The first episode starts with a car accident and the narrator’s voice: "Yusuke Urameshi, 14 years old. He seems to be the hero of our story, but now, suddenly, he’s dead."

Confused, Yusuke’s ethereal spirit sees as an ambulance arrives, and one of the paramedics attends a little kid. The kid is crying but seems unharmed. Another paramedic checks Yusuke’s body and declare him dead.

Astonished, Yusuke tries to stop the paramedics from taking his body away, but no one seems to see or hear him. When he tries to the one who closes the back door of the anbulance, his punch goes right through the paramedic's body.

Trying to make sense of the situation, Yusuke starts to remember the previous events of the morning. He went to school after skipping classes for 10 days in a row, but he ended up hiding on the roof, bored. His childhood friend, Keiko Yukimura, found him and chides him for his idleness. His answer was lifting her skirt and making some naughty comments about her panties, for which he received a violent punch in return.

As she left the roof, two of Keiko’s friends approached her, worried about Urameshi’s "bad boy" reputation, but Keiko dismissed their fears, telling them that Yusuke, if harsh and unpolite, is harmless and has very few friends (not the gang of bullies the two girls suspected).

After that, Yusuke surprised two boys planning to use his bad reputation to scare their schoolmates into giving them money, but before he could teach them a proper lesson, one of the teachers, Iwamoto-sensei, caught him and accused him of stealing. Yusuke walked away, but was caught by yet another teacher, Takenaka-sensei, who scolded him for cutting classes.

Deeply annoyed, Yusuke went home and found his mother, Atsuko, waking up with a hangover. She scolded him too, claiming that if he won’t go to school, he should drop it entirely, so she won’t have to pay for it anymore. Furious, Yusuke left again and was ambushed by Kazuma Kuwabara, his old school rival, and his gang. Yusuke easily defeated Kuwabara, and that made him feel better. One of Kuwabara’s friends, Okubo, suggested that he should give up fighting Urameshi, since it was the 156^th time Kuwabara lost. But Kuwabara swore he would never give up.

Yusuke finally remembers having met the little kid playing with a ball next to a high-traffic street. He played with the kid for a while, making funny faces, then told him not to play with the ball there, next to the street. But the kid didn’t listen. As soon as Yusuke crossed the street, the kid went back to his play, until the ball ran to the middle of the street. Seeing a sports car racing madly in that direction, Yusuke jumped to shove the kid to safety, being hit by the car himself.

At last Yusuke realizes in despair that he died in that accident, and is currently a ghost.

But a laughing voice calls his attention. A blue-haired girl in a pink kimono and sitting on an oar is levitating right behind him. She introduces herself as Botan, the guide who orients the journey through the Styx River — the goddess of Death, to western concepts. She reads in the book of Enma-daiou that Yusuke is an arrogant, brutal, selfish and dumb human.

She tells him that Reikai – the Spiritual Word — didn't expect his death, since no one predicted that a selfish boy like Yusuke would sacrifice himself to save a little kid. She also tells him that the kid was destined to survive the accident without any bruises – so in truth, Yusuke died in vain. So a trial for resurrection is offered to him.

But Yusuke thinks everyone is better without him and refuses the offer. Botan then suggests that he should wait and watch his own funeral before refusing it. At the ceremony, he sees Keiko, Atsuko and even Takenaka-sensei crying for him.

Kuwabara comes to the funeral as well, yelling hysterically at Yusuke, demanding a new fight. He has to be hauled away by his friends.

The little kid that Yusuke had saved is brought by his mother to pray. The kid doesn't quite understand the ceremony, thinking Yusuke is only sleeping in the coffin. He tells his mother that he likes Yusuke and wants to play with him again when he wakes up.

Touched by those moving responses to his demise, Yusuke tells Botan he accepts to go through the trial. She takes him to Reikai.