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This page is for Touhou characters who debuted in Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View.
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    Aya Shameimaru 
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/th09ayashameimaru.png

Traditional Fantasy Reporter
Aya Shameimaru

"Now then, time for a news story!"

One of the crow tengu who live up on Youkai Mountain, Aya runs the newspaper known as the Bunbunmaru. A shameless reporter notorious for her often salacious articles on various people, and is always looking for a new story to publicize. While she is strong, to the point that sometimes she accidentally wins fights when she was really just trying to take pictures for her newspaper, she prefers to work on her paper far more than fighting.

She technically first appears in Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red, which came out a few days before Phantasmagoria of Flower View, though she's put here as this is her first official appearance. This makes her the first character to be introduced in an artbook before showing up in game.


  • A Day in the Limelight: She's the star of the 'Bunkachou' games Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler, as well as Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red and Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia, which feature articles written by Aya for her newspaper. She's also a playable character in Hidden Star in Four Seasons.
  • Almighty Janitor: She's an extremely powerful and old youkai, but her day job is merely being a reporter and due to the rigid tengu caste system she can't really advance in rank in tengu society.
  • Bad Liar: She tries to lie to Hecatia that she only writes about the truth, which she doesn't buy.
  • Beware the Silly Ones:
    • With her polite, humble way of speaking and apparently trivial motives, it's easy to forget that Aya is over a thousand years old and one of the stronger named characters in the series.
    • In Forbidden Scrollery when she easily silences Kosuzu after she freaks out upon Aya revealing her true identity as a tengu, there's an unspoken but present implication that if Aya so desired she could've easily killed Kosuzu before she even had a chance to react.
  • Bifauxnen: She dresses as a paperboy as part of a disguise in Forbidden Scrollery to try and move among the humans without drawing attention to herself.
  • Blow You Away: As a crow tengu, she has the traditional fan and the wind power to match.
  • Camera Fiend: A decidedly less than pleasant example, as her subjects most often end up in unflattering news articles.
  • Catchphrase: "Ayayayaya!"
  • Characterization Marches On: One of the most dramatic cases in the series. Aya in her early appearances was portrayed as mildly incompetent but otherwise fairly benign Tengu reporter unaware of how her work came off to others, and who characters treated as merely a harmless nuisance. Subsequent works however would instead gradually make her much more competent and intelligent, with her bad reputation instead being wilful choices to manipulate the truth for publicity and control of information, making her come off instead as a sleazy and corrupt Immoral Journalist. This can be seen best in her interactions with Reimu; while their interaction in Bohemian Archive in Red just had Reimu get mildly annoyed at Aya's behaviour, the stage review in Strange Creators sees Reimu outright contemplate killing her.
    Reimu: Nothing good happens whenever I run across her, but even when I don't, she's making toxic paper, so maybe I should destroy her soon.
  • Depending on the Artist: Aya's crow wings appear in most official media by other artists, but not in ZUN's art.
  • Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Aya is drawn with normal ears in early appearances, most clearly in her fighting game appearances. Double Spoiler was the first game to give her Pointy Ears, and this would be the standard after that point for all the Tengu.
  • Everybody Hates Mathematics: She shows in Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red that, while Ran Yakumo may enjoy doing math in her spare time, not everyone in Gensokyo shares her enthusiasm for the subject.
    Ran: Here, an equation of a thousand expressions.
    Aya: Ack!
    Ran: And here is the proof.
    Aya: Ughhhhh.
  • Excuse Me While I Multitask: Her walking animation in the fighting games has her taking notes on her notepad while she walks. In the middle of a spell card duel. She doesn't waste any time in preparing her articles, it seems.
  • Fastest Thing Alive: Considered to be the fastest sustained flier in all of Gensokyo.
  • First-Person Snapshooter: In this case, taking photos of your enemies defeats them - or so it seems, judging by aforementioned spinoff games.
  • Hypocrite: As Hecatia points out, Aya continually claims to be presenting "the truth" in her line of work while ultimately just writing whatever benefits her, facts be damned.
  • Iconic Sequel Character: Aya's one of the most commonly recurring characters in the franchise, but didn't appear until after the end of the original Windows trilogy of games.
  • I Let You Win: This is what her profile says about her fight with the player characters in Mountain of Faith, as letting intruders gain access to the mountain without a fight would be suspicious.
  • Immoral Journalist: To say Aya is lacking in journalistic ethics is an understatement. In Lotus Eaters, she outright states that Reimu being beaten by a wayward spirit would be better, just because she'd have a more interesting story to publicize.
  • Intrepid Reporter: Goes around taking pictures and doing interviews for her articles.
