Legendary mangaka, Akimi Yoshida is celebrating her 40th anniversary, and what better way to do it than with a new anime? MAPPA and Fuji TV’s Noitamina Animation bloc, are coming together to bring one of Yoshida’s classics to the small screen. The classic manga in question? The 80’s/90’s shoujo/crime/action classic, Banana Fish. They even unveiled a brand new PV announcing the anime adaptation for 2018:

Viz media, which publishes the manga in English, describes its story as:

Vice City: New York in the 80s… Nature made Ash Lynx beautiful; nurture made him a cold ruthless killer. A child runaway brought up as the adopted heir, hatchet man, and sex toy of “Papa” Dino Golzine, the East Coast’s Corsican crime lord, Ash is now at the rebellious age of seventeen – forsaking the kingdom of power and riches held out by the devil who raised him, preferring a code he can live with among a small but loyal gang of street thugs. But his “Papa” can’t simply let him go – not when the hideous secret that drove Ash’s older brother mad in Vietnam has suddenly fallen into his insatiably ambitious hands.

It’s exactly the wrong time for Eiji Okamura, a pure-hearted young photographer from Japan, to arrive in NYC and make Ash Lynx’s acquaintance… and fall with him into the bloody whirlpool of pride, greed, lust and wrath unleashed by the enigma code-named Banana Fish…

Free’s Hiroko Utsumi is directing the series over at MAPPA (Yuri! on Ice, Kakkegurui). Fuits Basket’s Akemi Hayashi will be designing the characters, while Mob Psycho 100’s Hiroshi Seko is writing the scripts.

Akimi Yoshida also created another classic shoujo manga, Umimachi Diary. As for Banana Fish, it ran inside the pages of Bessatsu Shoujo Comic from 1985 to 1994. However, this would also be the series’ first anime adaptation, more than 20 years after it ended.

source: Comic Natalie