Webcomic / Mieruko-chan

Miko, Hana and no one else. Yep. They're totally alone in this picture. Totally.

Mieruko-Chan: The Girl That Sees "Them" is a Horror Comedy by Izumi Tomoki, originally published on Pixiv before getting serialized in Comic Walker magazine.

Miko Yotsuya is a completely ordinary Japanese high school girl. She goes to school, hangs out with her best friend Hana, and tries not to attract the attention of various horrifying ghosts and spirits that seem to haunt her hometown, creatures that no one else she knows can see.

Yen Press has picked up the rights to an official English release. The first volume came out on November 2020.

An anime adaptation by Studio Passione has been announced. The first PV can be found here. The Anime started October 2, 2021

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Tropes:

• 10-Minute Retirement: When the "Godmother of Downtown" learns her strongest wards and spells are no match for the latest presence haunting Miko, she calls it quits on being a fortune teller and goes back to the country to live with her son. However, she's inspired to get back into business in chapter 26.
• Abandoned Hospital: Starting in chapter 43, Miko stays in an hospital due to hurting her head in an accident. The place is not abandoned, it is still busy and working, but an hospital being an hospital, it is filled to the brim with ghosts, and due to Miko's ability, her stay soon turns into a living nightmare as she has to avoid the spirits of deceased patients, dead doctors and bizarre things that roam the hallways at night.
• Accidental Hero: In chapter 14, Yuria sees Miko's clumsy attempts to keep some ghosts away and thinks she's doing it deliberately, to show off.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Despite being spiritually unaware, Hana manages to exorcise a cursed building by luring a hungry cannibalistic ghost to eat the other ghosts haunting it.
• A-Cup Angst: There are a few jokes about Miko being jealous of her bustier friend Hana.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Yuria Nigurendou and Miko's father appear in the very first episode of the anime adaptation^note which adapts chapter 1 and the first few pages of chapter 2, whereas in the manga, they don't show up until later chapters.
• Adaptation Expansion: The first episode of the anime adaptation expands on the manga's first chapter by showing viewers what Miko's life was like before her first paranormal encounter with the ghoul at the bus stop.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Chapter 10 focuses on Hana, who unwittingly goes into a haunted building to look for a lost dog.
  • Chapter 30 gives Hana another adventure by herself, where Shindou runs into her as she retrieves a boy's lucky charm, and narrowly escapes a river ghost.
  • Chapter 32 focuses on Yuria, who tags along on one of Shindou Romm's ghost tours in hopes of picking up a few tips about dealing with the supernatural.
• A Dog Named "Dog": Miko’s brother names the stray kitten they care for “Nekomaru”, which is just the Japanese word for “cat” with a common masculine name character stuck on the end. Mr. Zen changes it to “Mocha”.
• Ambiguous Situation: At the end of chapter 23 Touno Zen finds the actual man who has been killing cats in his neighbourhood, there's the sound effect of a taser, and the man gets reported missing. What Zen exactly did to him is a mystery. Although the cat killer most likely isn't dead due to Zen lacking a ghost following him.
• Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Chapter 28 implies that what the ghosts look like varies from person to person. Chapter 45 fully confirms this with Romm explaining it that different people will see things differently, using a window reflection over the cityscape as an analogy for how he sees the spirits, he surmises that while Miko sees more then most, her vision is more a handicap as she can't see past the spirits or even tell them apart from real people.
• Asian Fox Spirit: The "god" from Chapter 11 that devours the spirit haunting Hana vaguely resembles a fox with multiple tails.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Several chapters imply that Touno Zen, a sinister figure Miko encounters on several occasions, is a cat-killer. Subverted when it turns out he actually likes cats. His mother, on the other hand, once killed a stray cat he brought home, and even as a spirit, she clings to him and the one that’s actually been causing the deaths of cats in the area is another man entirely.
• Bait-and-Switch: Chapter 9 has Miko go downstairs and see a hulking horselike ghost haunting her family, who are eating breakfast totally unaware. Miko looks and acts incredibly uncomfortable the entire time, seemingly because there is such a horrifying ghost around her parents. The end of the chapter reveals it's because her father is also a ghost who died a year before and seeing him upset her.
