You've had your dream. Time to get back to living.
The idea of adapting Mark McShane's novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon for Japanese television didn't originate with director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but he took the assignment and ran with it, bending the story to his own purposes with the aid of co-writer Tetsuya Onishi. Previously brought to the screen by Bryan Forbes in 1964, 2000's Seance (which opts for a more abbreviated title) starts out as a relatively ordinary domestic drama about a sound engineer and his psychically sensitive wife before McShane's plot is introduced. It is then further transformed into a traditional Japanese ghost story, with Kurosawa successfully pulling off each gear-shift, which is no small feat.
It helps that he and Onishi get the ball rolling with a scene centered on psychology student Hayasaka (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), whose paper on psychic phenomena (including doppelgängers, a plant that bears fruit later on) is rejected by his professor. As a result, Hayasaka declines to go forward with a demonstration by medium Junko Sato (Jun Fubuki, the botanist from Charisma), leaving her without an audience for her talents. Meanwhile, her husband (Kurosawa regular Kôji Yakusho) plies his own invisible trade, toiling away on television documentaries and the like. When one calls for the sound of wind blowing through the trees, he heads out into the woods to make a field recording and, like Jack Terry in Blow Out, picks up more than he bargained for. That's because a kidnapped girl who has escaped from her bumbling captor gets inside one of his equipment cases when he's not looking and she isn't discovered for a couple of days -- significantly, after Junko has been approached by Hayasaka and a skeptical police detective (Kitarô) for help in finding the lost girl. It's at that point that she hatches a plan to gain a little notoriety and convinces her reluctant husband to go along with it.
The key difference between the two adaptations is that while Forbes is more circumspect, Kurosawa brings his ghosts right out into the open. This is the case even before the Satos get embroiled in the kidnapping drama when Junko takes a part-time job as a waitress to help make ends meet. On her very first day, she gets spooked by a stern businessman who is accompanied by an eyeless ghost only she can see and which the businessman is apparently unaffected by. That goes a long way toward explaining why she has a hard time holding down an ordinary job and would go to such extreme lengths to capitalize on her unique gift/curse.