Toilet-bound Hanako-kun

What it is

Nene Yashiro, who wants a boyfriend, goes to the girls’ toilet on the third floor to summon Hanako-san, the ghost who grants wishes, and finds a boy in an old-fashioned school cap. He is the seventh of Kamome Academy’s Seven Mysteries and the one who keeps the other six in order, and after she swallows a mermaid’s scale and is cursed, she becomes his assistant. AidaIro have been drawing it for Monthly G Fantasy since 2014. Each Mystery has its rumour, its territory and the object that anchors it, and changing the rumour changes the ghost. The spirits are mostly the duo’s own inventions, dressed in the grammar of the school ghost story.

Yokai that appear

• Ningyo 人魚 — The mermaid whose scale Nene swallows in the first chapter, and the Little Mermaid story of volume 4.
• Kitsune 狐 — Yako, the fox spirit who holds Mystery No. 2, the Misaki Stairs (volumes 1–2).
• Kodama 木霊 — The tree spirit of the Confession Tree, which forces confessing couples together (volume 2).
• Tsuchigumo 土蜘蛛 — Tsuchigomori, the teacher who is Mystery No. 5, whose name and many-limbed true form echo the earth spider (volume 3).

How far from the record

Hanako-san of the toilet is a legend of the postwar school, told from the late 1940s and fixed in its familiar form, bobbed hair and red skirt, by the children’s books and films of the 1990s. The manga makes her a boy in Meiji-era student dress, gives him a name, a brother and a crime, and sets him over the Seven Mysteries that every Japanese school is said to have. The traditional names are few and bent to the school. The mermaid whose scale turns a girl into a fish is the ningyo of the old tales with its gift of long life turned into a curse; Yako, who holds the Misaki Stairs, is a fox spirit in a school uniform; the tree spirit of the Confession Tree is a kodama that forces couples together. The teacher Tsuchigomori, whose true shape has too many limbs, borrows the earth-spider’s name and nothing else. The rest, the clock keepers, the hell of mirrors, the rabbit-like mokke, are rumours the authors wrote themselves.

Where to read it

English

Toilet-bound Hanako-kun (external link) — Yen Press, 25 volumes by November 2026, plus volume 0; ongoing

Spanish

Hanako-kun, el fantasma del lavabo (external link) — Editorial Ivrea, 25 volumes plus volume 0, ongoing. Published in Latin America by Panini as Hanako-kun y los misterios de la Academia Kamome

Indonesian

Hanako Si Arwah Penasaran (external link) — Elex Media Komputindo, volumes 0–24, ongoing