This Monday, the official website for the animated adaptation of Minami Katsuhisa’s The Fable revealed character design sheets and a preliminary premiere date for spring 2024 on NTV. The anime is produced by Tezuka Productions and directed by Takahashi Ryousuke (Armored Trooper Votoms, The Phoenix, Ozma) with scripts by Takashima Yuuya and Morita Mayumi (Black Jack, Dagashi Kashi‘s second season).
Minami published the original series in Kodansha‘s Weekly Young Magazine from November 1, 2014, to November 18, 2019; it was eventually collected into 22 tankoubon volumes. The manga went on to win the 41st Kodansha Manga Award for the general category in 2017 and sell over 20 million copies by October 2022. It also received two live-action film adaptations directed by Eguchi Kan, with former V6 member Okada Jun’ichi as the protagonist.
A sequel titled The Fable: The Second Contact was serialized in Weekly Young Magazine from July 19, 2021, to July 10, 2023, reaching eight volumes. A spin-off, also titled The Fable but written in hiragana (ざ・ふぁぶる), was published online on Comic Days from March 6, 2018, to February 26, 2019, and was printed in a single volume with other stories by Minami. Kodansha USA licensed the series in English in March 2022.
In the field of assassination, the hitman nicknamed “The Fable” is what people would call a genius. Able to take down any target with deadly effectiveness and not a shred of remorse, his business has been doing well. Too well, actually, to the point he risks attracting attention to himself. For that reason, his employer orders him to lay low with a yakuza contact in Osaka for a whole year and use the money earned so far to live the life of an average person, also as a sort of infiltration training. He accepts like he would any other job, but as someone who can kill as naturally as he breathes, this could prove more difficult than even the most dangerous jobs. His complete lack of social skills doesn’t help either…
