Japanese Urban Legends: The Yōkai Alliance

Chapter 1.5: Aka Manto and Toire no Hanako-san

It was a seemingly regular day in 1945 in Japan, and school was just like any other day for Hanako-san. Until she and her classmates decided to participate in a game of hide and seek. She went to hide in the third story's third bathroom stall, and there she waited. Just then, she heard some older girls. They had overheard the teachers talking about Hanako-san's parents, who had died in the war. They were asking each other about who had the guts to tell her, not knowing that she was hiding in the adjacent bathroom stall. She heard everything, and was crushed. She was only seven years old, and now an orphan. She wondered if such a lonely life was worth living, maybe she'd be better off dead? 

Just then, the sound of loud planes came shooting overhead. Just then, a big loud boom followed, and in the blink of an eye, a bright, blinding light. It was an air raid, and Hanko-san was no longer alive. She came back as a yokai who haunted that bathroom stall that she had died in. The third stall on the third floor. To summon her, you should say out loud "Are you there Hanako-san?" and knock on the door three times. If you do this correctly, she will then respond with "I am here, you found me," and then a bloody hand will come out of the toilet and drag you to hell. Other times, she just likes pranking and scaring people, and never harms them. It all depends on her current mood. 

Aka Manto is a yokai who haunts public and school bathrooms, and every time he arrives he asks you to choose between red or blue toilet paper. If you choose red, he will lacerate your body, until your bathroom stall is drenched with red blood. If you choose blue, he strangles you, turning your face and body completely blue. Before he was a yokai, he was a highschool student. He was mercilessly bullied since elementary school. One day, it went way too far. His classmates took him to the bathroom and they shoved his whole head into the toilet. He could have easily gotten up, but what was the point anymore? His life was just so miserable. It would be better to be dead than to suffer his whole life. 

So there he stayed in the toilet water, just wishing to drown, and after five minutes he was finally dead. He couldn't rest though, as his spirit craved revenge for such an awful existence. So he haunted bathroom stalls, and everything was the same, until the day when he met Hanako-san. He was alarmed as he had never seen another yokai before, so he didn't really care that she existed, and was about to walk away, until she asked him to be her friend. "Why would you want a nobody like me as your friend?" he asked. "I am terribly lonely here, always bound to this one toilet, it is misery at best. I feel familiar with you even though I don't know who you are, almost like you're my older brother." she responded. 

"You must be mistaken, I have no siblings, family or friends." he said. "Well, then I'll be your friend, you look like someone who could use a friend." she said. And just like that, they became friends. Hanako-san and Aka Manto decided to team up and haunt bathrooms together. It was fun sometimes, but other times it wasn't fun at all. They had been doing this exact thing for who knows how long already, the only difference being that they had been doing it separately then. It also didn't help as Aka Manto couldn't figure out how to unbind Hanako-san from this one toilet stall so that she could have a little more range so they could traverse whatever bathroom they wanted together. Aka Manto was 18, and Hanko-san was 7, and being yokai, they would be that age forever unless they found peace. At least at the end of the day, they both finally had a friend.