Crime and Punishment Manga Gets TV Show w/ Kengo Kora as Lead

The screen adaptation of Naoyuki Ochiai's Crime and Punishment: A Falsified Romance manga will be a live-action television series which will premiere on April 29.

Kengo Kora (Ohisama, Gokusen 2) will star as the college dropout Miroku Tachi, while Asami Mizukawa (Nodame Cantabile, Dark Water) will play Echika Ameya. Masato Ibu (Maison Ikkoku - Apartment Fantasy, Nodame Cantabile) will play a public prosecutor. Tetsushi Tanaka (Maho Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto) will also act in the series. Ai Hashimoto will play the leader of a paid dating group named Hikari Baba, and Shota Sumetani will play a money smuggler named Shota Someya.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's original Crime and Punishment novel classic, a poor student struggles with his decision to kill a pawnbroker and the resulting consequences, while the rest of society reveal themselves in how they react to the crime. Ochiai re-imagines the psychological drama by putting a young hikikomori (shut-in introvert) man and an enko (paid dating partner) girl at the center of the crime in modern-day Japan. A college dropout named Miroku meets a high school girl named Risa and devises a terrible plan.

cr: ann