• Bathtub Bonding: Miko and her brother are said to occasionally bathe together. When he suspects she has an abusive boyfriend and wants to check her body for any marks, he barges in on the bathroom when she's inside with this offer in mind. But it turns into a awkward situation when he happens to walk in just as she's surfacing from the bathtub and looks mortified. He seems to think she's having a Naked Freak-Out and starts to leave, but she's actually terrified of the ghost in the bathroom, and insists on him staying so she won't be alone with the ghost.
• Bathtub Scene: Miko takes a quick shower and then a bath to try to relax in chapter 7 & episode 4. But naturally, her bath is ruined when a ghost shows up in the bathroom. The sequence is also played for Fanservice with a lot of Male Gaze on Miko's body, albeit any naughty bits are covered up by a combination of Godiva Hair, Scenery Censor, Shoulders-Up Nudity and Toplessness from the Back.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Downplayed, as several grotesque looking ghosts seem to have genuinely benevolent intentions. However, it's suggested that some ghosts retain their feelings of life and love to such a degree that their spirits mostly retain the form they had in life with zero grotesque elements. Gozuka's late pet cats and late wife in particular are suggested to look as they do because of the sheer love and dedication to him they had in life.
• Big Damn Heroes: In chapter 27, Mitsue shows up just in time to ward off the spirits that have Miko surrounded.
• Big Eater:
  • One of Hana's defining attributes is her big appetite; she's especially fond of sweets. It’s implied to be because her powerful aura attracts spirits that feed on it, causing her to constantly be hungry.
  • In a dark twist of this trope, the spirit world is heavily centered on cannibalism. Several ghosts are seen eating smaller, weaker ghosts to metamorphose into more monstrous and powerful forms, while there are entire waiting lines of ghosts leading to grotesque ghost-devouring spirits.
• Black Blood: The anime's OP and title bumpers feature vivid neon splashes of color all over in what's clearly mean to be stand-ins for ectoplasmic gunk or blood, to underscore the underlying horror of the series. The ED features proper blood-red scrawls (as fitting for as song written from the ghosts' POV).
• Black Speech: Particularly old spirits, like the kimono-clad ghost that trailed Hana and the fox god and its attendants, speak with indecipherable, archaic-looking characters.
• Bland-Name Product: The anime features such things as 'Spring' crisps instead of Pringles (complete with a cat-head stand-in mascot).
• Body Motifs: Eyes and mouths.
  • The entire story relies on the concept of people being able to see ghosts while having to pretend being blind to the supernatural, and the ghosts themselves tend to have a wide panel of creepy eye distortions, ranging from empty eye sockets to bloated and bulging blood-shot fish eyes.
  • The motif of the mouth, and by extension the idea of eating and devouring, is omnipresent in the series. Ghosts always have a grotesque or deformed mouth, sometimes they sport extra-sets of jaws in the most unusual places; powerful ghosts are seen regularly devouring weaker spirits to grow stronger and bigger, while people with powerful life-aura such as Hana need to eat a lot to replenish their energy. And of course there is the waiting lines of ghosts whose purpose was fulfilled, seemingly moving to the "other side": through Miko's eyes, this process appears as the ghosts being mercilessly devoured by even larger spirits.
• Breather Episode: Chapter 18 comes after a particularly unsettling chapter and is much lighter on the horror. It even has an upbeat ending.
• Bring My Brown Pants: After a particularly close encounter with an axe-wielding ghost in chapter 15, Miko has to make another stop on the way home for underwear, implying she soiled herself in fear.
• Broken Pedestal: In Chapter 32, Yuria starts to think Romm really is just a phony when he takes his tour group to various places that are completely devoid of spirits. Then he ends up saving her from a ghost she's not powerful enough to see, and it finally sinks in that she might be in over her head.
• Bust-Contrast Duo: Miko is subdued and constantly stressed out from being a Magnetic Medium, and there are several jokes about her A-Cup Angst compared to her bubbly, extroverted friend Hana with large breasts.
• Casting Gag: Alexis Tipton voices another high school student that's involved with the supernatural that could harm their family.
