Creative Staff
Story/Art: Yoshiki Tonogai
Translation: Alexis Eckerman
What They Say
Within an abandoned old building, the popular mobile-phone game Rabbit Doubt – in which players must try to discover the wolf in rabbit’s clothing or pay the bloody price – has become a grotesque reality for a group of online friends. As the bones pile up, the survivors begin to question one another, and the seeds of suspicion take root. Who to trust? Who to doubt? With the wolf on the prowl, culling the herd, will any of the unfortunate souls caught up in this twisted game of murder be there to beat witness when the mastermind is finally unmasked?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As the volume opens up, Yuu finds himself franticly trying to discover a way out while keeping Mitsuki alive. Though he has Hajime patch her up, he still isn’t willing to trust him completely. He binds Hajime up and goes out to explore, but he soon panics upon discovering Haruka’s severed head. Yuu then rushes back and finds the room a mess, only to discover what appears to be Mitsuki’s body in the monitors, hanged from the ceiling. He tries to assault Hajime when he returns, only to have the situation turned around, with our hero accused of being the wolf. Though his logic is sound, Hajime of course discovers that Yuu isn’t the wolf, just in time to be assaulted by a mysterious figure in a rabbit mask. Things continue to degrade as Yuu prepares for the final showdown, and in getting captured he discovers that Mitsuki is the wolf, confirming his worst fears.
Mitsuki prepares to kill our hero by hanging, but not before explaining what’s going on. She claims this is occurring because Yuu lied, and she has to kill the liars of the world. While our hero dangles above certain doom, she explains the terrible things that everyone has done to bring down her wrath upon them. She proceeds to explain that the reason she’s become so messed up is that her dad was swindled, and almost took his own life as a result. After a short aside in which Hajime explains that the “Mitsuki” corpse from before was actually Haruka’s body which he disguised to lure out the wolf, he explains furthermore that he’s actually a detective. Together the pair escape, but as they’re out of options Yuu is forced into one final confrontation. It turns out Mitsuki thinks that Yuu lied to her in order to date another girl from school (leading to the girl’s grim demise as well), only for Yuu to explain that it was all done to pick out Mitsuki’s birthday present. She cracks completely with this realization, and Yuu is finally able to stop her.
However, Mitsuki’s bar code doesn’t work even though she’s the wolf, leading to a super crappy plot twist that serves to ruin a lot of the story. It turns out that Rei is still alive, her legs work, she’s actually the “real” mastermind, and she truly has hypnotism abilities. With them, she apparently planted a trigger in Mitsuki, causing her to think her dad was still alive and manipulating her into doing the killings. It turns out Rei’s parents died in an accident caused by the stress of Rei being branded a liar, so she came to hate liars. Apparently, she ended up using the television to launch mass hypnotic triggers that would manipulate people with susceptible hearts. She lets Yuu and Hajime go for reasons that aren’t exactly clear.
Later on, we find out that Rei used her hypnotism to have a forensics worker clear all evidence that she was ever there (I guess she’s lucky that a susceptible person who watched her show happened to be in the right place at the right time). She then proceeds to kill off Hajime and Yuu, whose apparent statement of love towards Mitsuki is the trigger to create the perfect wolf, even though his love was the thing interfering before and she should be the one setting the triggers anyway.
This whole chain of events is just a mess, as it ruins the realism of the world just to jam in the mass hypnotism plot point. It also raises the question of why nobody checked Rei’s pulse (she WAS the first victim and wasn’t even clearly dead) and why she crafted her plan with that in mind. And then on top of that, her backstory is pretty much just a weaker, less fleshed out version of the one given to Mitsuki! To top it all off, the “dark” ending even seems to actually water things down, simply killing people off rather than forcing them to live with the guilt and frustration of not being able to bring the real killer to justice, which was pretty much the only plot point the “twist” could’ve added anyway. It’s a real shame that such an otherwise great series has to end on such a crappy note.
In Summary
This is probably one of the hardest books I’ve ever had to review. It knocks it out of the park for the first four fifths of the volume, with great tension, suspense, and twists. But then it proceeds with an absolutely pointless twist and “dark” ending that ruin pretty much everything that came before. It adds a ton of plot holes in the process, screws up the gritty realism of the world, and adds pretty much nothing that wasn’t contained in the “fake” ending. It’s just an absolutely shocking mess, which is a shame because the rest of the book is brilliant. If you’re able to stomach a poor ending than it’s still probably worth a shot, but it’s a real shame that the finale has to stomp all over what came before and end things on such a poor note. Hopefully the sequel series will be able to avoid such missteps.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: A-
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: July 23rd, 2013
MSRP: $18.99
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