Kataribe Tsumugu

Kataribe Tsumugu (Japanese: 語部紡) is a Japanese female VTuber with NIJISANJI, the virtual liver agency run by ANYCOLOR. She debuted in January 2019 and is best known for going inactive after only three livestreams. She stayed on the agency's roster through a silence of about seven and a half years and then returned to streaming in August 2026.

Profile

Item	Detail
Debut	January 2019
Birthday	August 15
Age (character)	18
Agency	NIJISANJI (ANYCOLOR)
Debut group	Debuted with Onomachi Haruka and Seto Miyako
Character designer	Maki Hitsuji

Career

Kataribe Tsumugu passed a character-specific audition held by NIJISANJI. She was one of the members who joined after the agency's groups were merged. Her YouTube channel was created on January 22, 2019. On January 28, 2019, she posted her first tweet showing her model, along with an introduction. Sources disagree slightly on her exact debut date: some give January 30, 2019, and others give January 31, 2019, for her first stream on her own channel. During that first broadcast she said she had already died and was active as a ghost.

She held only two more livestreams after her debut: a chat stream on February 6, 2019, and a game stream on February 16, 2019. After that she stopped broadcasting entirely. Her last post on X (then Twitter), made in March 2019, consisted of the single word "mycelium". Even so, she was never removed from the NIJISANJI roster, and over the following years her case became well known among fans of the agency.

In 2026 she began to show signs of activity again. She took part in NIJISANJI's summer event "NIJISANJI Koshien", and the official announcement noted that her consent had been obtained. At midnight on August 1, 2026 (Japan time), she uploaded a new video to her YouTube channel, her first content in about seven and a half years. The video ended with a date in mid-August 2026 that matched her birthday, and several Japanese entertainment news outlets reported on it. On August 15, 2026, she opened a stream slot for 21:00 Japan time and returned to livestreaming. It was the fourth stream on her channel.

Activities

Streaming style

She was active for only a short time in 2019, so her streaming history is very limited. Her first broadcast was titled "I'm a ghost, but I'm doing my first stream". She followed it with a free-talk chat stream and a playthrough of the game Plug & Play. Profile databases list her content categories as free talk and gaming. Her August 2026 return stream marked the start of her activity after the long gap.

Characteristics

According to her official profile, Kataribe Tsumugu is an earthbound ghost bound to the library of a school, and she knows that she is a spirit. She is usually quiet, but she becomes excited and energetic when the topic turns to books or to things she did not know before. Her design shows long, faded brown hair with an ahoge and a red hairpin, blue eyes, black glasses, and a light brown knit jacket. Fans have long joked and theorized about her years of silence. Commentators have called her a "legendary" or "phantom" liver, partly as a play on her ghost character.