• Cliffhanger:
  • Chapter 26 ends on a major one; Miko goes back to the shrine from chapter 11, but not only does she find nothing but an empty patch of forest, but she's surrounded by hostile-looking spirits.
  • Chapter 35 ends with Miko apparently being consumed by the "God of the Mountain" and vanishing in an ominous cloud of darkness.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: One of the ghosts Miko meets is a creepy female spirit that's stalking a handsome man, and when the spirit thinks Miko was checking him out (Miko was actually looking at her) she gets aggressive and starts threatening Miko, who manages to trick her by watching wrestling videos on her phone to make the jealous ghost think the handsome man isn't her type.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Subverted. Even after facing frightening ghosts for days on end, Miko never stops being terrified of them. She just gets really good at hiding it, and her act crumbles when they leave, often shedding some Tears of Fear.
• Crash-Into Hello: In Chapter 39, Miko sees a scary monster with an eyeless octopus for a head. She ignores it as she usually does with ghosts and tries to walk through it... Only to crash into the "spirit" as it turns out it has a physical form and the "spirit" is actually the New Transfer Student Michiru, but Miko can only see her as a tentacled monster for some reason.
• Creepy Child: Chapter 20 of the manga has a child in the park who waves his hand to Miko and she waves her hand to him. It was actually a ghost disguised as a completely normal human child that shows its twisted real form and attacks Miko inmediately as she has acknowledged its existence only to be destroyed by the guardians of the shrine.
• Creepy Good:
  • The "gods" that banish the monster haunting Hana in chapter 11 appear benevolent, but are just as terrifying as the other creatures Miko sees. They also offer Miko a cryptic warning: "Three times." Chapter 27 seems to suggest they're not as benevolent as they first seem, as they cruelly reject Miko's offering and leave her to be tormented by spirits.
  • There's also a ghost in the train that looks slightly less horrible, as it's at least fully dressed, and wields an ax, really scaring Miko when she sees it attacking everyone but it turns out, the ax can't hurt humans and the ghost was hunting another ghost that had posessed a woman. In a later chapter, Miko even considers for a moment the idea of asking that ghost for help, though she rejects it as she does not even know how could she do that.
• Cross-Melting Aura: Sufficiently powerful spirits will cause protective charms to break and fail simply by proximity. Romm even compares their warding capacity against such spirits as 'hair in their food'. Barely a hindrance, but when you wear a lot of them at once...
• Curse: Miko's ability to see ghosts has brought her almost nothing but stress and misery. The few benign encounters such as the cat spirits or her father offer only temporary reprieve.
• Dark Is Not Evil: For all that the ghosts are horrifying, most of them are fairly harmless... unless you notice them. Maybe. It depends on the ghost.
  • The ghost of tormented cats that cling to Zen are neither malevolent or trying to exact revenge on him for killing them - because he didn't kill them. They cling to him to comfort him for his perceived failure at saving them. When the cause of their suffering disappears, they peacefully pass on.
  • The fearsome-looking, ax-wielding spirit that wildly chops at train passengers turns out to be looking at malicious ghosts that trying to possess tired commuters in their moment of weakness. His ax passes through humans harmlessly, but cleaves the ghosts like a butcher knife.
  • One of the fox miko of the Fox God turns out to be Romm and Mitsue's mentor's abducted lost soul despite looking practically identical to the other miko.
  • Mitsue believes this of the larger things devouring waiting lines of ghosts that Miko occasionally sees, theorizing that they may just be helping satisfied spirits pass on to the next plane. However, due to the difference in their perception she sees the process much differently than Miko does.
  • A ghost just wants to tell his widow the combination of their old safe. He even thanks Miko after she shows her the numbers he is repeating, allowing her to open it.
  • The big, long hospital ghost with gaping maw pushing a wheelchair around. It scares Miko shitless during her stay in the hospital. At the end of it, the ghost carries away Miko's recently-deceased roommate's spirit, along with his late daughter and presumably wife, who's been waiting for him all this time. It's notable because instead of eating the sprits in a gruesome manner, the ghost simply pushes all 3 on the wheelchair off into the night sky.
