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 14 and took a backseat in raising her son. He has a reserved seat in the guidance counselor's office, and numerous other delinquents in the city are constantly trying to take him on. Yusuke is pretty fed up with his 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. When he arrives in the afterlife, he is informed that the child would have miraculously survived, and had it not been for him the child would have one less scratch on his right arm. His act of heroism, therefore, was "completely pointless". Yusuke's premature death was unexpected and unnecessary, and the afterlife was not prepared for his arrival. After numerous tests to gauge his worth, Yusuke is eventually revived, and is assigned to work for the Spirit World as a detective investigating demon 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.