In the manga
Brown hair, black tie
- Hair — brown
- Tie — black
Written more plainly as a manipulative con artist. The framing is more critical of him.
Self-proclaimed
霊幻新隆
“The Greatest Psychic of the 21st Century”
Zero psychic ability. A pocket full of salt, a very good massage, and enough nerve to carry an entire exorcism business — and, somehow, the most important adult in a psychic kid’s life.
Fan-made tribute page. Not affiliated with the creators of Mob Psycho 100. All character artwork here — the portrait, the aura, the salt motifs — is original CSS / SVG drawn for this page. The photographic backdrops are CC0 / Unsplash-licensed stock textures, credited in the footer. No official Mob Psycho 100 images are used.
The paperwork behind the persona.
| Name | Reigen Arataka 霊幻新隆 |
|---|---|
| Age | 28–29 — sources differ |
| Birthday | October 10 |
| Height | 179 cm |
| Occupation | Owner and operator, Spirits and Such Consultation Office |
| Workplace | Spirits and Such Consultation Office — one small rented room |
| Affiliations | Mentor and employer to Mob (Shigeo Kageyama); works alongside Katsuya Serizawa |
| First appearance (manga) | Chapter 1 |
| First appearance (anime) | Season 1, Episode 1 — “Self-Proclaimed Psychic: Reigen Arataka ~And Mob~” (July 2016) |
| Japanese voice | Takahiro Sakurai |
| English voice | Chris Niosi |
Age is given as 28 by the series wiki and as 29 by MyAnimeList, so both are shown rather than one being picked. The height comes from MyAnimeList only; no second source was found for it.
A fraud, technically. A mentor, actually.
Reigen sells exorcisms he cannot perform. He has no psychic ability whatsoever — not a flicker — and he has built a whole small business on the confident opposite claim. His toolkit is salt, showmanship, a sharp read on people, and hands that genuinely know where the knot in your shoulder is.
The joke is that his clients still leave better off. What they usually walk in with is loneliness, stress, guilt or self-doubt, and Reigen — whatever he calls the ritual — actually listens, gives blunt practical advice, and sends them home lighter. The fake part is the ghost. The help is real.
Then a quiet middle-schooler named Shigeo Kageyama — Mob — walks in with powers that could level a building, and asks the con man for guidance. Reigen hires him. The money motive is obvious and he never quite pretends otherwise. But what he ends up giving Mob is the one thing no esper in the series can supply: the steady, unglamorous message that power is not the point.
Psychic powers, he tells Mob, are just another trait — like being fast, or good at exams. What makes a person worth something is how they treat people.
Before the office, there was a desk he could not stand.
He started out a salaryman at an ordinary company. Nothing paranormal, nothing spiritual — regular work at a regular firm. He quit because he was bored, and because he disliked the job.
Roughly four years before the story begins, he rented a small room and put a name on it: Spirits and Such Consultation Office. There was no plan behind it. He took the room more or less on impulse and started calling himself a psychic.
Then a middle-schooler turned up as a client, looking for help with powers he could not switch off. Reigen — who has no powers at all — took the job.
The business exists because a bored office worker walked out and rented a room. The most consequential thing he ever did was answer the door to a kid he could not possibly help in the way advertised.
Spirits and Such
Consultation Office
Six traits, pulling in different directions at once.
Charm, quick thinking and social footwork, deployed to convince paying clients that he is a powerful psychic.
Reads a room and a person fast, then adjusts his register to match. The same skill that makes him a good liar makes him a good counsellor.
Personable, verbally confident, entirely comfortable with an audience. Never met a silence he wouldn’t fill.
Started from self-interest and ended up genuinely invested in Mob’s safety, self-esteem and growing up okay.
Aims at the real problem — the stress, the loneliness, the self-doubt — even while performing a supernatural solution to it.
Vain, evasive, allergic to accountability. Still refuses to truly hurt a client or exploit a child. He learns humility the hard way.
The manga and the anime do not draw him the same way — and they do not quite write him the same way either. Both figures below are this page’s own drawing, recoloured.
In the manga
Written more plainly as a manipulative con artist. The framing is more critical of him.
In the anime
Warmer and more likeable. The bombast is toned down and the charm is pushed forward.
Left column: real, verifiable, unglamorous. Right column: the show.
Genuine
One entry below is canon: he has no psychic ability at all. The rest is this fan page’s own read on how good he is at things — the bars are a rough impression, not official stats.
Massage & acupressureExpert
Real acupoint work on shoulder and back tension. The most-used ability he owns.
Counselling & life adviceExpert
Unlicensed, unbilled, and frequently the actual product being sold.
PersuasionVery high
Talks his way into jobs, out of trouble, and around the truth.
Physical fitnessSurprising
No powers, but agile enough and smart enough about leverage to hold his own in a fight.