  • Romm reveals that the dark tentacle monster haunting Michiru is likely a natural forest guardian that decided to latch on to Michiru rather than the sacred trees they are known to inhabit. In effect, the tentacle monster is acting as Michiru's Guardian Angel and has no malicious intent.
• Dead All Along: In chapter 9 & episode 4, Miko has breakfast with her family and seems more perturbed than usual by the ghost in the room. Until later there's The Reveal that her father, who has just been introduced to the audience, is also a ghost, having died somewhat recently and is what's truly messing with her. Sharp eyed viewers will note that Miko's mother and brother did not acknowledge his presence.
• Demon of Human Origin: So far, most of the ghosts and spirits in the world of Mieruko-chan seem to be the spirits of dead humans. Most of them have clues to who they used to be or how they died in their design, and the most monstrous of them seem to be a type of mutated ghost that cannibalized other spirits. Even the mysterious "god" of the shine that is presumed to be an Eldritch Abomination turns out to be the ghost of a young shrine maiden who a long time ago was killed in a Human Sacrifice. However, a handful of entities seem just too otherworldly to be human, such as the horse-skulled maître d' tending to the line of ghosts in the diner.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: At least one ghost thinks so, since it spend its time shorting out would-be pirates' cameras and giving them headaches.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The anime's opening and ending theme are sung in-character by none other Miko (voiced by Sora Amamiya) herself.
• Dramatic Irony: Chapter 10 has Hana going into a cursed building to retrieve a little kid's dog. She is scared that she'll see a ghost... all the while being followed by a freaky ghost she can't see.
• Eating Lunch Alone: In chapter 17, Miko rather awkwardly discovers that Yuria eats lunch by herself... in the girls' bathroom. Hana, oblivious to the tension between the two of them, offers to let Yuria eat lunch with Miko and herself.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Miko's younger brother suspects her strange behavior is due to her having a boyfriend follows her to the library, and sees freaks out when he sees she picked up a book about getting hickies and assumes she has a Domestic Abuser for a boyfriend. Actually, she just randomly picked that book when she got scared by the library ghost.
• Exposition Diagram: In chapter 28, Mitsue uses some left-over vegetables to explain the presence of the spirits that she and Miko can see, and Miko ends up using them to indicate that there's a being even Mitsue can't see.
• Face of a Thug: In chapter 4, Miko convinces Hana to give a stray kitten to Gozuka, a thuggish-looking fellow covered in tattoos. He's surrounded by ghostly cats (which are actually based on nekomata) that are much more benevolent than the spirits Miko normally sees, and he does turn out to be a Kind Hearted Cat Lover.
• Foil: Mitsue Takeda and Shindou Romm are both Not So Phony Psychics who help Miko with her problem, but they contrast wildy from each other:
  • Mitsue is an old woman known as the Godmother who wears old style clothing, while Shindou is an adult who calls himself the Enigma Syndrome who dresses more like a stage magician.
  • Miko approached Mitsue to buy some holy bracelets, but ended with nothing due to all of them breaking, while Shindou approached Miko to sell his Power Stones and ends up giving her one.
• Framed for Heroism: In chapter 14, the spirits from the shrine in chapter 11 show up to save Miko and her friends from a particularly horrifying ghost, but Yuria seems to assume that Miko was the one who saved everyone.
• Freudian Excuse: Chapter 21 reveals Toono-sensei's mother was an emotionally-abusive Education Mama.
• Full Moon Silhouette: In chapter 45, Miko and Romm watch a family of ghosts being carried off in a wheelchair pushed by an Eldritch Abomination that seems to be some sort of Psychopomp. As the creature takes off flying, there's a panel with it silhouetted against the moon.
• Haunted House: Lots of them.
  • In chapter 10 Hana rescues a dog from a local "cursed building", an abandoned building that can't even be torn down because accidents keep happening to demolition crews. The building is indeed filled to the brim with ghosts - and Hana is not affected only because she brought with her a more monstrous ghosts that devoured the other ghosts, effectively "cleansing" the building.
