10th anniversary show runs in February 2027
The staff for the stage play adaptations of Production I.G’s Joker Game spy anime series announced on Friday the series will receive a new stage play titled Joker Game IV next year in February. The play will run in Tokyo and in the Kansai region. The fourth show celebrates the 10th anniversary of the stage series.
Image via Joker Game stage play’s website
© 柳広司・KADOKAWA／JOKER GAME ANIMATION PROJECT ©JOKER GAME THE STAGE PROJECT
The returning cast includes:
Daisuke Nishida will direct and write the script for the show.
The first stage play adaptation ran in May 2017, and the second stage play ran in June 2018. The third stage play adaptation ran on November 21-30 in Tokyo.
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 in April 2016. Crunchyroll streamed the series as it aired in Japan, and Funimation streamed an English dub for the anime.
Subaru Nitō launched a manga adaptation of the anime in Mag Garden’s Comic Garden magazine in February 2016, and ended it in January 2018. Mag Garden published five volumes for the manga.
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.
Sources: Joker Game stage play’s official website, Stage Natalie
