is a Japanese

manga Manga ( Japanese: 漫画 ) are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long prehistory in earlier Japanese art. The term ''manga'' is ...

series written and illustrated by

Takashi Shiina is a Japanese manga artist who writes primarily for the weekly Shogakukan manga publication ''Weekly Shōnen Sunday''. When he started at the company in 1989, he began with an anthology of various shorts and one-shots collectively known as ''S ...

. It was published in

Shogakukan is a Japanese publisher of dictionaries, literature, comics ( manga), non-fiction, DVDs, and other media in Japan. Shogakukan founded Shueisha, which also founded Hakusensha. These are three separate companies, but are together called the ...

's ''

Weekly Shōnen Sunday is a weekly ''shōnen'' manga magazine published in Japan by Shogakukan since March 1959. Contrary to its title, ''Weekly Shōnen Sunday'' issues are released on Wednesdays. ''Weekly Shōnen Sunday'' has sold over 1.8billion copies since 1986, ...

'' from May 1991 to September 1999, with its chapters collected in thirty-nine '' tankobon'' volumes. The series explores some

folk religion In religious studies and folkloristics, folk religion, popular religion, traditional religion or vernacular religion comprises various forms and expressions of religion that are distinct from the official doctrines and practices of organized re ...

themes such as possession, exorcism, shamanism, Yurei, and

Yōkai are a class of supernatural entities and spirits in Japanese folklore. The word is composed of the kanji for "attractive; calamity" and "apparition; mystery; suspicious." are also referred to as , or . Despite often being translated as suc ...

. The series was adapted as a 45-episode

anime is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

television series by

Toei Animation () is a Japanese animation studio primarily controlled by its namesake Toei Company. It has produced numerous series, including ''Sally the Witch,'' '' GeGeGe no Kitarō,'' '' Mazinger Z'', '' Galaxy Express 999'', '' Cutie Honey'', '' Dr. Slu ...

called ''Ghost Sweeper Mikami'' which ran on

TV Asahi JOEX-DTV (channel 5), branded as (also known as EX and and stylized as TV asahi), is a television station that is owned and operated by the subsidiary of certified broadcasting holding company , itself controlled by The Asahi Shimbun Comp ...

and the

Asahi Broadcasting Corporation is a certified broadcasting holding company headquartered in Osaka, Japan. Until March 31, 2018, it was a unified radio and television broadcaster serving in the Kansai region. On April 1, 2018, its radio and television broadcasting divis ...

from 1993–1994, covering most parts of the first nine volumes of the Manga (total 39 volumes). The anime lead to the release of a movie, which had been the only existence of Mikami in the United States (released by

Manga Video Manga Entertainment was a producer, licensee, and distributor of anime in the United States and the United Kingdom. Originally founded in the UK in 1987, the UK branch became Funimation UK and Ireland in 2021, also currently known as Crunchyr ...

). The TV series has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks. In November 2013, Toei Animation released all of the episodes with English subtitles to

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

. In 1993, ''Ghost Sweeper Mikami'' won the 38th

Shogakukan Manga Award The is one of Japan's major manga awards, and is sponsored by Shogakukan Publishing. It has been awarded annually for serialized manga and features candidates from a number of publishers. It is the oldest manga award in Japan, being given since ...

for the ''shōnen'' category.

Plot

Overdevelopment and crowding in Japan has forced many of its indigenous spirits and ghosts to lose their homes. Due to problems caused by the homeless spirits, a new profession was created, the Ghost Sweepers (GS). Private exorcists for hire, they serve only the highest bidder to survive in the cutthroat corporate world. Among this, the Mikami GS Company, led by 28-year-old Reiko Mikami and her two assistants, the 17-year-old boy Tadao Yokoshima and the ghost girl Okinu, is said to be the best. The manga setup is scenario-to-scenario, with many plots intertwining classic Japanese culture and modern day realities, with occasional references to Western influences. In between these plot points, there are longer story arcs where new characters are introduced and the existing characters are further developed. While the overarching storyline focuses on Reiko's contention with her arch-nemesis, Astaroth, the series is mostly character-driven and serves to gradually develop characters, especially the main protagonists.

