As is sometimes the case, the extra-curriculars with Sakamoto Days are more forward-facing than the story itself. In the first place it’s decidedly odd that such a huge commercial hit – one of the biggest in by far the biggest manga magazine in the world – took so long to get an adaptation. At 19 volumes it’s literally one of the longest waits in Weekly Shounen Jump history, and it makes no sense. It sells a ton, fares very well in the table of contents, and is even liked by critics.
As if that weren’t enough, it didn’t appear to be getting the champagne treatment either. Sakamoto Days is not quite as big a hit as Boku no Hero Academia or Haikyuu!! were when their adaptations began (much earlier), but even beyond not going to somebody like Bones or Production I.G., the general perception around this adaptation was “dumpster fire”. Most everyone (including some who claimed to be in the know) said disaster was looming. And the previews did look pretty indifferent. I took a wait and see approach, which I guess is easier to do if you’re not a vested fan of the source material. But TMS is not a shit studio, and director Watanabe Masaki is more than experienced and decently capable.
My verdict is, much ado about nothing. This was perfectly fine, maybe even better than fine. It may not have been a sasuga fest or a stylistic triumph like Nige Jouzu no Wakagimi, but the fight scenes – which everyone agrees are totally critical to this adaptation’s success – were well-drawn and choreographed. They captured the cool factor which manga readers insist is the essence of the series. And those readers seem to agree, as the response from both old and new viewers seems mostly positive. In this instance all that negativity may actually have helped, as it certainly lowered expectations. Things could obviously crater at any time, but there’s certainly no sign of that here.
We did indeed get a double-episode premiere, as is all the fashion these days. Listeners to the “My Taste is Better Than Yours” podcast may know that my co-host Samu is a humongous Sakamoto Days fan – he seemed generally pleased with the premiere(s) – but that doesn’t really apply to me. I read some chapters once upon a time and certainly didn’t dislike them, but I never felt like there was anything special going on. It’s not like we haven’t seen this basic premise a hundred times, but execution obviously matters. Samu himself says the series is style over substance, and I sort of get that here.
Mangaka Suzuki Yuuto famously considers Hunter X Hunter his favorite manga, and I can see that in the tone this series goes for. It has a bit of Spy x Family to it too, in some very obvious ways. The titular Sakamoto Taro (Sugita Tomokazu, who doesn’t have all that much to do), is an ex-hitman who was the best in the business. He’s a superhuman, basically, but that’s no stretch as we also have an esper in the mix. That would be his former partner Asakura Shin (Shimazaki Nobunaga), who gets assigned to take Sakamoto out for daring to leave the business. Which he did after he fell for a convenience store clerk, with whom he eventually had a wedding and a child, and then gained about a hundred pounds.
The deal with Sakamoto is he rarely speaks, though Shin does hear him thinking a lot. His wife Aoi (Touyama Nao) made him promise not to kill anyone ever again. And indeed, to use his powers to save people. Which we see him do a couple of times already, starting with Shin, who’s about to be rubbed out by the family for failing to kill his old sempai and indeed pleading for his life to be spared. He also winds up (with Shin’s help) saving a young girl named Lu Shaotang (Sakura Ayane) whose parents were killed by a Chinatown mob boss after the key she possesses (to the vault holding the clan treasures).
All that is relatively formulaic for this sort of work, but it’s certainly brought off with a fair bit of aplomb. I did wind up liking both Sakamoto and Shin quite a lot, and the action sequences were indeed very good. There were also some pretty funny moments, like Shin slapping pain patches on Sakamoto in the midst of a showdown with the hitman brothers after Lu. No new ground was broken here, but the entertainment level stayed pretty high across both episodes.
This is obviously only the introduction to the story, which will soon move past the chapters I’m familiar with. The staying power of both the story and the production itself is going to be an interesting thing to watch play out. I could see this premise getting pretty repetitive, and cool fight scenes have a limited ceiling as a draw for me (especially when not animated in shock and awe fashion). Then again there’s a twinkle of something a little subversive here, and maybe Suzuki has something more interesting to say than he reveals in this prologue section. We have a two-cour (split) commitment, so if he does the anime has plenty of time to relay it.
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