  • Japanese Politeness: One of the few characters who actually behaves like this - Aya speaks in a polite, professional manner even while she's being pushy, and prefers statements like "Ah, that would be a bit..." rather than outright saying no. According to Akyuu all old and powerful youkai tend to be polite, but most such characters are less humble and come across closer to Affably Evil than this trope. It probably has something to do with the tengus' elaborate social structure compared to other youkai.
  • Leitmotif: "Wind God Girl," as well as "Youkai Mountain ~ Mysterious Mountain."
  • Lost in Translation: The name of her newspaper, Bunbunmaru, translates roughly as "Sentence Sentence Period" but is also a Pun on her own name and catchphrase ("Bun" can also be read as "Aya"), and is pronounced the same as the nickname of baseball player Takahiro Ikeyama (equivalent to "Old Two-Strikes").
  • Manipulative Bitch: Uses Reimu's official position of neutrality towards political affairs in Gensokyo to sell newspapers at Suzunaan in Forbidden Scrollery, since much to the shrine maiden's chagrin it prevents her from being able to interfere.
  • Mirror Match: Eiki uses her magic mirror to invoke this in Shoot the Bullet by having Aya fight herself.
  • Never Gets Drunk: In Chapter 8 of Lotus Eaters, Aya drinks several liters worth of sake while visiting Geidontei and doesn't even get mildly tipsy. Only the oni sake in Chapter 10 manages to majorly affect her, and she still doesn't pass out.
  • Nigh-Invulnerability: Illusionary Dominance is a survival spell, and consists of Aya moving so quickly she is completely impossible to land a hit on. Notable in being one of only two times in the entire franchise for a survival spell to not be on a Final Boss or Extra Boss. However, the spellcard does have a rather short time limit, although this could be in part due to Aya saying she'll hold back beforehand and that she's only fighting at all due to orders.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: Despite the fact that she and Momiji do not get along, Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia reveals that both resent the fact that despite their loyalty and hard work for Lord Tenma and the other greater tengu, they're both stuck in their respective castes.
  • Old Shame: In-universe. It's revealed at the end of Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia that she decided not to publish the book because she regretted altering the context of her stories for the sake of entertainment (alongside the fact she was worried about Sagume's capabilities to manipulate the book into becoming reality). It's later revealed in a chapter of Forbidden Scrollery that she straight up banned its publication altogether.
  • Pointy Ears: Revealed to have pointy ears in the artwork for Double Spoiler as well as in Forbidden Scrollery.
  • Politically Incorrect Hero: Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia shows Aya to be surprisingly xenophobic, with her articles being littered with lies and half-truths designed to turn people against "outside" influences on Gensokyo. Some of this is down to her imitating news publications from the Outside World, but her interview with Hecatia shows part of it is her own genuine beliefs as well, something Hecatia more than happily calls her out on.
  • Punch-Clock Villain: In Mountain of Faith, Aya claims that she's only fighting the Player Character because she was ordered to (given her past experience with them), and won't really try too hard to win.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: She's a formidable fighter with red eyes.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: With Hatate. Aya's the blue oni, having a much more dignified manner of speech and taking her reporting much more seriously. She is also older and more mature than Hatate.
  • Signature Headgear: Like any self-respecting tengu, she wears a tokin. Forbidden Scrollery also has her complement her "paperboy disguise" with a matching newsboy cap. Said manga practically lampshades the tokin as the signature headwear of the tengu by having Aya's entire dramatic reveal of her race to Kosozu consist of switching out the cap for the tokin and cheerfully announcing "I'm a tengu! Surprise!"
  • Spell My Name With An S: K-S Romanization of her last name - "Syameimaru".
  • Springtime for Hitler: She's strong enough that she'll sometimes beat the person she's interviewing in the midst of combat completely by accident.
  • Super-Speed: Easily one of the faster individuals in Gensokyo, definitely the fastest, along with Hatate, as far as average speed goes. Special note goes to her survival spell; Illusionary Dominance, which has Aya move so fast she simply cannot by hit by any means, even by massive area attacks like the Master Spark.
  • Tengu: She's a crow tengu.
  • Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Alternative Facts in Eastern-Utopia has Aya at her absolute worst, putting together a magazine filled with xenophobic fear-mongering and outright fabricated information all in the name of attention. Though she does come around at the end after being called out by Hecatia, ultimately choosing not to publish the book as a result.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Admits to playing fast and loose with the truth when it suits her needs. Also her comments about Nitori make no sense unless we invoke this.
  • Unwitting Pawn: Towards the end of Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia, Hecatia brings up the possibility that Sagume used her powers to make Aya into an unwitting sleeper agent for the Lunarians' larger designs on Gensokyo. While the exact validity of this is never confirmed, the possibility is disturbing enough that it becomes the primary reason Aya cancels the magazines publication.
  • Winged Humanoid: Inconsistently shown with and without crow wings in official works, but has yet to be seen with wings in any of the games. Forbidden Scrollery however shows that she can hide and show them at will.

