Yayoi Hozuki

Gender: Female

School Year: Third-grade elementary school student

Voice Actor: Yuu Sasahara

IQ: Over 160 after the accident

Notable Trait: Double pupils that allow her to perceive both the present world and the otherworld

Yayoi Hozuki is the first student tutored by Keitaro Gentoga, and she lives at the home of her cousin, Eiko Hozuki.

Like Keitaro, she has a spirit-medium constitution, but her presence is unusual even among spiritually sensitive people.

One and a half years before the main story, Yayoi lost both of her parents in a traffic accident.

During that incident, her mother’s spirit was taken away by the powerful evil spirit known as Kuubo.

To recover her mother’s soul, Yayoi visits haunted locations, captures dangerous spirits, and turns them into pieces for the eventual battle against Kuubo.

Her goal is not simply to exorcise spirits, but to collect, raise, and weaponize them.

Because of this, she sees Keitaro as an ideal partner.

His ability to attract spirits makes him extremely useful for her dangerous ghost-hunting work.

Before the accident, Yayoi was a bright and ordinary child for her age.

After the accident, her spiritual sight became fully established, and her intelligence rose dramatically to an IQ above 160.

Whether due to her near-death experience or the sudden growth of her intellect, she became calm, analytical, and strangely mature for an elementary schooler.

Her facial expressions rarely change, giving her an eerie, doll-like impression.

That does not mean she is emotionless.

She gets visibly excited about occult topics, becomes embarrassed by Keitaro’s words, competes with boys her age, and tries to get adults to buy her lots of snacks.

She also takes advantage of her small appearance when it helps her get her way.

Yayoi refers to elderly people affectionately as “grandpa” or “grandma.”

She is deeply loyal to anyone she recognizes as family or as part of her circle.

For her mother, Keitaro, and Ai Kamiyo, she is willing to take terrifying risks without hesitation.

At the same time, she can be brutally ruthless toward evil spirits that continue harming others after death.

If collateral spiritual damage occurs during her methods, she rarely shows concern and has no real intention of changing that approach.

Keitaro’s description of her as a “crazy occult loli” captures her terrifying intensity quite well.

Yayoi’s greatest objective is to rescue her mother’s spirit from Kuubo.

To do that, she gathers evil spirits from haunted places and trains them as combat assets.

Against strong spirits, her first priority is usually capture.

Destroying or erasing them is only a last resort, because a powerful ghost is more valuable to her as a weapon.

Her enemies are monsters that cannot be reasoned with by clean ideals.

For that reason, Yayoi accepts both purity and impurity as tools, engraving that harsh resolve into herself.

Yayoi was born with eyes that can see both the living world and the spirit world.

Before the accident, the two views overlapped indistinctly and were difficult for her to separate.

After the head injury she suffered in the crash, her vision became sharply divided and clear.

She describes the result as being like “4K resolution.”

Her sight allows her to see ghosts clearly, and she can also perceive the life energy surrounding living humans.

However, her spiritual sensitivity is strongly tied to vision.

Because of that, she has several weaknesses.

In dark places, she has trouble spotting spirits.

When spirits show her hallucinations, she is vulnerable to being fooled.

She can also struggle to distinguish between ghosts and physical objects.

Divine spirits, which are different from ordinary ghosts, are difficult for her to detect unless she concentrates.

She also lacks the ability to sense a spirit’s presence instinctively.

This means that even with her exceptional eyes, she is not omniscient.

Yayoi’s occult techniques are mostly self-taught.

Despite that, her talent is so great that even the spirit of Abe no Seimei evaluates her highly.

Multiple first-rate spiritual practitioners recognize her potential and try to recruit her as a disciple.

Yayoi refuses them because she values cost performance and wants to defeat Kuubo as quickly as possible.

Her methods often rely on using poison against poison.

Rather than following orthodox spiritual practices, she captures malevolent entities and forces them into a system where they strengthen one another.

This makes her frighteningly effective, but it also shocks or unsettles professional spiritualists.

Yayoi’s mind is not the only thing that seems to have been affected by the accident and her spiritual condition.

Her physical ability is also far beyond that of a normal third-grade girl.

She can swing a Jizo statue wrapped in stockings like a hammer.

She can subdue an adult man possessed by an evil spirit when she catches him off guard.

She can climb a utility pole and enter the third-floor balcony of an apartment building.

In battles against spirits, she often becomes the action specialist, even when two university students are present.

Although Yayoi hunts and captures evil spirits, she does not hate all spirits.

If a ghost became malevolent under sympathetic circumstances, she may treat it with pity and care.

Through repeated visits to haunted locations, she also forms cooperative relationships with benign spirits.

However, spirits that harm others after death receive no mercy from her.

Ironically, despite being a spirit medium, Yayoi seems to be feared by spirits herself.

When she visits haunted places alone, she apparently encounters spirits only about once every three tries.

This is likely because she is seen as a living person who is dangerous even to the dead.

At first glance, Yayoi’s room looks like a normal young girl’s room filled with cute dolls.

The walls are lined with shelves, and dolls are packed tightly across them.

The truth is far more disturbing.

Many of those dolls contain carefully selected evil spirits that Yayoi captured during her haunted-site investigations.

The dolls constantly rattle and tremble.

Keitaro, who has strong spiritual sensitivity, is so overwhelmed by the sight that he collapses when he first sees them.

Despite the danger, the Hozuki household does not suffer from hauntings.

This is because the dolls are used as substitutes containing parts of the Hozuki family members’ bodies, such as nails.

If a spirit attacks Yayoi or her family, the damage is redirected through Yayoi and distributed to every spirit in the room.

Even if one spirit tries a suicidal attack, the other spirits stop it because they do not want to be dragged into the backlash.

In other words, the room is both a defense system and a prison.

It is also a spiritual “poison jar,” where evil spirits restrain, pressure, and strengthen one another.

Spirits that become too powerful to be kept in the room are called graduates.

Eiko Hozuki, who lacks spiritual sight, believed until recently that the dolls were simply Yayoi’s collection.

Eiko Hozuki

Eiko Hozuki is Yayoi’s cousin, and the two are extremely close.

During haunted-site investigations, they show excellent teamwork and understand each other with very little explanation.

However, Yayoi sometimes gives Eiko a cold look when Eiko’s stalking behavior toward Keitaro becomes too obvious.

Yayoi’s Father

Yayoi’s father was named Seiji Hozuki.

He served in the Self-Defense Forces and died in the traffic accident.

Yayoi loved him deeply.

When she met his spirit after being discharged from the hospital, she cried openly despite her newly calm and controlled personality.

Yayoi’s Mother

Yayoi’s mother was named Chitose Hozuki.

She was a homemaker and also died in the traffic accident.

For unknown reasons, her soul was captured by Kuubo.

Saving her is the central reason Yayoi continues her dangerous collection of evil spirits.

Eiichi Hozuki and Shion Hozuki

Eiichi Hozuki and Shion Hozuki are Yayoi’s uncle and aunt.

After the accident, Yayoi became their adopted child.

They appear only rarely in the story, but they are included in the substitute-doll protection system.

Yayoi refers to her adoptive father as “Dad” in a formal adoptive sense.