Muraki, Kazutaka

邑輝一貴

Kazutaka Muraki serves as the main antagonist in Yami no Matsuei. His angelic looks and traits stand in contrast to his cruel nature. Muraki's psychological issues seem to have started in childhood, involving his mother and his half-brother Saki. Muraki's mother collected dolls, and she is depicted as treating him as if he were a doll as well. Muraki's affection for dolls and his habit of collecting them is a recurring motif in the manga and anime, mirroring how he treats real people. In the anime, it is implied that Saki killed Muraki's parents while they were still children and also intended to kill him. However, in the manga, Saki's role is unclear beyond disrupting Muraki's childhood, and Muraki identifies himself as his mother's killer.
Regardless of the details, Saki was shot by one of the family guards, and Muraki became fixated on resurrecting Saki so he could kill him personally. Therefore, Muraki aims to use Tsuzuki's body to bring Saki back. This subplot is prominent in the final three episodes of the anime and in volumes 7 and 8 of the manga.
Muraki is a skilled manipulator, posing as a benevolent doctor who regrets his failure to save lives, while concealing his private life as a serial killer. Muraki undermines his good "Dr. Jekyll" image, contrasting himself with Pr. Satomi in the Kyoto Arc, episode 12.[1]
As a serial killer, Muraki has many victims, the most notable being Hisoka Kurosaki. After stripping the thirteen-year-old Hisoka naked, Muraki placed a curse on him. The curse, which was untraceable—partly because Muraki erased Hisoka's memory of the incident—mimicked a terminal illness, and Hisoka suffered in a hospital for three years before eventually dying. Later, when Hisoka becomes a shinigami, Muraki forces the boy to remember the night he was cursed.
Throughout the story, Muraki manipulates the souls of the dead, often killing people himself, hoping to attract the attention of the Shinigami, specifically Tsuzuki. He is obsessed with Tsuzuki's body, both carnally and scientifically. In the manga, Muraki's desires are explicit, but the anime had to censor such extremes, so Muraki's advances toward Tsuzuki were portrayed as hints of sexual harassment. Later in the anime, it is revealed that Muraki wants Tsuzuki's body to revive his half-brother.
A respected physician, Muraki has many connections across Japan among powerful patrons, but in the anime and manga, he is mostly seen with his close friend Oriya and his former teacher, Professor Satomi. Muraki also has a childhood sweetheart named Ukyou, but little is known about her, except that she seems to attract evil spirits and that her health is poor.
Some readers believed that due to his heterochromia, he might be a guardian of one of the four gates of GenSouKai (see Wakaba Kannuki). However, in the King of Swords arc (volume three in the manga), a scene where Tsuzuki knocks out the fake eye reveals that Muraki's right eye is not real and is mechanical. The origin and nature of Muraki's supernatural abilities remain an enigma: he is human, he is alive (not a Shinigami), yet he raises a dead girl to be a zombie, seals and opens Hisoka's memory by mere touch, controls creature spirits similar to Shikigami, enters Meifu by himself and teleports Tsuzuki to another location.