    Medicine Melancholy 
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/th09medicinemelancholy.png

Little Sweet Poison
Medicine Melancholy

"You must be happy. You can die surrounded by poison."

A doll that has come to life as a youkai, she works hard for the emancipation of all dolls. Unfortunately, most dolls are unable to live as she can. She has the power to control various kinds of poison, allegedly due to the fact she was discarded on the Hill of the Nameless in the middle of a field of poisonous lily-of-the-valley flowers.


  • Ax-Crazy: A genocidal Creepy Doll who wants to Kill All Humans.
  • Bad Powers, Bad People: Played absolutely straight. She controls poison and is a genocidal maniac who rambles about how humans should all die and has no problem killing everyone who stumbles into her field.
  • Character Development: Is one of the few characters whose lecture from Eiki actually sticks, as she ends up making friends with Eirin and Reisen in an attempt to understand other people.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Bar a background appearence in Hopeless Masquerade, she to date hasn't made an appearance in an official work since 2006.
  • Creepy Doll: She's a sentient doll and easily one of the creepiest characters in the entire series.
  • Fantastic Racism: She harbors a fierce hatred towards humans, and will happily experiment her poisons on them.
  • Insane Troll Logic: Most of her pseudo-philosophical ramblings are this. Especially in Reisen's scenario, where she claims that (human) bodies are vulnerable to poison because they are made of poison.
  • Leitmotif: "Poison Body ~ Forsaken Doll."
  • Living Toys: She's a doll that gained sentience. It is likely the little doll that follows her around is the real Medicine and the big doll is an external body projection.
  • Madness Mantra: Given the chance, she'll lapse into rambles about poisons and their effects.
  • Master Poisoner: Mainly relies on flower-based toxins. In-game this manifests as poison clouds that slow the opponent down, making her one of the worst characters to be against.
  • Nonindicative Name: She is... somewhat less than medicinal. Although, as she notes herself, many poisons can be medicine in small concentrations. One could also say she gives humans a taste of their own medicine.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: Eiki points out during her lecture that Medicine's lack of experience regarding the world outside her flower field makes her no different than more small-minded humans.
  • Poisonous Person: Her body is permanently coated with a cocktail of poisons.
  • Power Incontinence: Can't really control her poisons, which makes her go all out even if she doesn't necessarily want to.
  • Shout-Out: Her name comes from the Ray Bradbury short story collection A Medicine For Melancholy, while her backstory is also similar to "Rappaccini's Daughter".
  • Vengeful Abandoned Toy: She was thrown away by her owner as a doll, which is implied to be the reason for her extreme hatred of humanity.

    Yuuka Kazami 
See our Touhou PC-98 page.

    Komachi Onozuka 
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/th09komachionozuka.png

Guide of the Sanzu River
Komachi Onozuka

"I won't show mercy if you're going to interrupt my laid-back work."

A shinigami whose job it is to ferry the souls of the dead across the Sanzu River to await judgment, using her power to manipulate distance to shorten the boat trip when needed. However, she's an incorrigible slacker, which ends up leading to the events of Phantasmagoria of Flower Viewnote  when the amount of dead souls overwhelms her and begin accumulating in the world of the living.


