Sakamoto Days

A body first, a past reasoned out afterwards

The shape came before the story: a man both fat and unbeatable, an idea Yuto Suzuki has traced in part to the 1978 comedy Enter the Fat Dragon. He reasoned the rest backwards from that body: the man is heavy because he retired, and he retired because he married. TMS Entertainment adapted the result in 2025.

Masaki Watanabe directed that adaptation, animated in Clip Studio Paint and Adobe software under a paper texture, an idea he credits to the cinematographer. The texture deepens the menacing passages and gives an almost homely warmth to the scenes where the family eats or watches television. The roller coaster fight of the third episode was modelled in 3D, then animated and rotoscoped, and took about three times as long as an ordinary scene.

The Story

Taro Sakamoto had no rival as a hitman until he fell for a convenience store clerk called Aoi, who set one condition: quit, and never kill again. He agreed, married her, had a daughter, opened a shop in the suburbs of Tokyo and put on weight. The trade finds him anyway, and he has to hold it off without breaking that promise, helped by a mind-reading young killer, the orphaned daughter of a crime boss and a sniper.

The manga behind it began in Weekly Shōnen Jump in November 2020. Suzuki's editor, Soushiro Ishikawa, says the artist works for readability above all when he draws action, and credits his background in Nihonga, a Japanese style of painting, for his page layouts.

The Ideal Audience

Twenty-two episodes went out in two blocks on TV Tokyo across 2025, with Netflix carrying them worldwide on the same days. Netflix's mid-year report made it the platform's most-watched anime worldwide over that half, at 24.4 million views.

Common Sense Media puts the series at sixteen and up: gun fights, beheadings, coarse language, smoking and drinking. Its reviewer also flags the fat jokes aimed at Sakamoto himself, and we would rank those above the violence. A second season is due in January 2027.