News

Cells at Work! Gets Kabuki Stage Play in April 2027

A new official X/Twitter account opened last Friday to announce that Akane Shimizu's Cells at Work! (Hataraku Saibō) manga is getting a kabuki stage play adaptation at the Shinbashi Enbujō in Tokyo in April 2027. The account lists that it is a "scramble kabuki" play, a new style that casts a mix of traditional kabuki actors and other actors.

Kensuke Yokouchi is directing and writing the play.

Ainosuke Kataoka, who played Pneumococcus in the series' live-action film, stars as White Blood Cell in the play. The cast also includes Kazutarō Nakamura, Ryoga Ishikawa, Mandy Sekiguchi, and Ichikawa Chusha.

Shimizu launched the original Cells at Work! manga in the March 2015 issue of Kodansha's Monthly Shonen Sirius magazine, and ended it in January 2021. Kodansha USA Publishing is releasing the manga in English.

The first television anime of the original manga premiered in July 2018. The second season premiered in January 2021, alongside the anime of the Cells at Work! Code Black spinoff manga.

The live-action film adaptation opened in Japan in December 2024 and ranked at #1. The film sold a total of 612,000 tickets and earned a total of 844,768,310 yen (about US$5.74 million) in its first three days. Netflix began exclusively streaming the film in June 2025.

Kodansha USA Publishing is also releasing the following spinoff manga in English: Cells at Work: Bacteria!, Cells at Work!: Neo Bacteria!, Cells at Work! White Brigade, Cells at Work! Baby, Cells NOT at Work!, Cells at Work! Code Black, Cells at Work and Friends!, Cells at Work! Lady, and Cells at Work: Platelets!.

Several other spinoffs exist such as Kae Hashimoto's Hataraku Saibō Illegal (Cells at Work! Illegal), Yū Maeda's Hataraku Saibō Muscle (Cells at Work! Muscle), Choko Aozora and Meku Kaire's Hataraku Saibō Neko (Cells at Work! Cat), and Koma Warita and Ryō Kuji's Hataraku Saibō Okusuri (Cells at Work! Medicine).

Sources: Cells at Work! kabuki play's X/Twitter account, Comic Natalie