Believers (manga)

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Believers (Birībāzu) is a Japanese manga written and illustrated by Naoki Yamamoto. It was his first weekly serial drawn entirely by himself. The story ran in Shogakukan’s Weekly Big Comic Spirits from May 24 to November 22, 1999 and was collected in two wide-ban volumes.

The plot follows three members of a cult called the Smiley Face Center who are stranded on a deserted island off Japan’s coast. They try to purge themselves of lust and other evils, but their past temptations keep pulling them back. As they cling to their faith, they begin to doubt what is real and what isn’t.

Yamamoto was inspired by real-world cults after the 1995 Tokyo sarin attack. He imagined what would happen if fanatic followers were isolated together. The island setting is based on the Second Sea Fortress, an artificial island near Tokyo Bay built in the 1910s and largely forgotten after the 1923 earthquake. Yamamoto used reference photos and later visited the fortress for inspiration; a nude photo shoot during the visit influenced some landscape backgrounds.

Believers was re-released in two volumes by Fukkan.com in 2012. In February 2022, it was announced that the manga would receive a live-action film adaptation, directed by Hideo Jojo, which premiered on July 8, 2022.