Ending Question

It's been a while since I last read the manga, but no, she does not die in the manga. I suppose the movie is more up for interpretation of whether the final conversation she had with him was real or not. My belief is that she did survive in the film, and the reason why she went back to sleep after hanging up the phone is (in my opinion) because the boy finally gave her the relief/soothing she wanted by having the rope around her neck, and thus she could finally sleep fitfully and not be insomniac.

The manga is vastly different from the movie. In the manga, the hand killer is one of the teachers at school, and when the boy finds a fridge of the hands the killer kept as souvenirs, he plants a black strand of hair so the killer thinks Morino (the girl) is the one who touched his stuff. The teacher confronts Morino in an empty classroom in rage, but she hits him with a classroom chair and screams for help claiming he's trying to rape her.


The manga version is also more gruesome in terms of how the killer mutilated the women's bodies after he killed them, while in the film the killer makes their bodies as dead works of art.

The main difference from the movie vs the manga is that in the manga the hand killer and the killer that has been murdering multiple women are two different people. But in the movie, they combined these people into one killer.