First Look: Sakamoto Days

Written by Ross Locksley on 13 Jan 2025

The latest weekly anime from Netflix is the assassin comedy series Sakamoto Days, a series with such a simple premise I'm actually surprised we haven't seen it before.

Taro Sakamoto was the most feared hitman in the underworld, essentially an indestructible beast of a man capable of catching bullets with chopsticks. He worked for a group called The Order until he ran into a young woman named Aoi at a convenience store. Instantly smitten with the young woman, they started dating. At Aoi's insistence he gave up the hitman life, got married and opened a convenience store, allowing himself to become out of shape as he became a domesticated man. The first episode opens with another member of the order, Shin Asakura, seeking to take his life. Nobody leaves The Order without permission.

The first episode lays a lot of groundwork while managing to keep the story feeling tight and lively. Shin's clairvoyance is used effectively to show his talents, his motives for offing his former partner seem fairly legitimate (though arguably if he can read minds he should already know what an asshole his boss really is) and the opener smartly keeps the cast limited to Shin, Sakamoto and his immediate family. There's plenty of action packed into the runtime too, with some nice visual gags (Sakamoto's store transformation is genuinely amusing, though it's been done before in Kingsman) and some excellent action sequences that put me in mind of Noir. The animation is solid if not outstanding, pretty standard TV fare for a modern show which means its smooth, sharp and well directed.

Most of the humour is derived from Sakamoto's deadpan delivery and his incredible fighting prowess that's intact despite his ample frame. His ability to turn everyday objects into lethal weapons is also quite inventive and allows the episode to surprise you here and there.

Whether or not the show will have legs depends largely on how fresh they can keep things - now we know how good Sakamoto still is, the element of surprise is gone, though I imagine his attitude will continue to draw a smile. I might have preferred a slightly more drawn out reveal of his latent abilities, in much the same way that Trigun made Vash look either foolish or incredibly adept depending on how you look at his actions, but Sakamoto Days aptly goes for the jugular to move the story forward.

As a shonen anime I expect various groups of characters to appear and a quick glimpse through the Wiki shows this to be the case - lots of groups of mostly men with at least one interesting female character, which means the traditional shonen structure is very much in place. The rest will be down to the writing.

As an opening episode Sakamoto Days hits all the right notes - it's a good time all in, getting the basic plot points lined up while having fun with the premise. There's lots of interesting possibilities from Sakamoto's past that can come back to haunt him and from what I've seen of the manga's art style, this should have some pretty trendy looking threats in the pipeline.

Sakamoto Days airs a new episode each week on Netflix.