Live-Action The Great Passage Series Reveals More Cast

NHK revelaed more cast members for Fune o Amu ~Watashi, Jisho Tsukurimasu~ (The Great Passage ~I Will Make a Dictionary~), the live-action series of Shion Miura‘s Fune o Amu (The Great Passage) novel series, on Wednesday.

The newly announced cast members include:

• Yuma Yamoto as Shinichirō Miyamoto
• Rie Mimura as Kaguya Majime
• Makiko Watanabe as Kaoru Sasaki
• Maeda Oshiro as Mitsuru Tendō
• Ryō Iwamatsu as Kōhei Araki
• Osamu Mukai as Masashi Nishioka
• Kyohei Shibata as Tomosuke Matsumoto
• Shinichi Tsutsumi
• Nobuyuki Suzuki
• Machiko Washio
• Masanobu Katsumura
• Yôko Moriguchi
• Ayumi Itō
• Eri Murakawa
• Tokio Emoto
• Yoshihiko Hosoda
• Junki Tozuka
• Miho Kanazawa
• Katsuhiro Higo
• Masaki Kaji
• Kayo Noro
• Ririsa Miyazaki

The series will premiere on the NHK BS and BS Premium 4K channels on February 18 at 10:49 p.m. JST (8:49 a.m. EST).

The 10-episode series stars Yōjirō Noda as the protagonist Mitsuya Majime, who was recruited to a publishing company’s dictionary editorial department due to his love of words and reading, and Elaiza Ikeda as Midori Kishibe, who was transferred from a fashion magazine’s editorial department to the dictionary editorial department. Renpei Tsukamoto and Manabu Asou are directing the series. Naomi Hiruta is writing the script, and Face 2 fAKE is composing the music.

Miura’s novel originally shipped in 2011, and it inspired a live-action film directed by Yuya Ishii that opened in Japan in 2013. The film won the Japan Academy Prize for Picture of the Year in 2013.

The story follows the employees at the Genbu Shobō publishing company. Araki, who is a veteran editor for the dictionary department, is looking for a successor now that he’s approaching retirement age. After Majime Mitsuya — a salesman who’s a poor talker — meets Masashi Nishioka — Araki’s coworker who is sociable and frivolous — Araki overhears their conversation and decides to recruit Majime into the department. The story follows “the awkward humans” Majime and Masashi as they work together to compile a medium-sized Japanese dictionary titled “The Great Passage” (Daitokai).

Haruko Kumota (Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju) launched the novel’s manga adaptation in Kodansha‘s ITAN magazine in June 2016. Kodansha published the manga’s first compiled book volume in July 2017, and the second and final volume in November 2017.

An anime adaptation that used Kumota’s original character designs premiered on the Fuji TV network’s Noitamina timeslot in October 2016. Amazon Prime‘s now defunct Anime Strike paid streaming service streamed the anime in the United States.

Sources: NHK, Mainichi Shimbun’s Mantan Web