Or, if you please, “Dark Gathering: the Kindergarten Years”
Yeah, that basically tells you what’s going on: little purple-haired girl with supernatural mommy issues can see ghosts and, perhaps more importantly, fight them.
We see essentially three vignettes in this episode, which work together to get the teacher most responsible for Kaya, miss Chie, familiar with Kaya’s abilities and behavior that, due to most people not seeing ghosts and Kaya having been scorned for it in the past, com off to most folks as her being a problem student who gets in the way of her peers and who is occasionally destructive.
The first of these is a haunted swingset causing injury, where Chie manages to see the ghost just before Kaya punches it out, growing closer with her even as she alienates herself from other students.
The second has to do with some haunted books in the library. Kaya seals them with masking tape, and saves Chie when she understandably but unwisely tries to remove the tape from one, reading it in the process.
Finally, we get a haunted bathroom stall (perhaps the most classical of Japanese school hauntings) that entraps those who go inside, but that can still be opened from without. Here, Kaya actually saves a classmate, who is able to stick up for her, while Chie comes to Kaya’s aid and gets her out of punishment because she trusts that Kaya is, in fact, protecting people. Together, this essentially proves to her that not everyone is out to get her or ready to scorn her for what she does.
After this, we do get one little stinger: Kaya may be the strongest of all (kindergarten) psychics, but she still doesn’t dare enter her mother’s room, unable to fight the darkness that dwells within.
So far, the start is a little light on plot, but for the kind of story it is, that’s fine. I do hope that some of the vignettes last a little longer in the future, so we can build some extra suspense and enjoy more of the ghost punching. The monster designs are, like those in Dark Gathering and Mieruko-chan, creatively horrific, but they perhaps lean a little more into kid-safe blobs… not that dangerous monster ghosts are ever going to be totally “kid safe” as the West sees it.