Sakamoto Days: John Wick With A Happy Ending (Kinda)

Seinen is a manga demographic aimed at adult men populated by gritty and violent stories often portraying tragic and stoic main characters. The world presented within its panels is carved with a realistic and lifelike artstyle to go along with the type of story it’s trying to tell. The comedic and exaggerated features commonly associated with Japanese comics are often rare or entirely absent. That’s where you would find most series about assassins like the classic Crying Freeman, the tragic story of a brainwashed hitman who sheds tears for every victim he makes. At some point, however, mean looking assassin characters started to find a spotlight outside of gritty Seinen, but rather in comedy series.

Some notable titles like Reborn! which has its own take on the Italian mob with the twist that the hitmen in the story are babies. Spy × Family introduces us to Yor Forger, the most adorable killer housewife to date. The Fable tells the story of Sato Akira, the Pelé of murdering people, sent to live in a small city for a year with the mission of spending his time there without committing any murders. On the pages of these manga, killing people for a living doesn’t necessarily make you into a villain. Seeing their story through a comedic lens helps make these characters into likeable anti-heroes. Amongst all of those, Yuto Suzuki’s Sakamoto Days gives us one of the funniest parodies of the hitmen genre to date.

Taro Sakamoto is a legend in the underworld of assassins. But, after making a name for himself, he left the criminal underworld behind to pursue a happy simple life with his wife Aoi. Now the distinguished hitman is reduced to a chubby convenience store manager who wants nothing more than to spend his days eating and playing with his little daughter. However, you know how it goes, you can’t simply walk away from the Japanese Association of Assassins. Thus, Sakamoto’s boring and happy life is constantly interrupted by his former associates who are sent after him. Getting rid of the hitmen pursuing him shouldn’t be much of a problem as he’s supposed to be the greatest killer (even with the extra kilos) but to make things just a little harder for Taro, his wife made him promise he would not kill again. Now, the out of shape prodigy of assassination must find creative ways of stopping his enemies and preserve his newfound lifestyle without doing what he does best.

Sakamoto Days is admittedly inspired by western movies like John Wick and The Equalizer. Manga creators have never shied away from using an existing plot as a starting point to make their own stories. From Mad Max we got Fist of the North Star, from Journey to the West we got Dragon Ball and so on. Yuto Suzuki follows that tradition, borrowing from these works as a foundation for the story they want to tell. Like John Wick, Sakamoto is someone who left the underworld to be with his loved one and has to pay the price for it constantly. However, unlike Johnathan, he gets to live his happy life with his family. In the episodic nature of the manga, Taro, along with managing a convenience store, manages to fend off assassin after assassin. While John Wick’s foes are often formidable martial artists and sharpshooters, the people who come after Sakamoto and his family tend to be even more over the top with all sorts of chaotic supernatural abilities and cybernetic enhancements.

The first hitman to attack Sakamoto’s store is the young assassin Shin Asakura, who can read minds – which is handy since Sakamoto doesn’t speak much. The young Shin, who initially is tasked with killing the former legend, ends up joining Sakamoto’s staff instead. The same happens with Lu Xiaotang, the young daughter of a Chinese mafia boss. After being saved by Sakamoto and Shin, she joins the convenience store crew and helps fight their enemies with her drunken boxing kung fu. This is a constant in the series as many of Sakamoto’s adversaries end up becoming friends after failing to murder him, often being moved by his new lifestyle.

Weekly Shonen Jump, the legendary magazine where Sakamoto Days is published, has stories catered for young audiences (Shounen means boy after all). However, what’s considered appropriate for young audiences in Japan can be quite different from what you see in the West. There are plenty of cute characters here who you would assume fit more in the slice of life aesthetics of the story, but this manga gets wild when it comes to its action scenes. We see people being killed, decapitated and amputated not many panels away from Sakamoto having a wholesome moment with his daughter. Sometimes Yuto Suzuki seems to go for that comically violent Looney Tunes aesthetic, but when he wants to, he knows how to make something gory and scary. That juxtaposition reminds me of when you’d find violent animated films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, or Vampire Hunter D in the children’s section of video stores back in the 90s. But Sakamoto Days won’t allow itself to be too gory or violent beyond the dramatic effect of chopping someone’s head off for impact on the page. The tone is usually brought back to comedy right away as the overweight Taro frequently becomes lean again by burning all his excess calories to draw the extra energy he needs to defeat the baddie of the week. But fear not, a meal is all he needs to get back to his adorable round self.

Sakamoto Days offers a lot of endearing slice-of-life moments rudely interrupted by zany battles full of homages to martial art movies, manga, and action cinema. You see nods to many famous titles like John Wick, Leon: the Professional, and even The Shawshank Redemption. As a fan of that genre of movies myself, I’m looking forward to seeing how those homages are going to be portrayed in the anime adaptation. Give it a read If you ever found yourself wishing John Wick could just have lived a happy life with his wife and dog, but not happy enough that you wouldn’t get to see some over the top action scenes in between chores.

Sakamoto Days has been published in 14 volumes (so far) through Viz Media. It can be found at all good comic book shops, online retailers, eBay, Amazon/Kindle, and digitally on the Shonen Jump and MANGA Plus reading services.