Doubt (manga)

Doubt, also known as Rabbit Doubt, is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Yoshiki Tonogai. The series focuses on the "Rabbit Doubt" cell phone game, with rules similar to Mafia. The players must find the wolf, or killer, amongst their group of rabbits as they are picked off one-by-one. Six players of this game find themselves trapped in a building with one of the group already dead; to avoid the same fate, the remaining five must play a real-life game of "Rabbit Doubt" and find the wolf (liar) hiding among them.
The manga was serialized in Square Enix's shōnen manga magazine Monthly Shōnen Gangan from July 2007 to February 2009, with its chapters collected in four tankōbon volumes. The series continued with two sequels: Judge, published from January 2010 to August 2012, and Secret, published from October 2013 to February 2015.
Doubt revolves around a fictional cell phone game called "Rabbit Doubt", in which the players are rabbits in a colony; one of these players is randomly chosen to act as a wolf infiltrating the group. Each round, the rabbits guess which is the wolf as the rabbits are eaten one-by-one until only the wolf is left.
In the story, four players of the "Rabbit Doubt" game: Yū Aikawa, Eiji Hoshi, Haruka Akechi, Rei Hazama and a non-player Mitsuki Hōyama meet to relax together. They are knocked unconscious and awaken in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, filled with security cameras, to meet Hajime Komaba, a medical student, and discover Rei hanged. The group finds Rei's cell phone and realize that they're playing a real-life game of "Rabbit Doubt". To survive, the wolf, described as the liar, must die.
Later, the groups tries to find an exit and the wolf using bar codes found imprinted on their bodies. However, their chances are limited as each bar code will open only one door. Yū discovers that he does not have a barcode anywhere on his body. He tries to hide this fact by lying, saying his code was on his stomach so no one would doubt him and say he was the wolf. Eiji is furious that this game has everyone killing each other and only continues to cause pain and anger. Accusing Hajime, who was not with the group when captured, of being the wolf and hitting Yū, Eiji is locked in a room.
After unlocking a room with surveillance cameras in them, the group find a mysterious man under a rabbit's headgear. He later dies from a poison thumbtack under the headgear, which, when removed, pricked the unknown man. They use Hajime's barcode to unlock a library, and there they find a book of everyone's hidden secrets, even Mitsuki. This causes the group to doubt one another. Haruka accuses Mitsuki being the wolf, attacks her and locks her in the bathroom. The group tie up Yū in the surveillance room where he witnesses Eiji's death for a brief second. Hajime unties Yū to check on Eiji, only to find his hand chopped off and the door stuck. Afterwards, the roles are reversed, and Hajime is tied up while Mitsuki is placed in the hospital bed from Haruka's attack. Yū checks the wolf's room which was unlocked thanks to the mysterious man's barcode. He checks the rabbit headgears and finds Haruka's head in one of them.
Yū runs back to check on Mitsuki only to find Hajime on the floor, untied and attacked, and Mitsuki has been hung. Both accuse each other of being the wolf. Later, Hajime is attacked by Mitsuki, who had faked her own death. Mitsuki accuses Yū of lying to not only the group, but to her, personally. She says she gave everyone a barcode except Yū to throw suspicion on him so they would lock him up, so Mitsuki could kill everyone and escape with Yū. Mitsuki reveals to Yū how everyone in the group had lied. Eiji had lied about being a friendly guy, but in reality he had gotten someone killed when he went to war with a neighboring city. Haruka seemed charismatic and kind but was actually the leader of her high school's prostitution ring, where she even blackmailed the customers. Hajime had killed a little girl while practicing at his father's hospital, but the news was swept under the rug to protect him.
She receives a call on her cellphone and steps away to answer. It is revealed to be Mitsuki's father (who has planned the game) calling. He had agreed to be the guarantor on a friend's loan, but he was betrayed and saddled with an enormous debt, and he attempted suicide. For this Mitsuki explains that she wants to punish all liars to achieve her father's revenge, and thus she no longer trusts Yū, because he lied to her about not being able to hang out with her after school a week ago. In reality, he had been out with a female classmate to secretly buy Mitsuki a birthday present, but Mitsuki saw them together and assumed that they were a couple, even killing the classmate. When Mitsuki leaves to kill Hajime, Hajime reaches Yū and reveals his real identity as a detective investigating teenage disappearances and hands him a scalpel to use as a weapon. Yū and Hajime successfully knock Mitsuki out.