  • In chapter 18 Miko, Hana, and Yuria visit a haunted house set up by a local bakery as a promotional gimmick. Hana is tempted by the promise of free donuts to those who make it all the way through, and Miko relishes the rare chance to not have to hold back from freaking out at scary things. Until a REAL ghost shows up....
  • In chapter 32, Shindou Romm organizes a "haunted tour" of the area, and he makes his clients stop in front of a haunted house where a grisly crime took place. However as it turns out, the place isn't actually haunted... but the house next door is.
  • Miko's own house is actually technically "haunted" as all sorts of creepy ghosts keep popping in regularly, though they seem to be ghosts simply happening to pass by... There are only two ghosts who stay permanently in the house: a large dog-horse-like creature with human-like face and hands, and Miko's dad, both of whom are shown to provide some sort of protection to the inhabitants.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Chapter 37 is pretty much a conga line of heroic sacrifices; the "God of the Mountain" is going after people with strong spiritual aura, and Romm was its target years ago. His and Mitsue's surrogate mother intervened the god from taking him, at the cost of getting taken herself. Romm the spent his entire life to find a way to exorcise the god in an attempt to avenge her, but his plan with Mitsue and Miko isn't working so well. So he decides to take the god's bell, the mark of its victims, so Miko can escape from the god. Mitsue disagrees and intervenes with his Heroic Sacrifice, coming forward to be the sacrifice instead.
• Hospital Hottie: Miss Kido, the nurse at Miko's school, proves to be a more tempting target than Hana for a perverted ghost in chapter 3. Unfortunately for the ghost, who gets exorcised by her powerful flower-scented perfume.
• Hotter and Sexier: The manga has a few and very mild fanservice scenes, but they completely stop past Chapter 17. The anime, on the other hand, included a lot more Male Gaze than the original webcomic and manga, particularly focusing the camera on Miko's butt and legs.
• Human Disguise:
  • All hostile or even neutral ghosts can be more or less humanoid but look clearly inhuman, which means at least Miko can identify them at first glance.. until she has an encounter with a ghost that has the appearance of a completely normal living child and uses that to find out that she can see him and then attacks her.
  • In Chapter 39, Miko is the only one who can see that the New Transfer Student has a spirit attached to her.
• Interrupted Suicide: In chapter 30, it turns out the boy Hana met really was going to throw himself in the river, but Hana helping him out and Shindou giving him a pep talk convinces him not to go through with it.
• I See Dead People: Miko inexplicably gains the powers to see strange ghosts and monsters wherever she goes.
• I See Them, Too: Chapter 12 introduces Yuria, a girl who can also see ghosts and spirits, though not as well as Miko. She declares Miko her rival after learning she (unwittingly) drove her mentor, the "Godmother of Downtown", to quit the fortune-telling business.
• Indirect Kiss: In Chapter 46, when the girls are eating donuts together, Michiru requests for Miko give her a part of her donut, particularly asking for the piece Miko already bit into and gestures for Miko to hand feed her. Hilariously, Miko had some difficulties feeding Michiru the donut since she can't see Michiru's human mouth under her ghost form, and smudges the donut on Michiru's face. After eating the donut piece, Michiru comments that she loved Miko's "donut". Afterwards, Michiru took a bite of her own donut and then stuff it into Miko's mouth as "payback", much to Miko's confusion.
• Invisible to Normals: Aside from Miko and a few others, all of the ghosts and spirits are completely imperceptible to normal people. Most of the Horror Comedy in the series involves Miko getting put into situations where she has to act normal around people while creepy ghosts are hanging around or interacting with them.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover:
  • In Chapter 4, Miko gives away a stray kitten to a man with the Face of a Thug who turns out to be this. Miko can see he's surrounded by kinder cat spirits, implied to be the ghosts of his previous cats. And in the end, he's shown happily taking care of the cat. And it's revealed the scars on his face are the result of the cats he takes care of.
  • Doubly Subverted with Touno Zen. He initially appears to be a cat killer because he is followed by freaky corpse-like cat spirits. However, it's revealed that Zen genuinely does love cats to the extent of getting hit by a car to save one. It was his abusive mother that was responsible for the cat spirits and a separate man who's been killing cats.
