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The sound of the rain hitting a window in the evening was a sound more enjoyable than silence itself. A pair of eyes looks at the window covered in water droplets. They are the eyes of Haru Katsu, the sixteen-year-old son of an executive working for Japan's most prominent TV network. He sits in his leather armchair, staring at the outside world through the distorted window of his family's penthouse at the top of Oko Tower in downtown Karakura Town. His medium-length shaggy hair covers the top portion of his view.
"Why must I be the one to not have anything to do on a gloomy day like this?" Haru asks to himself. He gets up and puts his hand on the window, looking at all the rain falling from the sky and making unnoticeable impacts on the ground below. "My dad would usually hand me a fancy toy when I was little. Then as I got older a new video game, but I now no longer enjoy the things he gets me to entertain me while he's away on his business trips."
Haru lives with only his dad because his mother passed away giving birth to him. His dad didn't want him to feel guilty about it so he does his best to make him happy. Haru has now grown tired of this and wants something more than what a video game can give: something to give his life more purpose. What it is he's looking for now, though, he doesn't understand.
Haru's phone goes off. He picks it up and answers.
"Oh hey man," Haru replies to the sound of one of his buddies' voices.
"Hey Haru! Do you wanna come to the arcade and hang out?" Haru looks out the window again as he listens.
"Sure, why not? I've been wanting to get out of my place anyhow."
Haru didn't bother to take an umbrella with him because he prefers to feel the rain, so he knows that it's real and it's there. The walk down the street to the arcade was of no incident and Haru soon finds himself surrounded by his group of friends... well Haru never considered them his real friends.
"Hey Katsu, let's go play this game!" Haru walks with one of them to a shooter game and picks up a pistol controller. He easily fights off all of the aliens and gets a high score. To him, Haru's "friends" are only hanging out with him because of his family's wealth and the credibility of the network his dad works for.
An hour has passed of unlimited game playing when Haru finally stops. He looks outside the arcade to see the rain has subsided.
"Guys, I'm going now," he announces. There were protests to his leaving. Haru replies, "Sorry but I just don't feel like it anymore now. I'll see you later." He walks outside the arcade into the street.
There was the sound of an explosion down the street.
"Huh?" Haru looks in the direction of the sound. There was a cloud of dust in the sidewalk down the block. Once it settles down, he sees a crater is now in the concrete. Everyone soon comes out to see what was going on.
"What the-?"
"Was it an explosion?"
"Someone call the police!"
Another explosion occurs right next to Haru. The blast blows him back quite a bit and then he suddenly feels like a truck just hit him from another direction and he flies a bit further away from the site of the explosion. Haru groans from the pain he felt from that blast. He moves his head up to see what is there now.
His vision was a bit blurry, but he sees a faint, opaque form right where he was standing. The form looks about two stories tall and is not of this world.
"What... what is that?" Haru asks. As he says those words, he starts to feel something that he has never felt in his whole life. He feels like as if he can sense the thing that stands before him without even looking at it. The form seems to turn around a bit and then it vanishes. Haru tries to see where it had went, but then he loses consciousness from the hit he took.
The next time Haru opened his eyes, he doesn't find himself in a hospital as he was expecting when he passed out. To his curiosity, he wakes up to find himself in his own bed.
"What the...? Why am I here?" Haru then recalls the strange thing he saw when he was blown back by the explosion. "And what was that?"
He gets up and goes to a nearby TV. The power button is pressed and it goes on right away to a news channel. At the anchor desk was a women dressed in a scarlet-red suit that was possibly made for nothing more than to look gorgeous on the tube and tell people about events that have no meaning to them.
"In downtown Karakura Town, there were a couple of explosions in the shopping district. The police have evidence to suggest they were gas explosions, caused by fissures in the pipeline."
Haru slowly watches her, waiting for a hint that he was there after all.
"The police also reported that no one was injured and only minor property damage was done." The power button is pressed again to turn the machine off. Haru takes a second to contemplate what was reported.
"Just what the hell is going on here...?" he asks himself in the confines of his room. After he takes a swing around the penthouse, it was clear to Haru that his dad wasn't still home yet. With the sun now breaking over the horizon in the east on a beautiful day in Karakura Town, Haru can only think of one thing to do now with his time. He gets dressed and then walks out of Oko Tower to head for the nearby park.
As he walks, he tries to contemplate all the things that are happening to him now all of a sudden. The explosion, the thing he saw... and of course why are people now saying he wasn't involved in all of that. He walks past a couple of people putting up flowers near a wall. As he walks by, he hears them talk.
