Monkey Peak (モンキーピーク, Monkii Piiku) is a horror manga written by Koji Shinasaka, with art by Akihiro Kumeta.
The manga follows a group of employees from a pharmaceutical company that falls on hard times after a public scandal regarding the side effects of one of their drugs. When a new president comes along, he schedules a teamwork-building outing by taking 44 of the employees for a mountain climbing and camping trip. Once there, the group is now targetted by a murderous monkey-like being wielding a machete.
The manga ran from 2016 to 2019, and gained more subsequent media. The manga has a 2018 spin-off called Monkey Circle, a sequel called Monkey Peak: The Rock, and an animated adaptation.
Tropes
- Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: After losing his mind, Anzai disposes of most of the initial antagonists before serving as a Post-Final Boss.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Zigzagged. All of the characters whether male or female have serious nasty looking wounds when they die or suffer from injuries, but two out of three female characters (Fujishiba and Hayashi) have notably less dirt, injuries or signs of hiking for a long period of times. The majority of the characters hair are also seemingly to be unaffected by the amount of climbing and fighting throughout the course of the story.
- Cosmic Plaything: Saotome has had a very bad luck in life. Both his father and his best friend died when he was young and in both occasions, he had to live with the Survivor's Guilt because of it. People at his work hate him, and quickly starting banding against him at the most ambiguous piece of evidence.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: Hayashi, The Heart of the group who doesn't really participate in the decision making or the fighting, is the Monkey's accomplice.
- Dwindling Party: At the start of the series, there are a total of 44 climbers. At the start of the second volume (the eleventh chapter), there are only 17. And it only gets worse from there.
- Evil All Along:
- Yagi reveals that he has been dragging the survivors around in order to lure the monkeys, which he wants to kill to avenge his sister. By the time that the few survivors realize it, they're also aware that not following him is more likely to end with them lost and tailed by the monkey.
- Chief Hasegawa reveals he faked his death and kills Izuka when he meets him, admitting to be working with the monkeys.
- Hayashi, like Hasegawa, is an accomplice of the monkeys, and poisons what is left of the party in chapter 96, only offering antidote if they help her get rid of Anzai.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: When the group finds Yagi's hidden stash on a mountain, they find food and condoms. This leads them to the realization that this is a place only him and his sister knew about, therefore that he was having an affair with his own sister.
- Groin Attack: A very violent example when Anzai tortures Saotome by treating him as a punching bag and aiming for his crotch specifically.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Okajima throws himself off of a cliff to make sure the Monkey attacking Miyata's group also falls, killing both of them with an also falling boulder.
- Tono grabs his makeshift bomb and one of the monkeys to explode himself and save the group left, especially Satou.
- A House Divided: At the Nakadake Cabin, the group splits into two, an erratically behaving faction that wants to torture information out of Saotome, and the group that wants to find a way to peacefully solve the problem.
- It Can Think:
- Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the Monkey is its capacity to plan and trap the people it's hunting.
- The very first instance, the plaque pointing to the Hot Springs closest to where the characters were was switched to one going towards the wrong direction: an extremely steep and narrow stairway which would make the group's movement slow and dangerous, and allowing it free time to hack on the ones at the end of the line, while the panic would cause those a little more in the front to fall and cause several injuries on the way down.
- When the characters find the monkey already in the Nakadake Cabin, the first thing the monster does is to destroy the water bottles of the cabin in front of them, knowing they're already suffering of dehydration by then. Furthermore, they suspect it already had poisoned the food for them. Which it partly had.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: When Anzai suspects Himuro of being a possible accomplice of the monkey, he hands him up by the hands and starts stabbing his thigh with a fork to get him to talk. Even the people who helped restrain him are upset at this.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
- The Monkey. Is it a supernatural entity? Is it possibly an actual overgrown and violent monkey? Is it possibly just a normal person in disguise? To complicate things, it's implied that there is a traitor working together with the monkey, or that at least knew of its existence and wanted to kill the members of the company.
- The local legends says of the existence of a "Monkey God", counting how a samurai turned monkey killed the troublemaking monkeys of the area by pretending to be a lady and getting then drunk on sake before killing all but one who escaped by throwing them off of cliffs, making it possible to be a separate species of monkey. Characters comment that it still would not justify the monkey's actions as there was no reports of such mass violence and missing people before. Furthermore, there is actually a group of various monkeys acting in tandem.
- Later, it is shown that there is actually only one monkey. The other monkeys are people in costume, in a group to take down the members of the company.
- Nerd in Evil's Helmet: Beneath his hood, the sword-wielding Tooru is shown to be a regular-looking thug with a fake tan.
- Red Shirt: Out of the roughly 40 initial members of the group, about 18 will stay for any considerable amount of time, the other are killed in the few early chapters.
- Sanity Slippage: Justified. It takes a short time for character to start behaving erratically, but as the narrative points out, lapses of judgement are a symptom of their dehydration.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Miyata's formal shoes are a poor gear for mountain climbing. When he has to use them to go through particularly treacherous and rocky ground, his feet start bleeding.
- Symbolic Cast Fadeout: Each chapter opens with the faces, names and ages of the characters, with the deceased characters' pictures grayed out. This is a major hint that some characters survive their apparent death. The only exception is Chief Hagasawa who was marked gray after his first apparent death and his return before being revealed to be Evil All Along. The same also goes for Miyata whose was also grayed out for around 5 chapters after falling off a cliff but later revealed to have survived.
- Villain's Dying Grace: Anzai uses the last of his strength to kill the last of the conspirators rather than Saotome, accomplishing his dream of getting to make one last great throw.
- Wham Shot: In chapter 37, Kaoru gets stabbed in the back even while the monkey is already inside the cabin. Cue the reveal that there is more than one monkey.
