Hanako And The Terror Of Allegory [Manga]

Allegories, stories that have hidden meanings. Japan is famous for numerous amounts of wives’ tales, folklore, and allegories. But what would happen if those stories came true?

Daisuke Aso is a private detective known for “taking care of” these stories. One day Aso takes on another such case: the man under the bed, with an ax. The client, Kanae Hiranuma, hasn’t been able to sleep in days. She believes that if she does sleep then a man with an ax will come out from under her bed and kill her. Aso takes the case and, before long, solves it. It turns out that it really was Kanae’s imagination, but one that can effect all humans. See, once someone truly believes in an allegory, it becomes real, but just to humans. The only way to get rid of an allegory is to get the believer to not believe. That, however, is not easy at all.
Well, Kanae somehow gets a job working for the Aso detective agency, where she gets to know Aso better. Aso was once a police detective; he likes porno books (they’re all over his office), and he is obsessed with allegories. One of Aso’s allegories is that if you hiccup 100 times in a row, you’ll die, and every time Aso is around an allegory, he gets the hiccups. The second allegory is of a little girl who lives in a bathroom and can travel by toilets (what she’s actually supposed to be, I haven’t figured out yet).
The next two cases in this volume are of the slit-mouthed woman, a woman who has a mouth that goes from ear to ear, and is obsessed with men telling her she’s beautiful, and the other is the allegory of the human-faced fish, said to be vengeful spirits of a human who can take on the form of a fish with a human face-like design on its head.