Find the answers to the school’s seven mysteries and something will happen. That is the legend at this currently unnamed high school. One of these mysteries is the wish-granting ghost, Hanako of the Toilet. They say she will grant your wish, but you must give up something precious in return. Heroine Nene Yashiro enters the haunted girls’ bathroom and summons Hanako, only to discover that he’s actually a boy. But, thankfully, everything else is true. The boy-crazy Nene states her wish to have her latest crush Minamoto fall in love with her.
The duo’s initial love plans all fail because Hanako is new at this and very straightforward, seemingly preferring not to use supernatural means to grant such minor wishes. But then Nene finds a magic mermaid scale of Hanako’s that will bind together whatever couple eats it in two halves. She eagerly eats her own half, but then unfortunately discovers that Minamoto loves someone else and then she transforms into a fish. Then, because apparently fish are the servants of mermaids, a demonic one appears to come take her away.
Hanako turns out to be surprisingly strong, especially for a recent legend and manages to drive the mermaid off. He grants Nene her wish to be human again, but at the cost of her becoming his servant when he eats the other half of the mermaid scale. This binds the two of them together and makes her the half of a couple that she’s always wanted to be. It also leaves Nene going through an H2O Just Add Water situation where she grows fish scales whenever she gets wet.
Hanako acts as a local sheriff and diplomat for the supernaturals of the school, being that he is one of the Seven Mysteries alluded to in the intro. He and Nene work to not only keep the peace between the school’s students and supernaturals to make sure neither side winds up hurting the other, but also make sure that the rumors that the monsters must follow never dip into dangerous territory.
For, you see, supernaturals are bound to follow and act out the stories that people tell about them and, if they don’t, they will begin to lose their connection to this world and return completely to their own, never to return.
I follow Yen Press on Twitter, and it often seems that they’re shouting some news about the latest volume of this series (and possibly the anime, but don’t quote me), so I figured I’d see why.
That plus the fact that this is the first new manga series that my local library has gotten in months.
But, frankly, I don’t see why the series is so popular. The characters are all stock and the story doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere. The tone of it all is very XXXHolic, which I did enjoy up until it started trying to have a story and to link up with Tsubasa Chronicles wherever it could, when it used to be just fine as a collection of short, spooky horror stories. (There’s an irony there, for sure.) But Hanako-Kun is neither spooky nor deep, at least not to such a degree as XXXHolic was.
(sigh) I miss that series, back in its glory days.
The one thing I can say about Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun is that the art style is also very XXXHolic, but in a good way, with lots of darkness and fine details and shadows and occasionally smoke or otherworldly designs whenever something supernatural shows up.
That being said, I, for one, would consider giving this series a hard pass.
Maybe next time I post, the library will have gotten something better. Or who knows-Maybe by then the pandemic will be over and I can fulfill my year-long dream of spending an entire day at the bookstore again!
