Hisaya Nakajo’s Hana-Kimi turns 30 this year, and the anniversary is being marked with two productions instead of one. A new live-action television series airs on NTV from December 5, and the manga’s first ever stage play follows in February with most of the TV cast carrying over.
The series runs eight half-hour episodes. Hana Kawamura plays Mizuki Ashiya, the track athlete who transfers into an all-boys high school to get close to high jumper Izumi Sano and ends up sharing his room. Makoto Hasegawa of the boy group THE RAMPAGE plays Sano. Itsuki Fujiwara, also from THE RAMPAGE, plays Shuichi Nakatsu.
Hana-Kimi live-action series cast
- Mizuki Ashiya: Hana Kawamura
- Izumi Sano: Makoto Hasegawa (THE RAMPAGE)
- Shuichi Nakatsu: Itsuki Fujiwara (THE RAMPAGE)
- Shinji Noe: Keigo Ito (Ryugujo)
- Kyogo Sekime: Yuki Tomita (Ryugujo)
- Taiki Kayashima: Miro Takaoka (Lienel)
- Senri Nakao: Riku Morita (Lienel)
- Megumi Tennoji: Genosuke
- Minami Nanba: Daigo Kobayashi (Tagright)
- Masao Himejima: Tomoki Nishiyama (Tagright)
- Itsuki Kujo: Yuki Sakurai (Gekidan Exile)
- Makoto Kagurazaka: Hiroto Takahashi
Almost the entire dormitory is played by members of idol and talent groups, which is a change from the 2007 and 2011 versions. Those dramas cast working actors in the supporting roles and saved the idols for the leads.
Keisuke Shibata and NTV’s Shiori Ueno direct. Fumie Koga, Yuka Arai and Kazumi Oki write the scripts, with Yoko Tamura handling series composition. Koji Endo scores the music. His credits include the live-action Blade of the Immortal and Terraformars, plus the anime Nyaight of the Living Cat.
NTV broadcasts the show at 2:30 p.m. JST on December 5. TVer and Hulu stream it in Japan, and Hulu also carries a director’s cut.
The stage play is written and directed by Shintaro Sugano. It opens in Osaka on February 13 to 15, one week after the TV run ends, then moves to Aichi on February 18 and 19, and closes in Tokyo from March 13 to 22. Most of the series cast appears on stage.
A franchise that keeps coming back
Hana-Kimi ran in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume from 1996 to 2004 and is Nakajo’s defining work. She returned to it for a short continuation in 2011, a special chapter in 2014, and the After School sequel Himitsu, which launched in 2021. Viz Media publishes the manga in English and also handled her earlier Sugar Princess.
Live-action versions are nothing new. The 2007 series starred Maki Horikita, Shun Oguri and Toma Ikuta. A second one in 2011 starred Atsuko Maeda, Aoi Nakamura and Shohei Miura. Taiwan made its own version in 2006 and South Korea followed. What the franchise never had, until now, is a stage production.
Anime came much later. The adaptation premiered its first episode at Anime NYC in August 2025, started airing on Tokyo MX on January 4, 2026, and also ran on BS11, MBS and CBC.
Shoujo properties from that era are getting steady adaptation work again. Firefly Wedding lands a live-action series on Fuji TV in 2027, and the manga-to-drama pipeline has been one of the busier corners of the industry all year.
The stage play is the interesting half
Mizuki has to pass as a boy for eight episodes, so the whole show rests on that one piece of casting. Kawamura gets the job opposite an idol-group Sano, and the pairing is the same trick the manga pulled in 1996, now aimed at an audience that has watched a dozen shows try it since.
The scheduling says something too. A stage run that starts a week after the finale, with the TV cast intact, is built so viewers can walk out of the last episode and into a ticket queue. That is a commercial decision more than an artistic one, and it will work or fail on how December goes.
Stage versions of long-running manga have become a reliable second life for older titles in Japan. Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix is getting a stage production in February 2027, and the pattern is the same one Hana-Kimi is following here: a familiar name, a short theatrical run, and a cast the audience already knows from screens.
For readers outside Japan, Viz’s edition is complete and remains the entry point. The 2007 drama is the version most people abroad have seen. It plays like a snapshot of mid-2000s Japanese television rather than a faithful adaptation, which is part of why people still bring it up.
If the live-action route is not your thing, the 2026 anime is the newest way in, and the Golden Kamuy live-action series returning in January shows how long these franchises can keep cycling through formats.
Source: Anime News Network, with the series visual via NTV.
Featured image: Cast visual for the 2026 live-action Hana-Kimi television series, via NTV and Anime News Network.
