Yuya Yagira, the star of the live-action series based on Masaaki Ninomiya’s horror manga Gannibal, received the Asian Excellence Award at the Asia Contents Awards & Global OTT Awards in Busan, Korea on Sunday. The award celebrates outstanding achievements in various fields of culture in Asia and beyond.
The live-action series, which adapts the manga’s story of a police officer who uncovers a cannibalistic secret in a remote village, debuted in December 2022 and ran for seven episodes. The show is available on Disney+ and Hulu worldwide. Variety, an entertainment news website, reported that Disney+ claimed the series was the most popular original series produced in Japan on its platform, based on the number of hours streamed.
The series will have a second season with the same cast and crew.
Ablaze Publishing has acquired the rights to the manga and plans to release the first volume in North America in November and the second volume in February 2024.
Ablaze summarizes the manga’s plot as follows:
GANNIBAL follows Daigo Agawa, a police officer who is assigned to a remote mountain village called Kuge. He is greeted warmly by the villagers at first, but he soon notices something strange about the village after an old woman dies mysteriously. He begins to suspect that the villagers are hiding a dark secret: they are eating people.
The manga was serialized in Nihonbungeisha’s Weekly Manga Goraku magazine from October 2018 to November 2021. The 13th and final volume of the manga was released in Japan in February 2022.