Media

Manga

''Ghost Sweeper Mikami'', written and illustrated by

, debuted as a

one-shot One shot may refer to: Film and television * One-shot film, a feature film shot in one long take with no edits, or manufactured to look like so * ''One Shot'' (2005 film), a Sri Lankan action film directed by Ranjan Ramanayake * ''One Shot'' (2 ...

's ''

'' on May 8, 1991. The manga was then serialized in the same magazine from July 17, 1991, to September 22, 1999. Shogakukan collected its chapters in thirty-nine ''

tankōbon is the Japanese term for a book that is not part of an anthology or corpus. In modern Japanese, the term is most often used in reference to individual volumes of a manga series: most series first appear as individual chapters in a weekly or ...

'' volumes, released from March 18, 1992, to November 18, 1999. Shogakukan re-released the series in a twenty-volume '' wideban'' edition, published from December 16, 2002, to July 15, 2004; a twenty-volume '' shinsōban'' edition from June 16, 2006, to March 16, 2007; and a twenty-three volume '' bunkoban'' edition from August 18, 2016, to June 15, 2018.

Volume list

Anime

Episode list

There are 45 episodes which aired on TV from April 11, 1993 to March 6, 1994.

Film

A 1994 anime film was produced by Toei. Its story is original and acts as a sequel to the TV series. Ghost Sweeper, Reiko Mikami, is called on by the ghost of the long dead samurai Mitsuhide Akechi to stop the demon Nobunaga who has been possessed by a vampire called

Nosferatu ''Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror'' (German: ''Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens'') is a 1922 silent German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok, a vampire who preys on the wife ...

. Mitsuhide provides Mikami with a spear tipped with a with which to kill Nosferatu who is protected by his loyal servant Ranmaru Mori - a demon who can take the shape of a white spider. Nosferatu captures Mikami's associates, Emi Ogasawara, Doctor Chaos and Maria and begins to drain their blood. However, Mikami with the assistance of her friend, Yokoshima, manages to destroy Nosferatu with Mitsuhide's spear although Nosferatu says he will return in the future.

Video games

The manga and anime spawned two video games, one for the

Super Famicom The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), commonly shortened to Super NES or Super Nintendo, is a Fourth generation of video game consoles, 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan and South ...

and another for the

PC Engine The TurboGrafx-16, known as the outside North America, is a home video game console designed by Hudson Soft and sold by NEC Home Electronics. It was the first console marketed in the fourth generation, commonly known as the 16-bit era, thoug ...

. Released in 1993 for the Super Famicom, Natsume's is a side-scrolling

platform game A platform game (often simplified as platformer and sometimes called a jump 'n' run game) is a sub-genre of action video games in which the core objective is to move the player character between points in an environment. Platform games are charac ...

where the player controls Reiko through multiple stages.''Ghost Sweeper Mikami: Joreishi wa Nice Body''
at

MobyGames MobyGames is a commercial website that catalogs information on video games and the people and companies behind them via crowdsourcing. This includes nearly 300,000 games for hundreds of platforms. The site is supported by banner ads and a small ...

Reiko is armed with a magic baton that can be used to perform several types of melee attacks. The baton can be powered up to shoot various types of projectiles, though these powerups are lost if Reiko takes any damage. It can also be used as a type of grappling hook to access certain platforms. There are also limited uses of magic attacks that hit all enemies on the screen.

Banpresto (formerly Coreland Technology Inc.) was a Japanese video game video game development, developer and video game publisher, publisher headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. It had a branch in Hong Kong named Banpresto H.K., which was headquartered in t ...

released another game based on the franchise in 1994 for the

PC Engine Super CD-ROM² The TurboGrafx-16, known as the outside North America, is a home video game console designed by Hudson Soft and sold by NEC Home Electronics. It was the first console marketed in the fourth generation, commonly known as the 16-bit era, thou ...

simply titled ''Ghost Sweeper Mikami '', an

adventure game An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based ...

featuring

card battle A collectible card game (CCG), also called a trading card game (TCG) among other names, is a type of card game that mixes strategic deck building elements with features of trading cards, introduced with '' Magic: The Gathering'' in 1993. General ...

Reception

In 1993, ''Ghost Sweeper Mikami'', along '' Yaiba'', received the 38th