• Lyrical Dissonance: The anime's opening and ending themes have a cheery and upbeat tune to them, but the lyrics of the former are actually about a terrified Miko essentially crying for help and not wanting to see any more of these creepy ghouls she keeps seeing almost every day, while the lyrics of the ending are in the ghosts' point of view, telling the viewer how much they want to haunt them and have them look at them for sinister reasons.
• Madness Mantra: In chapter 13, Miko encounters a ghost muttering the words "Four... six... three... one..." over and over. It turns out to be the ghost of an old woman's husband, trying to remind her of the combination to his old safe.
• Magnetic Medium: Central to the plot. Once Miko started seeing spirits, she's only started seeing more and more as time goes on. Though one chapter implies that it's actually Hana the ghosts are attracted to even though she cannot see them herself.
• Masquerade: Miko does her best to keep her ability to see spirits a secret.
• Meaningful Name: The main character is named Miko, as in, the word for a Shinto priestess believed to possess spiritual powers. Miko does possess the power to see spirits, but is otherwise an Ordinary High-School Student.
• Metamorphosis Monster: In Chapter 10, a Humanoid Abomination ghost sticks to Hana, consuming smaller spirits that try to cling to her. It seems to be using her as a living barbecue grill, roasting the smaller spirits on her aura before eating them. When she enters the haunted building, the ghost gorges itself upon numerous lesser ghosts, and by the time Miko meets Hana, it's become a borderline Eldritch Abomination.
• Mood Whiplash: The anime's OP and ED intentionally invoke this, especially the ED with a peppy poppy song and vivid, colorful backgrounds behind the main characters, contrasting with the grotesquery of the ghosts that pop up, superimposed and screaming randomly through the song.
• More Powered Protégé: Mitsue the fortune-teller begins to mentor Miko when she realizes the strength of Miko's connection to the spirits. Mitsue's Protective Charms are too weak for the entities troubling Miko and her Supernatural Sensitivity can't even perceive the more powerful beings that Miko can, but she has the benefit of decades of experience.
• Nightmare Face: Most ghosts have horrific, twisted visages. You're lucky if it's the only part of their anatomy that's grotesque.
• Nonverbal Miscommunication: In chapter 14, Miko winks at Yuria to indicate they should give up trying to get through the haunted tunnel. Yuria thinks that Miko wants her to show what she can do.
• Not-So-Phony Psychic:
  • In chapter 6, Miko goes to Mitsue Takeda, the "Godmother of Downtown" for help with her ghost problem. Mitsue seems like an old fraud who's just looking to make money, but she does have enough genuine psychic ability to see the presence haunting Miko.
  • In chapter 25, the mystery man from the end of the last chapter turns out to be Shindou Romm, a huckster who tries to sell "power stones" to Hana and Miko for 500 dollars each. Even though both girls are convinced Shindou is involved in some kind of pyramid scheme, the stones turn out to be very effective at warding off ghosts.
• Not What It Looks Like: In chapter 7, Miko's younger brother Kyousuke becomes convinced that his sister's weird behavior is because she has a boyfriend who's taking advantage of her.
• Old School Building: While Miko's school is not old or decaying, it still fits to the T the trope of the "haunted school" typical of Japanese creepy stories. The building has been showed to be filled with ghosts: the spirit of a student saying "Good morning" to everyone, the lustful ghost of a sexual harasser, haunts in the girls toilets and on the running field... Plus, there are several ghosts attached to the teachers, ranging from protective to very dangerous.
• Once More, with Clarity: Episode 4's stinger replays a scene from earlier in the episode, this time showing all the apparitions in the scenes of the TV show she and her brother are watching.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: The creatures Miko encounters come in all shapes and sizes, some of them almost human and others horribly twisted parodies of humanity.
• Parting-Words Regret: Chapter 9 implies shortly before the death of Miko's father, she had an argument with him over eating a seasonal chestnut pudding cup she'd bought for herself.
• Peeve Goblins: In chapter 24, Miko's trip to the movies is interrupted by a spirit... fortunately, it seems to be one who limits itself to shorting out the phones and cameras of people who try to pirate the movie.
