Sun-bleached asphalt shimmers under a Karakura afternoon, and a fifteen-year-old with a permanent scowl kicks a flower vase back onto a ghost's grave. Ichigo Kurosaki has seen spirits for as long as he can remember — drifting chains, hollow eyes, the quiet dead who forgot how to move on. He tells the girl lingering there to hurry up to heaven before he heads home to a father who greets him with a kick to the face and two sisters who are also learning to see what should stay invisible. It is a strange life, but it is his. Then a black butterfly lands on his windowsill, and a woman in a black kimono steps through his bedroom wall.

Rukia Kuchiki is a Soul Reaper, a death god tasked with purifying Hollows — monstrous lost souls that devour both the living and the dead. She is precise, irritated, and utterly unprepared for a teenager who can kick her in the head. When a Hollow bigger than a truck descends on his home and his sisters scream, Rukia takes a wound meant for him and offers the only salvation left: her Zanpakutō driven through his chest. The transfer was supposed to be temporary, half her power lent to a vessel. Instead Ichigo absorbs nearly all of it and cleaves the Hollow in two with a blade taller than his own body. Rukia is stranded in a temporary human body, her punishment for the illegal act already crawling toward Karakura from the other side. Ichigo now hunts Hollows by night and conjugates verbs by day, a Substitute Soul Reaper standing at the threshold of worlds — and the executioner's sword is already aimed at the one who gave him the key.

Also known as: ブリーチ, Burīchi, BLEACH.