NETFLIX continues to build on its impressive licensed anime library with Sakamoto Days, an action comedy revolving around a retired
legendary assassin turned small convenience store owner and family man.
Once a feared figure in the Japanese underworld, Taro Sakamoto (Tomokazu Sugita) in the present operates a family-owned convenience store in a quiet part of Tokyo. After getting married and becoming a father, Sakamoto is unrecognisable from his days as a bachelor assassin, having gained an estimated 70kg in excess weight.
Sakamoto Days kicks off when Shin Asakura (Nobunaga Shimazaki), a clairvoyant hitman reluctantly locates him, with the order to either successfully convince Sakamoto to return to the underworld or if failing to do so, to snuff out the portly ex-assassin’s life.
Based on Yuto Suzuki’s manga series, Sakamoto Days bears a lot of similarities with other fictional works, especially recent ones such as the films Nobody and John Wick. What sets the animation apart is the Japanese eccentricities common in manga and anime, along with the story’s heavy emphasis on the family unit.
There is also the comedy that comes from juxtaposing a stoic, mostly quiet character such as Sakamoto with the other more colourful and expressive characters, such as Asakura. As his clairvoyance is always “turned on”, he is constantly reading the minds of others and it gives a window for the series to inject humour by having Sakamoto think of hyper-violent things to shut Asakura up.