• Post Modern Magick: In chapter 34, Romm uses music played on his cell phone to ward off some restless spirits... namely, "Painkiller" by Judas Priest.
• Pun-Based Title: The title "Mieruko" is a pun made from the Japanese words for "Able to see" and "Kid". It also sounds similar to the protagonist's name, Miko, who can see ghosts.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The two ghastly priestesses of the "God of the Mountain" are implied to be this, despite looking identical otherwise. One always expresses herself with ugly snarls, and the other just limits herself with a dark glower.
• Refusal of the Call: Rather than try and reach out to the creatures and ghosts she sees, Miko does her level best to ignore them and get on with her everyday life especially since she lacks ways to exorcise them.
• Right on Queue: A variant. Miko, distracted by her phone, joins what she thinks is the queue for the bakery. A moment later, Hana calls her, making her realize it's actually a queue of ghosts, lining up to be devoured by a larger being. What this means for those devoured remains unexplained, especially since the queue comes back in Chapter 13, where the ghost whose goal had just been met is seen being eaten.
• Rule of Three: The fox god (rather cryptically) promises to protect Miko from evil spirits three times. She accidentally uses two before understanding what’s going on. She intentionally uses her third to destroy the spirit of Toono Zen’s abusive mother.
• Sand In My Eyes: Miko's excuse when Hana asked her why she's crying after a giant spider ghost suddenly appeared behind her is "A beetle flew into my eye".
• Sanity Strengthening: On her way back from shopping, Miko realizes that one of the figures she's seeing is actually a diminutive older woman, who's very clearly suffering from Alzheimer's. Guiding her back home, she notes a ghost keeps muttering a series of numbers nearby, and uses her phone to write them down. When the elderly lady sees the numbers, she dashes inside her house, to the annoyance of her daughter, and reaches for her husband's safe, using the numbers the ghost mentioned to unlock it. Inside, she finds a comb of great sentimental value - the mere act of putting it on immediately brings her back to lucidity, to her daughter's astonishment.
• Shinigami: Several otherwordly entities seem to fill this role, or at least to enforce the rules of death in this world. There are multiple huge beings whose entire purpose is to devour the ghosts of the dead who are ready to leave this earth, and one of those "waiting lines" is overseen by a maître d'-like spirit with a horse skull for a head (and under his tuxedo, enormous tentacles to rip apart ghosts that try to get into a different devouring maw than the one they've apparently been assigned). There is an ax-wielding spirit who roams the subway, hunting down ghosts that hide into the living, and once he catches them he puts them in a bag for some unknown purpose. And in Chapter 43, after narrowly avoiding getting hit by a truck, Miko briefly sees a sickle-wielding man who looks to have been a Grim Reaper (and the ironic thing is that he looked much more human than most of the series' ghosts).
  • Chapter 45 reveals that the wheelchair-pushing monstrous spirit from the hospital is yet another psychopomp, come to help a family pass on the afterlife. Chapter 44's spidery "hand collector", who decapitates hand-headed ghosts with a giant pair of scissors and collects the heads in a bag, might also be one; it encounters the wheelchair pusher while packing up its latest claim and seemingly points it in the direction of the old man it's expecting.
• Shout-Out:
  • In Chapter 32 Yuria takes part in a haunted-site tour organized by Shindou Romm. One of the locations is an allegedly haunted house where a father killed his family and then committed suicide and all who enter fall victim to a curse. It's an obvious shout-out to the Ju-on series, with several participants even pretending to hear a cat or see a pale child and a woman on all fours.
  • In one of the bonus mini-chapters, Miko watches a horror movie where a female ghost appears out of a fridge. It is very likely a reference to a 2004 Japanese horror movie known as Cursed in English and Chô kowai hanashi A: yami no karasu in Japanese, where a malevolent female ghost enters the room where her victim is by crawling out of his fridge.
  • On Miko & Hana's first visit to the forest shrine, Hana babbles about how much the environment reminds her of Studio Mibli films.
  • After sealing himself away to guard the bell ghost, Rom seems to have taken to livestreaming Dead by Daylight and even has a figure in his room.
