Ana Satsujin (Peephole) is a psychological thriller manga written by Rahson about a suicidal NEET and his discovery of a murderous neighbor through a peephole.
The manga is currently available on Manga Box
, an official manga magazine app and website. It is currently available in Japanese, English, and Chinese.
This manga provides examples of:
- Anyone Can Die: By the time the manga's over, the only surviving character is Kurosu and Miyaichi's son.
- Bookends: Kurosu and Miyaichi's relationship began with a peephole. The final chapter ends with their son, an unnamed female neighbor, and another peephole.
- Bowdlerise: The version of the manga put on the legal English Manga Box app was heavily censored to Apple/Google Play guidelines, with nudity covered by black bars and severed heads getting the Pixellation treatment. Chapter one in particular is so censored that it makes the series look like hentai. What makes the censorship even worse is that it's happening in an app already restricted to 17+.
- Bungled Suicide:
- Following two years of living as a ronin and one year as a shut-in, Kurosu tries and fails to commit suicide by hanging himself on a wall-mounted hanger. Due to shoddy construction, the wall gives and creates a peephole which looks into his neighbor's bedroom, which is the catalyst for the manga.
- Much later on, Kurosu again tries to hang himself, this time from a bridge over a river. However, the rope breaks and he comes up before he can drown.
- Cleanup Crew:
- Reina Enmeiji runs one that deals with Miyaichi's kills, among other such clients.
- In the second half of the manga, after Kurosu is released from prison, he starts work for a cleaning service that specializes in taking care of homes where deaths have occurred. It's eventually revealed to be connected to Reina.
- Easy Amnesia: Thanks to nearly dying and being in a coma, Miyaichi loses her memory. It's only restored after she witnesses Kurosu being stabbed.
- Fan Disservice: While there are a fair number of fanservicey scenes, the vast majority of scenes of nudity and sexually-themed material are anywhere from unsettling to full-on creepy.
- Feel No Pain: When Sakaki tries to kill Miyaichi and Kurosu on their wedding night, he uses two huge goons that he's surgically altered to greatly dull pain from impact trauma. What he didn't count on was Kurosu using fire against them, which works very well.
- Generation Xerox: Gender Flipped version. Kurosu and Miyaichi's son grows up to be a murderer as well, and the final chapter implies that the exact same events will play out again with him and his female neighbor.
- Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: Sakaki's victims get brainwashed into believing that they are in a happy family-like situation, with worship-like devotion to Miyaichi at its core.
- A God Am I: During his torment of Jun, Sakaki states this out of his own delusions of grandeur and his twisted view on reality.I decided I'd become God. To be God is to have overwhelming power. [...] My medical skills are divine gifts that only I can wield. They make me a god.
- Human Resources: Reina retrieves the organs from the corpses she acquires, and also uses the bones to make furniture.
- Insurance Fraud: Miyaichi isn't the only Serial Killer in the manga. One, Fujiura, marries men and kills them for the insurance money. She almost does in Kurosu in this manner but is arrested and ends up being killed by the decapitation device Sakaki installed in her during her last round of plastic surgery.
- Is This Thing Still On?: Sakaki places a bug on Kurosu, which leads to him having to hear him and Miyaichi have their first time."If only you had broken the listening device earlier, I WOULDN’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO YOU TWO HAVING SEX!"
- Magic Plastic Surgery: Sakaki is an extremely skilled plastic surgeon, able to completely transform his patients. He does work for both legal and under-the-table clients, the latter of which is partly how Fujiura has been able to elude capture for so long.
- Mutual Kill:
- Subaru Ibiko and Koutoko Sakaki shoot each other, although the former's death is slower because it was a gut shot.
- Kurosu and Miyaichi slice each others' necks as their final act.
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: "Kill You" in this case — Kurosu agrees to become Miyaichi's planned final kill in what they view as the ultimate expression of their love. It's to the point where seeing someone else attempt to kill him snaps her out of her amnesia.
- Off with His Head!: Sakaki installs inside some of his clients and the "family" he creates in his awe of Miyaichi hydraulic spools connected to a wire in their necks that is used to swiftly decapitate them.
- Parting-Words Regret: Upon seeing their young son, both Kurosu and Miyaichi silently express their dying regret that their Mutual Kill answer was a mistake.
- Psychometry: Haruko has some proficiency with this particular power, although her psychic visions don't always need contact to work.
- Rape as Drama:
- Haruko is threatened with rape, then death, by some Yakuza thugs but is saved by Miyaichi.
- Jun Schneider is assaulted by Sakaki but saved by Kurosu before he can get very far.
- Sadist:
- Rio Miyaichi clearly enjoys her killings, sometimes making Kurosu an unwilling pawn in luring in victims, often at the expense of his own health and safety.
- Koutoko Sakaki, in his obsession with Miyaichi, kidnaps people, alters them to resemble her, and brainwashes them into devotion to her, and feels no remorse about killing any that deviate even slightly. When Jun calls him on this, he doesn't take it well.
- Self-Harm: One of Kurosu's co-workers at the cleaning company has been cutting herself for some time. She tries to find an outlet through Ibiko's charitable organization but, unlike the other members, it actually makes her worse.
- The Sociopath: There are many examples in the series, but Rio Miyaichi, who is a mostly unrepentant serial killer and also our main character's new girlfriend, takes the cake. While she claims to only kill criminals, she also makes it clear that she's perfectly capable of killing anybody she feels like, and at one point randomly kills a police officer for no apparent reason aside from simply not liking his tone of voice while he was questioning her about another killer (while she herself wasn't under direct suspicion at the moment), and even justifies her actions by saying that cops aren't people.
- Surprise Pregnancy: It's revealed in the final chapters that while in a coma, Miyaichi was pregnant with her and Kurosu's child, one that they sadly only learn about in their final moments.
- Time Skip: The final chapter takes place fifteen years after the previous chapter, with Kurosu and Miyaichi's now-grown son murdering Reina.
- Twin Switch: Koutoko Sakaki is actually identical twin brothers who swap places routinely. Jun Schneider kills one twin as he's trying to kill Kurosu and Miyaichi; the other and Ibiko shoot each other to death.
- Unsettling Gender-Reveal: There's no details about Reina's exact gender, but she certainly has a "him" as Kurosu puts it. This is actually not pulled on Kurosu so much as the reader, since her Full-Frontal Assault is the first thing he sees upon regaining consciousness, but his narration doesn't get around to that detail immediately.
- Villain Protagonist: Kurosu ends up becoming one by virtue of not doing very much to stop Miyaichi's killing even though he doesn't like it, and sticking with her after she starts roping him into her kills. In the second half of the manga, he starts becoming more outright villainous as his sanity starts to crack, but after Miyaishi is revealed to be alive he goes back to his old characterization.
- Villains Out Shopping: Miyaichi is a Hiroshima Toyo Carp fan and chapters 7 and 8 has her and Kurosu at one of their games. Kurosu notes how weird it is that somebody he's personally seen kill people also has such mundane interests.