"Poor girl... it has been a month since she died in that car accident..."
"I only wish she could have been spared from this unfortunate twist of fate..."
Then Haru starts to have that same feeling he felt that previous night-the feeling of sensing a presence that is watching him. He turns his head and sees a little girl standing right next to the mourning folks. Her shirt was stained with blood and blood covers her head.
Haru instantly says, "Hey are you alright?" The mourners turn to look at him.
One of them goes, "Were you talking to us young man?" He points to the girl with the bloody shirt behind them.
"Don't you see her behind you?" asks Haru. They turned around to look where he was pointing. Slowly their heads turn from left to right and up and down. They look at that spot for a while.
"Young man, are you feeling ok today?" they ask him with concern. Haru looks at them and then back at the young girl who is now turning to look at him. His eyes slowly go down to the rain puddle beneath her feet and he sees a very unusual thing... there was no reflection of the girl in the puddle. Haru's mind slowly takes it in of what it is he is seeing.
"Yes, I'm feeling fine... sorry to disturb you." Haru says with a cooling calmness in his voice. He continues on his path, but he knows as he walks away that the girl was watching him with each step he takes. "Just what was that about? How can I see her when they can't?" he asks himself.
The walk to the park continued without any further interruptions. Haru takes a path into the park and then takes a seat on a bench. With no one else around and a mind filled with questions to himself, Haru lets loose the dam and the thoughts came flowing out.
What the hell is going on around here? It all started out with that explosion last night, that much I can tell... that thing I saw there, just what the heck was it anyhow? And then the reports saying that I wasn't there at all... as if all of the memories of it were altered... To top it all off, I just saw a girl with blood on her shirt that no one else can see! I don't know if it sounds like I think it is... but it's starting to sound like I can see ghosts now.
A gruesome cry of an unworldly beast rings out in the park. Haru quickly gets up off the bench to see what it was that made the cry. It was silent and unmoving for a heartbeat. Then he gets that same feeling he had from when he saw that strange form and that dead girl.
"God... what is happening?" Haru exclaims. Then from a grouping of trees nearby, a creature that
is not familiar to Haru emerges. It was very tall and bizarre-looking with its black skin, a white face that resembles a mask, a hole in its chest, and the being has the form of a very large centaur at least. To Haru, it was a monster.
It occurs to him that this almost looks like the very thing he saw at the arcade. It matches his very description of the form he barely witnessed.
"Just what the hell is that thing?" Haru yells. The creature walks forward a bit in front of Haru. Then as quick as he can blink his eye, the thing seemed to have stopped dead in its tracks, and it body was split in half. As this happens, the creature gives out the same terrible cry that Haru heard earlier. It vaporizes into the thin air.
Haru stares at it as he finds himself unable to move. A woman then emerges from the nearby trees and goes to the area where the thing was standing. The stranger had her back to Haru. She had long purple hair tied into a pony tail and was wearing some strange clothing, but they appear to be an orange jacket and black pants.
"That's another one down," she says after a moment of silence. Haru was able to take to it that she was the one who eliminated that unusual being. The woman just stands there for a bit, and then in front of Haru's eyes, she was gone in a flash.
"... I think I need more time to figure out what's going." Haru says at long last.
That evening, the rain returns to Karakura Town once again and it strikes against the window where Haru was looking out at the world from last night. This time though, he doesn't just see the city lights through a window bathed in rain droplets, he sees the very questions that bog his mind.
He runs all of the events through his head in an endless cycle. The explosion, the thing, the dead girl, the woman. The explosion, the thing, the dead girl, the woman. The explosion, the dead girl, the woman. The explosion, the woman. The explosion, the thing. The dead girl... the dead girl... Then his mind finally rested on the thought of the dead girl... He looks at the window and then as if fate was intending to tell him the answer, he sees a series of droplets on the window are now showing the kanji character for spirit.
"I can see the souls of the dead..." Haru admits at last to himself. He said it not only because it was true, it was because he might have found the very thing that can cure his boredom with his life. He repeats, "I can see spirits!" The recalling of that woman who had taken down that large monster gave him the idea that he might have finally discovered a way to get the action he has been looking for to liven up his life. Still... one thing was left on his mind.
"But... if I can see spirits now, then how is it I have this ability all of a sudden? Where did it come from?" His eyes rest on the outside world through the window.