The official website for The Fable anime announced on Wednesday six new cast members and a January 9 premiere for the show’s second season, along with a new visual. The season will adapt the Yamaoka arc of Katsuhisa Minami’s crime comedy manga.
The reveal fills out a supporting roster that matters more than usual here, because the Yamaoka arc leans on a cast of underworld figures rather than the hitman at the centre of the story.
The new cast
- Kōichi Yamadera as Yamaoka
- Takanori Hoshino as Azami
- Hiroyuki Yoshino as Yukari
- Taiten Kusunoki as Jiro
- Satoshi Mikami as Koji Mizuno
- Seiyū Fujiwara as Suzumushi
Yamadera is the headline name of the group. He has been a fixture in anime, games, and imported film dubbing for decades, and giving him the Yamaoka role signals how much weight the production is placing on that arc’s antagonist.
When it airs
The second season premieres on NTV on January 9 at 12:55 a.m. JST. That late-night slot means the first episode lands on the night of January 9 and is effectively a January 10 start for most viewers. The series is scheduled to run weekly.
Staff and returning cast
Ryōsuke Takahashi returns to direct at Tezuka Productions after leading the first season. Sci-fi writer Yūya Takashima is back on series composition and shares script duties with Mayumi Morita. Kyūma Ōshita and Saki Hasegawa return as character designers, and Yasuyuki Urakami is back as sound director. Yo Tsuji takes over as music composer.
The returning cast includes Kazuyuki Okitsu as Akira Satō, Miyuki Sawashiro as Yōko Satō, Kana Hanazawa as Misaki Shimizu, and Akio Ohtsuka as Takeshi Ebihara, among others.
Where the first season left off
The anime premiered in April 2024 and ran for two continuous cours. Disney+ streams the series worldwide, Hulu carries it in the United States, and an English dub is available. That international reach is worth noting for a title that rarely tours overseas, and it means the second season should be easier to find outside Japan than the first one was when it launched.
The manga behind the anime
Minami launched The Fable in Kodansha’s Weekly Young Magazine in November 2014 and ended it in November 2019. The manga ran to 22 collected volumes and won Best General Manga at the 41st Kodansha Manga Awards in 2017.
The franchise did not stop there. Two live-action films opened in Japan in 2019 and 2021. A sequel manga, The Fable: The Second Contact, ran from July 2021 to July 2023 and closed with nine volumes. A third part, The Fable: The Third Secret, launched in March 2025. Kodansha USA publishes the original in English, and K MANGA runs the series as a simulpub. There is also a roguelike deckbuilder game in development from Kodansha Game Creators’ Lab and Mono Entertainment.
The Fable now sits in a crowded start to 2027. Our 2027 anime releases guide keeps a running list of the titles with firm dates, and our coverage of Sekiro: No Defeat and its January 2027 window is another example of a premiere locking in its slot this early.
Why it matters
A crime comedy about a legendary hitman forced into ordinary life is a hard thing to keep fresh across multiple seasons. The Yamaoka arc is where the manga stops treating the premise as a joke and starts treating it as a threat, which makes the choice of adaptation material the more telling detail in this announcement. If the season follows the arc as advertised, it should be the show’s most serious run yet.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Second season visual for The Fable anime, via Anime News Network.
