In a big city in Britain, there was a 15 year old High Schooler called who could see ghosts. One day as he was telling off the neighborhood punks, who knocked over a flower vase for a departed soul of a young girl, he gets to know the soul who the flowers were for and she thanks him for defending her when no one else could.
That night as he comes home, his dad gives him a surprise attack, wailing on his some with a burning fervor that goes on for a while. We then meet his 2 sisters, Karin and Yuzu, who are eating dinner along with another soul who torments Ichigo for a short time. One sister, Karin, can see ghosts and the other, Yuzu, can merely feel their presence. However Karin is in denial that they exist. Then their father consults a poster of their departed mother blaming all the problems on their puberty while acting very childish.
The next day the young girl soul is being chased by a large unidentified creature, unseen by everyone except Ichigo and an unidentified girl, who defeats the monster with a single swing of her sword, not even giving Ichigo and the young ghost a look.
That night Ichigo wonders about the girl and in a turn of unlikely events she comes into Ichigo's bedroom. At first he thinks she is a burglar so he kicks her, and she is shocked that she can be seen. She believes it to be a defect within him. She identifies herself as a Soul Reaper.
So of course Ichigo has many questions for this soul reaper, later identified as Rukia. Rukia believes him to be foolish, and she puts him in a full body bind; using a demon magic which apparently these "soul reapers" can use and sends the soul from dinner to the afterlife, using another magic called "konso." She informs him of her duties as a soul reaper and tells him that there is a good and evil to being a Soul Reaper.
There are the Wholes, Who are the good spirits and are also known as pluses, and the Hollows, who are the bad spirits, who are minuses. The reasons why Hollows take...