Father-son duo star in stage play
Image via Dark Horse’s website
© Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima, Futabasha, Dark Horse
Shochiku announced on Thursday that Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub samurai manga is getting a kabuki stage play adaptation that will run at Kabukiza Theatre in Tokyo from June 3-25.
Shidō Nakamura II (Ryuk in live-action Death Note anime and live-action franchise) will play Ogami Ittō and Nakamura’s second son Natsuki Nakamura (5 years old) will play Ogami Daigorō. Film director Masanori Inoue is also working on the kabuki adaptation.
Shidō Nakamura’s uncle Yorozuya Kinnosuke previously played Ogami Ittō in the manga’s 1973-1976 live-action series adaptation.
The original manga centers on Ogami Ittō, who is an executioner for the Shogun. After he is framed and his wife murdered, he and his infant son Daigorō wander the country as assassins for hire, while also working toward their own revenge.
Koike and Kojima original serialized the manga from 1970-1976. Kojima died in 2000 and Koike died in 2019.
First Comics premiered the manga in English in May 1987. The series was one of the first manga published in North America, and the first manga to be released in North America on a monthly schedule. Dark Horse Comics began releasing the series in 2000 as the first manga series to be published in North America straight to graphic novels that corresponded with the Japanese releases. In 2013, Dark Horse began releasing the series in omnibus format.
The manga inspired six feature movies starring Tomisaburō Wakayama, four stage plays, and a television series. As of October 2017, Paramount had the rights to a separate English-language live-action film adaptation of the manga.
Sources: Kabuki Bito, Comic Natalie
