Hohzuki Island (Hohzuki no Shima) is a horror manga by Kei Sanbe, which was serialized in Young Gangan from 2007 to 2009 and compiled into four volumes.
Kokoro Suzuhara is a fourth-grader who, along with his blind 5-year-old sister Yume, have been sent to an island to attend school. The island is more or less deserted; there are only four other students and four teachers. Of course, the adults are hiding something, and are willing to kill to keep the children from finding out.
This manga provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: What got the children onto the island, basically.
- Yukino and her friend, who suffer from emotional neglect and physical abuse, respectively. Though in Yukino's case it seems to be more of a case of Hands-Off Parenting.
- Big Brother Instinct: Kokoro, caused by his mother telling him to take care of his sister before she abandoned them.
- Big Eater: Futoshi. Deconstructed in that his binge eating was brought on by the trauma of losing his parents.
- Blind Seer: Yume can tell whose walking near her by the sound of their footsteps, and can tell when someone is lying by their voices.
- Cat Scare: That damn rabbit!
- Children Forced to Kill: Young children, forgotten by society, taken to an island to be sexually abused, hunted, and brutally murdered?
- Creepy Child / Undead Child:The girl in white. Fortunately, she they?seems to be benevolent towards the children.
- Cute and Psycho: Yukino, again.
- Justified, since the kids are rather more than ready to sic him, and they didn't trust each other.
- Cute Mute: Hatsune. It brings dangerous attention to her multiple times.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Yukino. Her best friend was beaten by her dad and later imprisoned for being a neglectful mother. Yukino's own parents didn't seem to care about her.
- Disney Death: Shu and Kuwadate. Remarkably for such a dark story, they both survive.
- Distant Finale: The last chapter sees all of the children returning to the island seven years later.
- Evil Teacher: Obviously. Though Kuwadate seems to revel in it more than the others.
- And then it turns out the only truly evil one was Kuwadate. Everyone else was just confused and scared.
- Fan Disservice: Yukino walking around nude? Nice. Yukino walking around nude about to bludgeon a child to death with a wooden sword? Not so nice.
- Genki Girl: Yukino's high school friend, Mai, who cheerfully refers to her black eye as "new makeup" courtesy of her father. Then again, she doesn't stay genki for very long afterward, although it's off-screen.
- Hands-Off Parenting: Yukino's parents barely acknowledge her existence, to the point where she's a bit jealous of her friend's abusive father who at least notices that his daughter isn't going to school. At one point she walks around naked declaring that she's off to town. Her dad? tells her to put on a coat; the acknowledgment touches Yukino deeply and apparently starts to heal their relationship. It's possible that Yukino's parents think they're just leaving their daughter alone like all teenagers want their parents to do.
- Harmful to Minors: Violence? Sexuality? Check and double-check.
- Hope Spot: Yay, we reached the port! All we have to do is steal a boat! Oh...the boats are all totally destroyed.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Painfully averted... Or not! All the kids survive.
- Killed Off for Real: Despite the Disney Deaths of all the children (including Hisanobu), only Usui and Headmaster are actually dead.
- Male Gaze: Played more for creepiness than fanservice.
- Murder the Hypotenuse/He Knows Too Much: The reason Kuwadate murdered Usui.
- Parental Abandonment: ALL OF THE CHILDREN.
- Kokoro and Yume were basically abandoned by their parents.
- Shu's mother was a single parent who went off the deep end and tried to commit a double suicide with him.
- Hatsune's mother and her common-law husband disappeared after creating a huge debt and beating her for singing along to an anime.
- Futoshi's parents died in a car accident, and he was sent to live with his grandmother.
- Rikiya's parents are in jail.
- We never learn why the missing Hisanobu is on the island, but given that he says that only "part of" the reason he was sent to the island was to recover from his illness, he may also be a straight example.
- Pet the Dog: Kuwadate's one and only act of goodness in the manga comes from saving Hisanobu when his illness nearly got to be too much.
- Poor Communication Kills: If only some of the children and Yukino had been more honest or receptive, a lot of the horrible incidents could have been avoided
- Properly Paranoid: Shu
- Except not really.
- The Reveal: The epilogue reveals that most of the weirdness had an explanation: Hisanobu's bloody drawer was the result of trying to hide a disease that caused him to vomit blood and the knife was to stop anyone from taking him off the island he loved so much. The Room Full of Crazy was the result of Shu's sleepwalking and carving messages to his mom. The eerily beautiful voice was Hatsune singing to herself:she hadn't spoken in so long that she didn't recognize her own voice. The ghost girl really is a ghost, however.
- The dog did it.
- Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: It starts off having the adults being evil and taking out life insurance on the children so that they could kill one of them whenever they were running low on funds, leading to the kids attempting to go to the other side of the island and escape. All deaths that take place are undone except for the adults despite at least onenote revoked "death" being blatantly lethal and it turns out that only the villain is actually evil and the adults are actually good.
- Scary Stinging Swarm: When one of the villains accidentally attacks attacks a wasp's nest thinking that he was disarming a different kind of trap.
- Social Services Does Not Exist / Department of Child Disservices: Take your pick. How else could the events on this island be occurring?
