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Yoshitoshi Abe, Masayuki Kusumi's Kodomo no Gourmet Manga Gets Live-Action Special

TV Tokyo announced on Tuesday that it is producing a live-action special adaptation of Masayuki Kusumi and Yoshitoshi ABe's Kodomo no Gourmet (Child Gourmet) manga that will premiere on October 25. Misaki Ishii (seen below) will play the protagonist An Yomogino.

Hajime Senoo is directing the special, with a script by Yōhei Yamazaki.

The manga's story centers on fourth grader An Yomogino, who loves eating food above all. As the elder sister in a family with two working parents, she and her younger brother Kuri are home on weekdays by themselves. She vows to make and eat delicious yet unpredictable dishes that are completely her own, born from her quirky imagination.

Kusumi and Abe launched the manga in the comicS+ app in July 2017, where it ran for five chapters before going on hiatus, and restarting once again on the online manga service Renta! last November.

Kusumi has authored multiple manga about gourmet cooking and food, but perhaps his best known work is Solitary Gourmet (Kodoku no Gourmet), which he wrote alongside late manga artist Jiro Taniguchi. The pair first serialized the manga from 1994 to 1996 in Fusosha's Monthly Panja magazine (now defunct). Kusumi and Fusosha published the manga's second volume in September 2015. The manga has inspired eight live-action television series as well as several TV specials starring Yutaka Matsushige. The manga also inspired a net anime that debuted on Production I.G's "Tate Anime" (Vertical Anime) smartphone app in November 2017. Fanfare and Ponent Mon plan to release the manga in English.

Abe is perhaps best known for his character design and conceptual design work on the 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain, but he has done design work for many other notable productions, including Haibane Renmei, Texhnolyze, NieA_7, and most recently, RErideD (for which he also scripted a number of episodes).

Source: The Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web