The chapters of Rainbow: Nisha Rokubō no Shichinin are written by George Abe and illustrated by Masasumi Kakizaki. Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin began serialization in Shogakukan Publishing's Weekly Young Sunday manga magazine but was moved to Big Comic Spirits when the magazine stopped publication.[1] The chapters of the manga have been collected into 22 tankōbon volumes by Shogakukan between April 2003 and February 2010.[2][3]
The story is set in the 1950s and focuses on six junior delinquents aged sixteen to seventeen that are sent to the Shōnan Special Reform School, and their mentor. The boys learn to cope with the atrocities and unfairness they encounter there. The manga follows the boys' lives during their time in the school and the years after they leave.
The manga opens in the year 1955 with six boys (nicknamed Mario, Cabbage, Soldier, Turtle, Scam, and Joe) being transferred by bus to a reform school due to their varied crimes. They meet the institution’s physician, Sasaki, who performs rectal exams on the boys before sending them to their cell. There they meet another boy named Sakuragi, who Mario starts a fight with. This results in all six of them getting beaten. After this, Joe pleads Sakuragi not to hurt him if he offers Sakuragi a cigarette he smuggled in. Sakuragi accepts, and shares the cigarette with the rest of the boys. Upon such an experience, the seven boys bond and become close friends. Joe mentions that he is an orphan with a younger sister named Meg on the outside, who his sole motivation for enduring his imprisonment. He gets visited by an orphanage member notifying him that Meg is about to be adopted. Out of his fear of never seeing her again, his new friends create a diversion for Joe to escape with Turtle accompanying him. On the way there, they run into the police, and Turtle keeps them occupied giving Joe enough time to escape them. When the boys meet Turtle back at school, he reveals his past family life when asked why he helped Joe. His father was a frequent drunk who beat his mother. He ran away from his home only to return and find it destroyed in the Hiroshima bombings. Joe manages to reach the orphanage undetected by the police. He confronts the orphanage member who had notified him of Meg’s adoption and demands to see his sister. The orphanage member reveals that she had been anticipating his return as police officers rush in and capture Joe. Upset that he might not be able to see Meg, Joe reveals that the orphanage member had sexually assaulted him and that he is afraid that Meg’s adoptive parents will do the same to her. Enraged, the orphanage member hits him over the head with a vase and pulls a knife on him. She stops her attack when Meg enters the room and tells Joe to go back to the reform school. Meg says that they were abandoned and have no choice but to be used. Joe is dragged back to the school while Meg prepares to leave with her adoptive father. Joe returns to his friends who are disappointed that they didn't succeed, but Sakuragi cheers the group up again. At this point, the rest of the boys refer to Sakuragi as “Anchan” (bro). Shortly after Joe’s return, Ishihara, (the school’s sadistic school guard) beats Joe and Turtle for escaping, then starts a rumor that Sakuragi is in school for murdering his own father. We see a flashback into Scam’s childhood where his mother had to work as a prostitute in order to feed her and her son, leading to Scam developing a difficulty in trusting people. Scam is then caught smoking in the library by Ishihara, and throws one of his lit cigarettes out the window in hopes he won't be found out. Ishihara offers Scam the option to blame this on Sakuragi, and Scam agrees. Right after, the cigarette that he threw caused a fire outside that quickly spread throughout the building. Sakuragi escapes the fire, (much to Ishihara’s surprise) but the rest of the boys are still stuck in the burning building. Still locked in their cell, the 5 other boys struggle to break out with no success, but most of them cling to the hope that Sakuragi will return. We see a quick flashback where Scam sees Ishihara throw the key to the cell out the window and into a patch of grass. Sakuragi runs into the burning building to rescue the five boys while Scam questions in tears if relying solely on oneself really does work out best for him.
