Voice: Risa Taneda
A girl with Kagemi abilities. She became able to see "impossible things", like other people's memories and experiences, as well as the dead, after an accident in her past. Due to her fear of "seeing" these things, she is half-hearted in her interactions with others. She currently lives with Hisoka Kurosawa, the only person who understands her, at the shop she owns, carrying out Kagemi work.
Director's Comment
Zero: Nuregarasu no Miko is the story of Yuuri taking in the emotions of the dead using Mitori and ending up becoming a shrine maiden. I thought of shrine maidens as an intermediary between life and death, so Yuuri had to be someone who was drifting in the rift between life and death - between being alive and dead - and if she took a single step she would have to go one way or the other. We were particularly careful to give her a look in her eyes that made you feel how in the middle she is. Eyes that look like she could go somewhere far away; eyes that look as though she could be called to by death at any moment. Grief-stricken eyes at the reality of eventually dying alone.
Speaking of eyes, the story is also one of how Yuuri becomes able to cry. I had a definite intuition that, since it's a horror game themed around water, tears had to be shed at the end. The principal character becomes able to cry that one time. (The themes include water and boxes, so naturally she also had to get in the bath.)
I also wanted Yuuri's gaze to look as though she's a moment away from crying. I thought the gaze would be properly persuasive of the contradiction that whilst captivated by death she tries to save people; the contradiction that she is introverted but active. It was quite a tricky issue, but I think Yuuri's eyes worked well.
By the way, the surname "Kozukata" is an old name for Iwate. We have a story that we thought of as a continuation of Shisei no Koe, so I wanted to put in something tying to it, since it was set in Iwate. I also thought it was interesting in terms of searching for missing people ["Kozukata" meaning "does not return"].
You can see the lines of her body when her outfit gets et, so we based her concept on wearing a dress shirt with nothing underneath. I thought it would be best as clothing that makes you happy to get wet. Her clothes open from the front because I wanted them to match up with the Camera Obscura, which does the same.
A digression: in the initial planning stages Yuuri generally had black hair, that was meant to have a sort of sunset colour mixed in with it when it got wet and light bounced off it. It was hard to fine-tune, and even when it wasn't wet it would still look sunset-coloured, so the plan ended in failure. Incidentally, in the same manner Hisoka's was meant to be blue, Miu white, Rui green and Miku deep red, but these proposals failed also.