  • The wheelchar-pushing ghost from the hospital reenact the Full Moon Silhouette from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when he escorted Mr. Sasaki and his family.
  • The hand-headed ghosts standing immobile in the hallway of the hospital seem to be a reference to the Nurses scene from the movie Silent Hill. In fact, the entire hospital arc seems to be an homage to the Silent Hill monsters.
• Sigil Spam: Miko and Hana buys from two fashion brands almost exclusively: A cyclops for Miko, Ramda Rabbit for Hana.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To Re-Kan!. Not only do both works have the exact same premise, but Miko, Hana, & Yuria are strongly reminiscent of Hibiki, Makoto, & Narumi.^note  A dark-haired medium with a hime cut, a space case with a light orange pixie cut, and a blonde, pigtailed tsundere, respectively. However, Re-Kan is a bright and cheerful story about a sunny, gentle Yamato Nadeshiko who bends over backwards to help the quirky wayward souls who come to her for help, whereas Mieruko-Chan is about a girl who tries her hardest not to notice the horrifying abominations that might just brutally murder her if she slips up.
• Spooky Photographs: Whenever Hana takes a picture, Miko sees a ghost in it. Miko thinks this is Hana's true talent for photography.
• Spy Speak: In chapter 28, Mitsue refers to the spirits as "mosquitoes" to keep any muggles from overhearing their conversation.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Miko has them.
• Tears of Fear: The sight of Miko's face with tears in her eyes after witnessing a horrifying ghost is a recurring image throughout the manga. It even shows up in multiple volume covers.
• To Be Lawful or Good: In chapter 21, Miko tries to catch Toono-sensei in the act so she can report him to the police, but she can't bring herself to let an innocent cat be harmed.
• Twist Ending: Chapter 9 ends with the reveal that Miko's father is a ghost, too.
• Ugly Cute: Miko holds this In-Universe opinion of the little old men spirits that pick up her lost change, only because they're not as freaky as the other ghosts that she's encountered. She changes her tune very quickly once she stumbles onto the spirit that spawns them.
• Undead Abomination: Many of the more horrifying/powerful spirits seem to count as this.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Miko deals with the ghosts she sees by not reacting to them, and they only seem to have any effect on her if she would acknowledge them.
• Weirdness Magnet: An unwitting one. Hana has such an intense aura that enormous quantities of spirits are attracted to her, but she can't see the chaos that occurs in the spirit world as a result.
• Wham Line:
  • Chapter 9: “I’m not sure how I feel about seeing my dad’s ghost.”
  • In chapter 24, Mitsue is called back into action when she gets a picture of Miko and Hana at the shrine from chapter 11, but according to Mitsue, "That shrine doesn't exist."
  • In chapter 33, Shige, a minor character who operates the shoe store next to Mitsue's shop, casually lays one on her after she returned from a brief absence. "Did anything happen while I was away?" "Oh, there was one thing.I died."
• Wham Shot:
  • In chapter 16, Miko is shocked to see a familiar face serving as her substitute: Toono Zen, the guy surrounded by creepy spirits last seen in chapter 4.
  • At the end of chapter 24, we see a mysterious man watching Miko and Hana leave the theater, and it's implied he can see spirits as well.
  • The ending of chapter 28 implies that Shindou and Mitsue have some history.
  • Chapter 32 shows a young Shindou Romm at the shrine, meeting the two gods.
  • In Chapter 39, Miko tries to ignore a new ghost at her school and she finds that not only it is solid but it has a human form that everyone else can see, believing that she is just a New Transfer Student named Michiru Ichijou. It turns out that she is a living human, but Miko is not sure for a while as she only can see the tentacled form that covers her.
  • Chapter 45 ends with a ghost attacking Miko being skewered by the tentacles of Michiru with the implication that she currently hides under Miko's hospital bed.
• When She Smiles: In Chapter 18, Miko's time in the haunted house attraction gives her the rare opportunity to actually scream at the ghosts terrifying her in the guise of reacting to the haunted house's scares. Because of this catharsis by the end of the chapter, she is able to genuinely smile for the first time in the series. The manga even describes her expression as the "Beaming Face of Utter Satisfaction".

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Can you see me?