Sakuragi makes it to the cell through the fire but is unable to break them out. He struggles against the doorknob despite it being locked until the roof caves in. Ishihara finds the key to the cell buried among the grass. Scam begs Ishihara to give him the key, proclaiming they are his first real friends. Ishihara proceeds to hit him with his guard stick. After Sakuragi breaks free from the roof’s rubble above him, he turns to see Scam holding the key to the cell, which he managed to take from Ishihara by force. Scam unlocks the cell and the boys proceed to help Sakuragi escape from another large piece of the ceiling. Ishihara is visibly happy that the building is burning down with Sakuragi in it, but is shocked to see all seven boys make it out alive. When he greets Sakuragi, feigning friendliness, Sakuragi punches him in the face. Sakuragi later wakes up in the hospital with several broken bones and many burns. He immediately asks where the others are upon waking up. All of the boys offer to give blood in order to save him. Scam is about to apologize for accidentally starting the fire with his cigarette before Sakuragi interrupts him; saying he saved them and that’s all that mattered. Sakuragi talks with his nurse about how his friends saved him and confesses to killing his own father. We see a flashback to Sakuragi’s family life, as he lives alone with his mother while the rest of his family fought or died in the war. When his father returned from 4 years of imprisonment in Siberia, he spiralled into alcoholism. Sakuragi returns one afternoon of boxing to help bring him back home from the pub. His father is appalled that he would take up an american sport and attempts to hit Sakuragi. Sakuragi tells his father if he returned just to show how pathetic he became, it wasn't worth the trip. His father’s last words to him were “Make sure you listen to your mother” as he walked away. The morning after, his body was found dead in a ditch. Sakuragi believes his own words pushed his father to commit suicide and regrets not trying to understand him better. The rest of the boys leave after overhearing the story and find comfort that Sakuragi will be released shortly after he’s done in the hospital. Sakuragi is eager to go back from the hospital to see his friends again, even if he hasn't fully recovered. We see a flashback of cabbage with his longtime girlfriend, Mitsu, when he gets attacked by a man who claims that she’s his. Cabbage fought back by hitting him with a manhole cover, resulting in his imprisonment. Mitsu arrives at the reform school to sing for the boyd’ entertainment. She and Scam wave at each other after she performs. Cabbage and Soldier go to visit Mitsu and when Soldier asks about Cabbage, she that “He thinks I’m his girlfriend... stupid, right?” When Cabbage sees her again, he finds her kissing another man. She tells Cabbage that she never saw them as an item. Soldier attacks the man she was with, but Cabbage stops him and compliments Mitsu on her singing. Before she has to leave, Cabbage tells Mitsu that he loves her before getting dragged back into the cell. Sakuragi returns to the cell and greets his friends again, with one more month until his release. Ishihara however, vows that he won’t live that long. Sakuragi inspires Mario to take up boxing. Soldier plans on joining the military. Scam has aspirations to get rich. Ishihara and Sasaki discuss that both of them will be screwed if Sakuragi talks, but they have a plan to stop him. All of the boys decide to carve their dreams on a tree. Once everyone else is finished writing theirs, Mario carves his wish that everyone else’s dreams come true. Once they return, Ishihara tells Sakuragi that he’s getting transferred to a different cell with tougher, more hardened criminals. Kumogai, one of the kinder guards, starts questioning Ishihara’s intentions, but gets hit by him as a result. Sakuragi appears to have befriended the other criminals at first, but later in the night they proceed to beat him due to a bribe from Ishihara. No matter how much they hit him, he always has a bold smile on his face. Mario asks them why Sakuragi isn’t showing up to lunch until they confess to beating him at night. Sakuragi survives off of the leftovers that his beaters throw at him after lunch. He refuses to fight back to avoid being sent to the isolation rooms. Mario goes to them to apologize for hitting one of them and offers to take some beating in place of Sakuragi. They break Mario’s right hand, ruining his chances to take up boxing in the future. Upon hearing this Sakuragi fights back, willing to take the isolation room rather than having his friends be harmed. Ishihara enters Sakuragi’s cell expecting to find him dead, only to find all the other cell members lying bloody and unconscious. When Ishihara asks them about it, they all say that nothing happened and Sakuragi had nothing to do with it. Ishihara leaves frustrated.
