YuYu Hakusho (幽☆遊☆白書, YūYū Hakusho?, literally Spirits Wander White Book, meaning "Ghost Files" / "Poltergeist Report", romanized as YuYu HAKUSHO) is a Japanese manga series created by Yoshihiro Togashi with an anime adaptation. The name of the series is spelled YuYu Hakusho in FUNimation's distribution of the anime and in the Viz manga.
The manga was originally published in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump. The series consists of 175 chapters collected in 19 tankōbon volumes, and won the Shogakukan Manga Award for shōnen in 1994. In North America, the manga currently runs in Viz' Shonen Jump.
The anime, directed by Noriyuki Abe and co-produced by Fuji Television, Yomiko Advertising and Studio Pierrot, consists of 112 television episodes and two movies: "The Golden Seal" (YuYu Hakusho: The Movie) and "Bonds of Fire" (YuYu Hakusho: Poltergeist Report). The anime series won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize in 1993 and 1994. The TV series originally aired on Japan's Fuji Television network from October 10, 1992, to January 7, 1995,[1] and was later licensed in North America by FUNimation in 2001. The show first aired on US TV on February 2002 on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block. Around March 2003, the show moved to Cartoon Network's Toonami block due to higher ratings. Then YuYu Hakusho was taken off Toonami around March 2005 and moved to an early Saturday morning timeslot at 5:30 A.M. where the series finished its run. It currently airs as part of the FUNimation programming block on CoLours TV.
Yusuke Urameshi is a street-brawling delinquent with a tough guy approach to everything. Yusuke's mother Atsuko, an alcoholic, had him at the age of 15 and shows little interest in raising her son. He has a reserved seat in the guidance counselor's office, and numerous other delinquents in the city are trying to take him on. Yusuke is pretty fed up with life.
However, no one expects a sudden act of heroism on his part: he dies trying to save a little boy from a speeding car. In fact, when he arrives in the afterlife, he is informed that no one was expecting him to die that way, and were not prepared for his arrival.
After numerous tests to gauge his worth, Yusuke is eventually revived, and is assigned to work for the Spirit Realm as a detective investigating demonic cases in the human world. He comes into spiritual abilities of his own, and enlists the help of numerous friends from Reikai (spirit world), Makai (demon world, translated in the English manga as the Demon Plane) and Ningenkai (human world) to aid him in his cases as they fight off demons and humans seeking to rule over all three worlds.
