New Crime Anime MURCIÉLAGO Unveils Its Main Cast

Anime fans mapping out the winter 2027 season just got a premiere worth circling. The television anime adaptation of Kana Yoshimura's long-running manga MURCIÉLAGO has revealed the voice actors behind its central trio, with a new teaser trailer setting the tone for a January 2027 debut.

According to Hypebeast's report on the teaser, Hitomi Ueda will voice Kuroko Koumori, a former death-row inmate whose execution is stayed so she can work as a state-sanctioned killer. The footage opens on a mugshot-style image of the scarred protagonist before cutting to her wielding an oversized handgun with open glee, leaning hard into the manga's collision of black comedy, gunplay, and heightened violence.

Ueda is joined by Minori Suzuki as Hinako Tozakura, Kuroko's partner and minder, whose cheerful demeanor hides extraordinary driving skills. Sumire Uesaka completes the newly announced leads as Chiyo Yanaoka, Kuroko's girlfriend and the daughter of a yakuza boss. The preview introduces all three performances while establishing the dangerous buddy dynamic between Kuroko and Hinako that drives much of the story.

A killer premise with a decade of manga behind it

The setup is pure pulp: spared from execution, Kuroko is recruited by the state to eliminate criminals whose brutality demands equally extreme measures. It is the kind of high-concept hook that has carried crime anime before, but MURCIÉLAGO arrives with an unusually deep bench of source material. Yoshimura's manga has been serialized in Square Enix's Young Gangan magazine since 2013, giving the adaptation more than a decade of chapters to draw from.

That backlog matters for how the anime will be paced. Long-running manga adaptations live or die on whether the production can plan a full arc instead of stalling for new material, and a finished-or-nearly-finished runway is the best insurance a premiere can have. The latest teaser is the project's second major video after an earlier super teaser, and it offers the clearest sense yet of how the adaptation plans to translate the manga's deliberately unhinged tone to animation.

The timeline also tells its own story. More than ten years of serialization built the fanbase, the anime's January window was announced earlier, and this week's cast reveal is the first concrete look at the voices carrying it. With the premiere roughly two months out, the production is right on the standard marketing cadence: teaser, cast, then a full trailer with broadcast details as the date approaches.

Where the series lands in a crowded winter season

January is traditionally one of the busiest premiere windows in anime, and 2027 is shaping up no differently. For viewers outside Japan, the viewing picture is already settled: HIDIVE will stream the series in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, putting it on the same service that has become a home for offbeat genre titles.

That distribution choice is a quiet signal about the show's ambitions. A six-territory day-one streaming deal suggests the licensors expect the series to travel, and crime anime with a female-led cast has found loyal audiences on streaming platforms in recent years. Compared with adaptations that arrive with no international home announced, MURCIÉLAGO is entering its premiere season with the logistics already handled.

For newcomers, the entry point is simple: a state-employed killer, a getaway driver who never misses, and a romance tangled up with organized crime. For longtime manga readers, the open question is how far the anime will go in matching the source's extremes. If the teaser is any indication, the answer is all the way.

One more thing working in the show's favor is timing. Winter premieres get a full cour to build word of mouth before the spring season arrives, and a January start lets the series ride the wave of year-end anime retrospectives that always spotlight what to watch next. If the full trailer lands in December as expected, MURCIÉLAGO will enter the new year as one of the season's most talked-about crime premieres.

Manga-to-anime adaptations are having a busy stretch on the site: the Magic Knight Rayearth remake opened with a throwback anthem that moved longtime fans, and the Psyren anime premiered on Crunchyroll after a long wait. For the bigger picture on how fandom itself is shifting, see why anime fandom is getting deeper, not just bigger.