Life After Death

For some reason or other, Tsuzuki eventually winds up working as a shinigami at Meifu (commonly termed as 'purgatory') at the department JuOhCho. The employees of Meifu are themselves a strange bunch. Given that their workplace is located in purgatory, it is possible that the prerequisites for becoming a shinigami is if the deceased in question has a high level of spiritual power, if they have some unfinished business in their previous life (such as Hisoka), or believe themselves guilty of a sin that cannot be absolved (such as Tsuzuki or Tatsumi).

In any case, Tsuzuki winds up working in the Second Division of the department, whose territory covers Kyushu. Over the course of the seventy years he has spent working in Meifu, Tsuzuki has had numerous partners (it is a rule for shinigami to work together in pairs), but none of them lasted long in this partnership, with most choosing to request for a transfer. Despite his happy and bubbly personality, Tsuzuki never really seemed to be able to let go of the guilt he carried back when he was alive, and this affected much of his business relationships with other people - Tatsumi especially (he had been Tsuzuki's third partner), wanted to protect Tsuzuki, but couldn't bear Tsuzuki's pain.

Despite this angst, Tsuzuki is a general klutz in the workplace. Many of the missions he has undertaken often winds up wrecking the greater part of Kyushu, overtaxing the department budget more than it already is. Tsuzuki is also notorious for being rather lazy in catching up to his paperwork, and compounded with the damages he causes, has much taken out of his paycheck, making him also the most underpaid employee of Meifu. Tsuzuki loves sweets and sake above all things, and has tried to wheedle treats out of many of his colleagues (particularly Tatsumi), with varying degrees of success.

Tsuzuki is currently the oldest employee in Meifu, having been there close to seventy years. Since Meifu can be assumed to be an established institution dating to ancient times and beyond, the question of what has happened to the other employees before Tsuzuki had even started work there can only be surmised. There is the possibility that these employees, having been able to work off what they perceived as their 'penance' for sins committed when they were alive, was able to transcend purgatory and finally enter heaven. The fact that Tsuzuki has been in Meifu the longest of anyone else to date, seem to hint at the magnitude of the sin he had committed that would warrant such a longer duration of time to do his 'penance' as a shinigami. Or - if a shinigami is able to finish his tenure as a death god and enter heaven only if HE himself is able to forgive himself for his sin / believes that he had done a long enough penance as punishment, this can indicate that Tsuzuki, despite seventy years of working in Meifu, has yet to absolve himself of whatever crime he had committed in his lifetime.

At the start of the manga and anime episodes, Tsuzuki is assigned to cover a sudden outbreak of 'vampire' murders appearing in the city, where victims are often found drained of blood. During this particular mission, he will come across two people who will play a pivotal role in his life: Dr. Muraki Kazutaka, a strange sadistic doctor with a vested interest in Tsuzuki and a penchant for taking life rathering than restoring it; and a young empath named Kurosaki Hisoka, the newest addition to Meifu, and Tsuzuki's new partner.