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Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku Manga Gets Stage Play in May
posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
Ichijinsha announced on Monday that Fujita's Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku (Otaku ni Koi wa Muzukashii) manga is inspiring a stage play that will run at Tokyo's Theater Sun Mall from May 11-15.
The play will star:
- Kazumi Doi as Hirotaka Nifuji
- Marina Horiuchi as Narumi Momose
- Ken Ogasawara as Tarō Kabakura
- Rio Tsubaki as Hanako Koyanagi
- Yūki as Naoya Nifuji
- Soui Odagawa as Kō Sakuragi
Mizuki Sano is directing the play and Masafumi Hata is writing the script.
Kodansha Comics is releasing the manga in English, and it describes the story:
Narumi Momose has had it rough: every boyfriend she's had dumped her once they found out she was an otaku, so she's gone to great lengths to hide it. When a chance meeting at her new job with childhood friend, fellow otaku, and now coworker Hirotaka Nifuji almost gets her secret outed at work, she comes up with a plan to make sure he never speaks up. But he comes up with a counter-proposal: why doesn't she just date him instead? In love, there are no save points.
Fujita launched the manga on the image sharing website pixiv in 2014. In November 2015, the manga moved to Ichijinsha's Comic POOL digital manga magazine. The manga ended on July 16. Ichijinsha published the manga's 11th and final volume on October 14. Kodansha Comics released the fifth omnibus volume on October 5. The manga will have a spinoff that will appear in pixiv's digital manga service comic Pool.
The manga inspired an 11-episode television anime that premiered in April 2018. The anime streamed on Amazon Prime Video inside and outside of Japan. The first original anime disc for the manga shipped with the manga's seventh volume in March 2019. The second original anime disc shipped with the 10th volume in February 2021. The third original anime disc shipped with the 11th volume on October 14.
A live-action film adaptation of the manga opened in Japan in February 2020. The film debuted at #1 in its opening weekend.
Sources: Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku stage play's website, Comic Natalie