When Yū tries to open the exit with Mitsuki's bar code, Rei is revealed to be alive, and she identifies herself as the actual wolf. Previously, Mitsuki had gone to Rei seeking help to ease her pain with hypnosis, but Rei led her down a path of revenge. Rei is seeking revenge because the media believed her hypnosis was a sham, causing her parents, who supported her, to commit suicide. In order to achieve revenge, she lied about her accident, manipulated Mitsuki, using hypnosis to pretend to be her father, who actually died in the hospital, and giving her orders as 'him'. Rei had used the mysterious man to kill previous players of Rabbit's Doubt. Rei orders Mitsuki to kill Yuu, however, the love Mitsuki has for Yū occasionally overpowers the hypnosis. Rei releases the surviving players and calls the police. Mitsuki, who has fallen into a coma, is accused of the murders as there is no evidence of Rei being there. At the hospital, Yū receives a call from Rei. She reveals that the reason there was no evidence of her presence at the game site is because one of the forensics agents working the scene is one of her Wolves, and although Yū tries to contact Hajime (who is at the scene to find evidence) about it, he is too late to save him from being strangled. Rei also tricks him into saying a phrase that causes Mitsuki to awaken in her "wolf mode": 'For the ones I love'. In the last scene, she approaches Yū with a knife.
Written and illustrated by Yoshiki Tonogai, the chapters of Doubt have been published in Square Enix's Monthly Shōnen Gangan since its premiere on July 12, 2007. The series ended its run on February 12, 2009, with a total of twenty chapters. One chapter was also serialized in the magazine in May 2009 to commemorate the release of a drama CD adaptation, which was released May 27, 2009.
In North America, Yen Press announced the English release of the manga in September 2012. The two volumes in English were released in omnibus format on April 23, 2013.
The individual chapters were published in tankōbon volumes by Square Enix. The first volume was released on December 22, 2007. The second volume was released on May 22, 2008, and the third was published on October 22, 2008. The fourth and final volume was released on May 22, 2009. The French language release is licensed by Ki-oon. The manga is also published in Finland by Punainen Jättiläinen, and in Poland by JPF starting in January 2013.
A spiritual sequel, titled Judge, began serialization in Monthly Shōnen Gangan in January 2010, and was later published in English by Yen Press. A live-action film adaptation of Judge was released on November 8, 2013.
Hiro, a young man, is in love with his childhood friend Hikari, while the latter is dating his older brother Atsuya. After Hiro shifts an appointment Hikari had with Atsuya, he finds out his brother was hit by a truck and died, leaving him consumed by remorse. Two years later, he wakes up one day handcuffed in a dark building, wearing a heavy rabbit mask. After a few steps, he enters a courtroom where seven other teenagers, also dressed in animal masks, await him, as well as a young boy who has died.
Each animal mask represents one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony (pig), avarice (fox), sloth (bear), pride (lion), lust (cat), envy (rabbit) and anger (horse). A video tells them through a stuffed toy the rules of the game in which they are forced to participate: every twelve hours, a voting takes place during which they would have to choose to sacrifice one of them until only four survivors remain in the game.
Tonogai's third spiritual part of the Doubt series, Secret, began serialization in Monthly Shōnen Gangan in October 2013. Like its predecessors, it has been published in English as well by Yen Press.
After months of therapy to help them cope with a bus accident that killed all of their classmates, the six high-school students who survived the accident are told by their counselor that three of them are murderers, and that he will turn the evidence to the police if they do not confess in a week. All of them suddenly find themselves engaged in a race against time to prove their innocence, but it is not so easy to trust others when everyone has something to hide.
The fourth volume placed fourteenth of thirty in manga in Japan for the week of May 18 to May 22 selling 45,770 copies that week. The next week, from May 25 to May 30, the volume rose to tenth place selling an additional 47,323 copies.