  • Berserk Button:
    • Her work ethic aside, she's often friendly to everyone she meets. But in her Scarlet Weather Rhapsody scenario, when Tenshi killed ghosts to alter the weather and defeated her fellow shinigami to feign immortality, Komachi put aside her role as a ferryman and gave the Celestial a good old-fashioned attitude adjustment.
      Komachi: "Not underestimating a shinigami would be in your best interest. Death comes even for the Celestials, you know?"
    • According to Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, not paying her right away will cause her to dump you into the Sanzu. In other words, she'll let you get horribly maimed by various sea life and deny you your afterlife for not paying immediately. Some fans interpret this as just a threat and not something she'll actually do, though.
    • Despite her laziness she takes her ferrying job seriously and if for any reason a soul goes missing she'll go to great lengths to find them. If any goes missing like say for example a certain celestial destroys them, then she'll get serious in stopping the perpetrator.
  • Beware the Nice Ones:
    • Despite being a shinigami, she's easily one of the nicer characters in the series. But, as explained above, messing with souls or the reincarnation cycle or is an easy way to get on her bad side.
    • Also, in Chapter 6 of Oriental Sacred Place, after looking for a Ksitigarbha (a small roadside statue that protects travellers from misfortune) that Marisa took and placed at the Hakurei Shrine, she gives her this not-so-subtle warning about what would happen if she doesn't return it:
      Komachi: "If you don't return it, Misfortune from Hell might come out and get you, you know. For example. Someone like... Me."
  • Brilliant, but Lazy: Scarlet Weather Rhapsody establishes that the Yamas put up with her constant slacking and irreverent attitude because when she bothers to do her job, she's hypercompetent to the point that any amount of trouble with her work ethic is worth keeping her around.
  • Bunny-Ears Lawyer: She's a greedy slacker with a possible drinking problem who loves having one-sided conversations with the souls she's ferrying. She's also the best damn shinigami there is.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: A slacker that barely manages to do her job... right up until someone decided to play around a little too far or messes with the cycle of reincarnation.
  • Cynical Mentor: Acts this way to Kasen in Wild and Horned Hermit.
  • Don't Fear the Reaper: Since taking people's souls isn't actually her job anyway.
  • The Dragon: She works under Eiki, but her boss wasn't initiating the problem in Phantasmagoria of Flower View. She does contribute somewhat, because she's such a slacker.
  • The Ferry Man: She has the role of Charon from Greek mythology — a ferryman whose duty is to guide souls to Higan, where they're judged.
  • Girlish Pigtails: The "two side up" variant, which fits with her easygoing personality.
  • Leitmotif: "Higan Retour ~ Riverside View".
  • Mighty Glacier: In the fighting games. Her scythe is slow but powerful, and has a large hitbox. Likewise her projectiles move very slowly but are hard to destroy, making them useful for blocking attacks or herding enemies towards her scythe.
  • Money to Throw Away: Literally, as she uses coin danmaku. Maybe that's why the Celestial Bureaucracy is always broke.
  • Nice Girl: As long as you don't piss her off, Komachi is a pretty good-natured gal.
  • Pet the Dog: The manga shows that while on the job Komachi is actually very polite and if anything else reassuring to souls of the recently deceased, she is shown calming down someone who had recently died telling the soul they are a good person and that they are not going to hell.
  • Pre-Final Boss: Is the penultimate boss of every route in Phantasmagoria of Flower View save for her own.
  • Shinigami: Although in Wild and Horned Hermit it's revealed that shinigami don't actually do the job of harvesting souls like you'd expect them to.
  • Shout-Out: Komachi's victory line against Patchouli mentions a book that kills the person whose name was written in it. It is also explicitly mentioned she can see lifespans.
  • Sinister Scythe: It's unique in that it somewhat resembles a ghost's tail. It's worth noting, though, that shinigami carry scythes not for use as weapons (though she uses it as such in the fighting games,) but to make it easier for recently deceased souls to understand that they are dead.
  • The Slacker: Spends most of her time napping and neglecting her shinigami duties.
  • Soul Power: Some of her attacks involve controlling floating souls, and presumably this is related to her job of ferrying souls.
  • Space Master:
    • Her power is "manipulation of distance", which she uses during her job to change the width of the Sanzu river according to the deceased's life, as well as in the fighting games, to trap the opponents on one spot so she can scythe and coin them to death.
    • In Chapter 48 of Wild and Horned Hermit, when she and Tenshi need to get inside Kasen's mansion, she uses her power over distance to expand the space between the seal and the door so that Tenshi can destroy it with the Sword of Hisou.
  • Spell My Name With An S: K-S Romanization of her last name — "Onoduka".
  • Tranquil Fury: When confronting Tenshi after having her aforementioned Berserk Button pushed, she appears to be as calm and carefree as always despite her anger. The second time however, not so much.

    Eiki Shiki 
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/th09shikieikiyamaxanadu.png

Highest Judge of The Court Of Paradise
Eiki Shiki, Yamaxanadu

"It looks like I still need to lecture you much more."

