed something wrong about the number of vehicles, the “children” wanted to isolate her immediately. That’s because they knew that she could be dangerous to their goals. Mai’s sense of something being wrong seems to immediately have been perceived by Naru. He was adamant that she shouldn’t go with the children. At that moment, I think Naru and Mai really were on the same wavelength of foreboding, and that really has become possible with their continued interactions throughout the series.

Now, let’s talk about the kind of exorcism or rather purification Mai can do. We know the exorcists in the team have different skills and knowledge. For Mai, it is similar to Masako and Gene’s. In particular, Gene taught Mai how to do a purification, but even so, it actually can be hard to think how anyone can do it without showing pity or sympathy. Gene didn’t really guide Mai word-per-word on what to say; she figured it out herself during the Forgotten Children case. Naru himself told her that she could persuade the teacher the same way she has always scolded him lmao. If you think about it, Mai is actually great at persuasion and she has always done so throughout the series. How many times has she persuaded Naru to believe her? And how many times has Naru clung to what she said?

That’s why, when she ventured to try purification as Naru and Gene encouraged, it seemed just natural how she would do it. Her sincerity always touched people so it just seems like her to be able to do it. I feel like it’s possible that she has always been a “guiding light” (not only to Naru) in the story even before she did her first purification, and this is probably why Gene met her. Just as Gene has been said to be her guide, it seems logical to think that Mai is also Gene’s guide in connecting with Naru.

As we all know, Naru and Gene had this twin channel for so long, but then it was not possible for them to communicate again (though indirectly it was through Mai and unknown to Naru for some time) until Mai came. This is where a lot of questions come from, but also come to make sense. Gene could have only been haunting the lake where he was thrown into, so how did he reach Mai? I feel like for a while Gene has been called to Mai’s dreams by following her “light,” and only when Naru found Gene’s body were the twins able to connect again. This “light” we can also call wavelength.

In any case, Mai’s growth throughout the series is really a sight to behold, but even more so, her connections with everyone are so dynamic and interesting. Gene had said in Akumu no sumu ie that Mai was easier to reach because of her wavelength, and at the same time, I think Gene was able to connect Mai’s dreams and Naru’s visions because her wavelength also more easily reaches Naru. While we can say that Gene lends Mai his powers, it’s also evident throughout the series that she has grown as a psychic and paranormal investigator herself, and her ability to hold the same wavelength as Gene is still commendable because clearly not everyone can do what she does.

There’s also a lot to be said about Mai’s mental capacity. It’s not easy to see gory visions in many cases. It’s also easy to lose hope in humanity from all the atrocities people can commit in real life to curse someone. However, it’s a relief that Mai is not alone, and I think having emotional support in the SPR team also helped wonderfully in her growth as a psychic. What a great found family TT

In summary, Mai is not the typical foil we often see in detective stories nor is she the typical orphaned heroine. There is a lot to be said about how untypical Ghost Hunt as a series is to be honest, and indeed, even now, we still don’t know what other psychic abilities Mai could possess or how they often work. For one, her astral projection ability has been there time and time again, and the fact she can transport a physical object to Masako that one time also is an unexamined case. We often think of Naru as mysterious, but I can say the same for Mai. After all, isn’t discovering a psychic randomly in the wild absolutely mysterious? And just when Naru needed a psychic like Gene too🥺It seems like Mai eventually answered Naru’s call to the universe in some way as he did hope for someone like that in After-school Hexer. Mai is definitely quite an unexpected discovery😅

[autumnmobile12]

Can we talk about how weird the first episode of Ghost Hunt is?

It starts off pretty average: there's a creepy, old schoolhouse that students have been telling ghost stories about for years. Pretty standard for a ghost anime.

The faculty wants to demolish the building, but due to the haunted rumors and a series of accidents that continuously take place on the premises, no company will take the job.

So the principal hires a ghost hunter to settle the matter once and for all. Okay, sure. If the rumors and the stories are the problem and hiring an investigator will ease everyone's mind, even if it's a placebo effect, that makes sense. Only...he hires on five separate people:

A paranormal researcher

A Shinto priestess

A Buddhist monk

A Catholic priest

A celebrity medium

Bro hit three of Japan's religions and then some like a bingo card and administration said, "Well, this is an expense we're going to be okay with."

Bonus Round: If you haven't actually watched this show, try to guess who is who in the above picture. I dare you.

[ahsokamaigranger]

My fellow Ghost Hunt peeps… are there any discord groups out there (other than ‘the ghouligans’ since I’m in that one already)?

[louistonehill]

She has two hands for a reason~

[xxe123spiderfreakxx]

did i post this i dont remember