Bleach names the voices behind Kazui and Ichika
Ichigo's son and Rukia's daughter finally have voices, as the anime's final cours heads for its closing episodes.
The two characters who close the book on the Bleach anime now have voices. Aniplex has announced that Kazui Kurosaki will be played by 橘杏咲 and Ichika Abarai by Ayaka Ohashi.
Both actors recorded comments for the reveal, which appeared on the official Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War site as the anime works through its final cours, -The Calamity-, which began broadcasting on TV Tokyo on 25 July.
Who Kazui and Ichika are
Kazui and Ichika belong to the next generation of Bleach. They arrive in the time-skip epilogue of Tite Kubo's manga: Kazui is the son of Ichigo Kurosaki and Orihime, Ichika the daughter of Rukia and Renji Abarai. Giving them voices is the anime's clearest signal yet that it intends to end where the manga ended.
Why the casting matters
Bleach spent years as the cautionary tale of an adaptation that stopped short, closing its original television run before the manga had finished. The revival has been working through the Thousand-Year Blood War arc ever since, and putting the epilogue's children on screen, with names attached, turns the finale from a promise into a cast list.
Our opinion
Casting the epilogue kids is the most concrete commitment the Bleach revival has made. It would have been easy to stop at the end of the war and leave the quiet future to the page; instead the production is spending whatever those final episodes cost to land on the same last panel the readers got. Fans who spent a decade assuming they would never see it finish are about to be proved wrong twice over.