Komachi's boss and Gensokyo's resident judge of the dead. Unlike Komachi, she takes her work seriously, and is oftentimes lecturing her subordinate, as well as everyone else. She possesses the power to see everything in black and white, which leads her to be a bit moralistic, although she always means well. For reference, her given name is Eiki and her family name is Shiki, with the latter coming first in Japanese naming order, and Yamaxanadu is a job title.


  • Black-and-White Insanity: As the judge of the dead, she needs to be able to answer without hesitation whether someone is good or evil, and her power lets her do so. However, the series is ambiguous about whether gods deciding what is right and wrong is necessarily a good thing for mortals, as seen by Kasen questioning her judgment of immortal hermits.
  • The Bus Came Back: Her dream self appears in Violet Detector as a boss.
  • Catchphrase:
    • "Yes, you have [sinned] a little too much."
    • "This is the good deed you can do right now." following the advice she doles out in almost all of her victory quotes.
  • Character Filibuster: Due to her job, she gets to preach upon the character's faults, and this being Touhou, they tend to have a lot of them. One might suspect that she is basically ZUN's in-story speaker.
  • Celestial Bureaucracy: She's a judge in the "Ministry of Right and Wrong" which runs Heaven and Hell, assigned to a jurisdiction that includes Gensokyo.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Komachi states in Oriental Sacred Place she started out as a Ksitigarbha, a statue of a Buddha who pledged to remain in Hell saving sinners as long as they existed, and the gathering of belief (one of the greatest sources of power in Gensokyo) turned her into a true deity.
  • Compassionate Critic: While she certainly seems to want people to be good, her preferred method of encouraging this is to point out all their flaws in great detail. This is apparently a trait of all Yama.
  • Corrective Lecture: Eiki tends to express her disapproval of other character's actions in the form of a lecture.
  • Depending on the Artist: Infamously so. Eiki's depiction varies from artist to artist across various material, going from "As tall as Komachi" to a a full-blown Token Mini-Moe.
  • Enemy Without: Her Cleansed Crystal Mirror reveals all the sins of the one who looks into it. In Shoot the Bullet she uses it on Aya, which is represented by Aya having to fight a duplicate of herself.
  • Fashionable Asymmetry: Her hair is longer on one side than the other. She also has different ribbons on either side.
  • Final Boss: The last boss of most Phantasmagoria of Flower View routes, save for her own. Interestingly she has nothing to do with the incident. If anything she helps in resolving it by dragging Komachi back to work. The characters only fight her because she starts giving a lot of unwanted lectures.
  • Hat of Authority: Her hat is remarkably ornate, even for a series where almost everyone has nice headgear. It's based on Enma/the Yama's iconic judge's cap and by extension reflects her ranking as a celestial judge.
  • Judgement of the Dead: Her job is judging Gensokyo's dead and determining where they'll go when they die.
  • Lawman Baton: Her Rod of Remorse fills much this role, literally striking with the weight of its target's sins. Also overlaps somewhat with Staff of Authority.
  • Leitmotif: "Eastern Judgement in the Sixtieth Year ~ Fate of Sixty Years."
  • Little Miss Badass: Yukari, who is likely one of the strongest beings in Gensokyo, said that if Eiki were serious she would not stand a chance against her even with both Yuyuko and Reimu backing her up. Admittedly, the context could suggest that she was talking about a verbal conflict.
  • Psychopomp: Guides souls to the afterlife.
  • Spell My Name With An S: K-S Romanization of her name - "Sikieiki". Which is also misleading in that it's really supposed to be two separate names: her surname is Shiki and her given name is Eiki. While the Si/Shi confusion has been cleared up, the combining of her two names into "Shikieiki" is something that's stubbornly wormed its way into the English speaking fandom and still hasn't completely gone away.
  • Super-Strength: The Rod of Remorse that Eiki holds takes on the weight of a person's sins. But no matter who she faces, the rod is never so heavy that Eiki cannot hold it up. She is the Highest Judge of Paradise, after all.
    • Alternatively, it may be that it's only heavy to the sinner. So to Eiki, who by job description would be nearly sinless, the rod would be feather-light.
  • Talking the Monster to Death: Judging by how everyone seems to try to avoid her lectures, it must feel like this trope for failing to avoid her.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: She calls everyone out, mainly out of concern that everyone's going to go to Hell or worse if they don't change their ways right now.
  • Willfully Weak: Being as bound to the rules of the Celestial Bureaucracy as she is, Eiki would never use the full power of her position on the living.

Alternative Title(s): Phantasmagoria Of Flower View, Touhou Phantasmagoria Of Flower View, Touhou Bunkachou Shoot The Bullet, Shoot The Bullet

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