News

Joker Game Spy Anime Series Gets Stage Play Adaptation in May

A stage play of Production I.G's Joker Game spy anime series has been green-lit. The play will run at the Zepp Blue Theater Roppongi in Tokyo from May 4 to 7. Daisuke Nishida is directing and writing the script.

The play will star Shogo Suzuki, Ikkei Yamamoto, Yūya Kido, Chihiro Okutani, Gaku Matsumoto, Kōji Saikawa, Kaisei Abe, Takeshi Maeda, Shoichiro Oomi, Masashi Yamazaki, Kōsen, Orakio, and Masashi Taniguchi.

The anime itself is an adaptation of Kōji Yanagi's novel of the same name. The original novel is set in 1937, before World War II begins in earnest. Lieutenant Colonel Yūki of the Imperial Japanese Army forms the "D Agency," an army intelligence outfit under his command and tutelage. Army General Staff attaches Lieutenant sakuma. to observe the unit's performance. D Agency casts a wide net to find agents beyond Japanese military personnel, and Yūki establishes D Agency's tenets, which go against IJA doctrine: "Don't kill, don't get killed, don't get captured." With this, Yūki trains a team of operatives who conduct missions against domestic and foreign powers.

Production I.G's television anime adaptation of the novel premiered last April. Crunchyroll streamed the series as it aired in Japan, and Funimation premiered an English dub for the anime in October.

Subaru Nitō launched a manga adaptation of the anime in Mag Garden's Comic Garden magazine in February 2016.

Yanagi published the original Joker Game novel in 2008. The novel won the Nihon Suiri Sakka Kyōkai-shō (Mystery Writers of Japan) award in 2009. Yū Irie directed a live-action adaptation of the novel, which premiered in Japan in January 2015. Yanagi followed up the original novel with three sequel novels — titled Double Joker, Paradise Lost, and Last Waltz — in 2009, 2012, and 2015, respectively. The series has more than 1 million copies in print.

Source: MoCa News