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Live-Action Meiji Tokyo Renka Series, Film Cast Anime's Voice Actors in New Roles
posted on by Jennifer Sherman
The official website for the live-action series and film adaptation of Broccoli's Meiji Tokyo Renka romance visual novel announced on Thursday that voice actors Daisuke Namikawa, Nobuhiko Okamoto, and Toshiyuki Morikawa appear as tsukumogami (old objects with attached spirits) in voice roles in the project. Namikawa will play Gramophone, Okamoto will play Fountain Pen, and Morikawa will play Pocket Watch. The three actors voice Ōgai Mori, Kyōka Izumi, and Charlie, respectively, in the original game and its anime adaptations.
In addition, the project's staff revealed a still that features Rikki Ihara as Mei Ayazuki. The still appears to show Mei next to items that the newly announced cast members will voice.
The eight-episode series will premiere on TV Kanagawa on April 9 at 11:00 p.m., and it will later debut on TV Hokkaido, TV Saitama, Chiba TV, Nagoya Broadcasting Network, KBS Kyoto, Sun TV, and QTV. The show will also stream exclusively on the U-NEXT service. The film will open in Japan in 2019 after the series finishes.
The cast includes:
Yutaka Kobayashi as Charlie
Shūto Miyazaka as Ōgai Mori
Makaha Takahashi as Shunsō Hishida
Taiki Yamazaki as Otojirō Kawakami
Toman as Kyōka Izumi
Yūki Kubota as Gorō Fujita
Tetsuya Iwanaga as Yakumo Koizumi
Shōta Matsushima as Tōsuke Iwasaki
KENN is performing the theme song "Ichiya no Eien ni Kimi Omou" (I Think of You Forever in a Night).
The time-travel romance fantasy story centers on ordinary high school student Mei Ayazuki. On the night of a red full moon a self-described magician named Charlie appears and takes Mei back to the Meiji period. Mei sneaks into a party at the Rokumeikan building and encounters Japan's historical figures such as Ōgai Mori. Mei also learns she possesses the "tamayori" power that allows her to see mononoke (spirits). Mei finds out she can travel back to her time on the night of the next month's full moon. Still, Mei is attracted to the prospect of living as her true self in the Meiji period.
Broccoli's Meiji Tokyo Renka visual novel romance franchise began with a 2011 mobile game, which was ported to PlayStation Portable in 2013. The anime film adaptation of the game opened in Japan in 2015, and a television anime premiered on January 9. A new iOS and Android game titled Meiji Tokyo Renka Haikara Date was originally slated for release in summer 2018, but it launched on December 14 after a delay.
Sources: Meiji Tokyo Renka live-action project's official website, Comic Natalie
