Character · Mob Psycho 100
Arataka Reigen
The greatest psychic of the twenty-first century, according to a business card he had printed himself.
In Otakana the clue reads: Con-man mentor with zero psychic power
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Mob Psycho 100
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Arataka Reigen runs Spirits and Such Consultation Office out of a small rented room and has no psychic ability whatsoever. He exorcises by rubbing salt around, waving his hands, and charging a flat fee. When an actual spirit turns up he sends in his part-time assistant, a middle schooler with more raw power than anyone in the city, and takes the credit at the front desk.
The con is real and so is the mentoring. Reigen is the only adult who tells Mob anything useful: that psychic powers are a talent like running fast, that they do not make him better than anyone, that you apologise when you are wrong. He also massages shoulders competently, gives blunt advice to lonely customers, and is very good at talking his way out of a room.
Season two puts him on television and takes the whole act apart, and the episode where he talks a hostile crowd down without a single trick is the one people remember. Takahiro Sakurai voices him in Japanese with the precise register of a man selling something. The joke of Mob Psycho is that the fraud is the best teacher in the show, and it is not really a joke.
Spelling REIGEN
REIGEN is the family name, and the game wants it rather than Arataka. Six letters built from two Japanese beats, rei and gen, so the EI pair is one sound and not two. Written 霊幻, the characters mean spirit and illusion, which is a fairly pointed name for a man with no powers. Keep the E in front of the I.