Psychic abilityNone
Zero. Not weak — absent. This is the one number on this page that is canon.
Theatre
Branded, named, and announced at volume. All of it is stagecraft for the client’s benefit.
Throw salt at the target while shouting an incantation. Purification, allegedly.
A punch, thrown with a salt-encrusted fist, for maximum visual drama.
A frightening name applied to what is, in fact, a very competent massage.
Editing the evil spirit out of the client’s photograph. On a computer. That is the whole technique.
Nothing in the right column works. Everything in the left column does.
The fraud gives the best advice in the series.
Listen. Just because you have these psychic powers and abilities, it doesn’t mean you’re any less of a human than anyone else. There are people who are fast, people who are book smart, and people with strong body odor. Psychic powers are just like that: another characteristic.
Being confident about your powers is fine, but you mustn’t get conceited. Depending on how we use our powers, they can also be deadly weapons. They’re just like knives.
In the end, you’re the one who’s going to get hurt. When things go south, it’s ok to run away and save yourself!
Your life is your own, and it’s up to you to live it exactly the way you want.
Your life is your own. It’s okay to run away!
The truth behind one’s charm is kindness.
Wording follows the English translations that circulate most widely. Public sources do not pin these lines to specific episodes or chapters, so no citation is given rather than a guessed one. Phrasing varies between subtitle and dub versions.
One office, several strays.
Employee · mentee · chosen family
The genuine psychic who works for the fake one. Reigen’s motive slides from “useful asset” to “this kid has to turn out okay,” and that shift is the spine of his whole character.
Colleague · deputy director
Hired during the rebuild and made deputy director of the office. Reigen cut his hair himself — a small nudge toward standing on his own. The habitual “Right, Serizawa?” is Reigen fishing for backup.
Uninvited
An evil spirit who tried to make Reigen his puppet. Reigen’s countermeasure was to pretend he could not see him. Their dynamic stays comedic friction, never alliance.
Mob’s brother
Reigen occasionally goes to him for help or an opinion, and — notably — treats him as an equal while doing it.
Rival, then not
A genuinely powerful esper who starts out clashing with Reigen and ends up respecting the man for the one thing he has that powers can’t buy.
Never actually hired
She was never taken on. She installed herself as unpaid secretary and simply kept turning up until it counted as a job. By the end the two of them needle each other like colleagues.
Client
Came to the office as a client with a friend and tested his credibility with a trick question. Reigen spotted Mob’s photo on his own “satisfied customers” board during the visit. No romantic angle on his side — he simply respected what she meant to Mob.
The first two are spoiler-free. Everything after is folded away — open only what you want to know.
Opening
Reigen meets Mob. The con-artist premise and the Spirits and Such office are laid out, and the mentor–apprentice arrangement that carries the series begins.
Mid-series
A run of client jobs and staged exorcisms. Reigen keeps the fraud running while getting steadily closer to Mob, tries his hand at expanding the business, and performs his named “techniques” with total conviction.
Separation
A public scandal and an online pile-on drive Reigen and Mob apart — the split following Reigen being dismissive about Mob’s social life. The press and public opinion turn on him and he ends up isolated and out of work. Stripped of the act, he has to look at how hollow his life had become without the kid in it, and how much of it he had been outsourcing to a fourteen-year-old.
Second season episodes six and seven are widely treated as his arc specifically rather than Mob’s.
Reunion & rebuild
Reigen and Mob reconcile. He reassesses how he has been living, brings Serizawa in as a stabilising presence, and puts Spirits and Such back together on healthier terms — choosing actual self-improvement over another, better lie. Still a bad boss. Visibly a caring one.
Finale
In the climactic confrontation Reigen is support, not spectacle. While fused with Mob’s power he briefly gains the ability to see spirits — borrowed, and temporary. He never acquires a power of his own. His arc resolves instead into something rarer in this genre: a stable, caring adult that Mob can actually rely on.
Arcs are listed in order of occurrence. Chapter ranges are not given, and the only episode range stated is the one sources agree on — season two, episodes six and seven.
Three things that happened outside the story itself.
Spin-off
Reigen: The Man With a MAX Spirituality Level of 131 — a one-volume anthology of short horror-comedy stories built around him. It ran on the MangaONE app from 19 March 2018, and Dark Horse Comics released the English edition on 15 December 2020.
Fandom
On MyAnimeList he is the most-favourited character in Mob Psycho 100 — ahead of Mob himself. No count is printed here on purpose: the number moves constantly, and anything committed to this page would be stale within the week.
Voice
Takahiro Sakurai, who voices him in Japanese, is a heavily awarded performer — the Overseas Fans Award at the 6th Seiyu Awards in 2012 and the Personality Award at the 16th in 2022, among others. Those awards belong to the actor, not to the character.