Yuichi Fukada has, in the last decade, realizes himself as a trustworthy director to bring beloved manga stories to life on the silver screen – HK: Forbidden Super Hero (2013), HK2: The Abnormal Crisis (2016), Gintama (2017), Gintama 2: Rules Are Made To Be Broken (2018), Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku (2020), and Under Ninja (2025). He bends himself to the dynamics of the film-committee system and while this generally results into safe films with a broad appeal, it would be disingenuous to argue that there is no fun to be had with these films. The adaptation of Yuto Suzuki’s Sakamoto Days fits the bill – too safe, but pleasant enough.
The narrative of Sakamoto Days follows Taro Sakamoto (Ren Meguro), a legendary assassin who after falling in love with Aoi (Aya Eto) decides to retire, marry, and establish a family. Six years after birth of Hana (Miyu Yoshimoto), his first child, and living a quiet life as a shop owner, he has become unrecognizable – his body became plump and fat.
One day, Shin (Fumiya Takahashi), a clairvoyant assassin, receives a call from his boss (Koji Kato) to tell him they have finally located Sakamoto. He turns up at the local shop to ask him to return to the world of assassins and, if he refuses, to take his life – No one leaves the organisation! – and defuse the threat he might pose in the future. He refuses.
While he takes care of Shin with ease – thrashing the store in the mean time, the no-kill rule his wife established within their family prohibits him from taking his life. Sakamoto, knowing Shin will pay his failure with his life, decides to visit his former workplace to prevent his former boss and his goons from killing him. After clearing the place, he welcomes Shin into his family.
Yet, the threat has not been averted. Sakamoto, with Shin and part-timer/martial-artist Lu Xiaotang (Mayuu Yokota) as his side-kicks, are forced not only to fend off anyone who seeks to hurt him and his family without violating the no-kill rule, the fundamental rule upon which his familial happiness is build, but to do so without anyone of the family noticing a thing.
Sakamoto Days is, structurally speaking, a narrative of two halves. While the first half of the film is episodic – merely introducing a colourful variety of characters, the narrative twist around the middle gives Sakamoto Days a more focused direction (Character-note 1). We learn that, at the same time, that the dodenkai group put a bounty on Sakamoto, an unknown assassin named Slur (Jun Shison) for the bloody crosses he decorates his crime-scenes with, has started to decimate assassins affiliated with the JAA, disrupting the functioning of The Order, an organisation within the JAA which ensures the assassin world remains balanced.
With a mere narrative flick, we are suddenly plunged in a long action-rich finale. A bit all to sudden, though. This shift exposes the lack of any kind of emotional build-up in Sakamoto Days. Fukada heavily relies on the pre-existing emotional investment of the spectator in the characters to mask the emotional ineptitude of its narrative structure. Those few emotional moments, despite their musical accompaniment, only truly work for those audiences who already know the characters and the direction of their character arcs.
At a thematical level, Sakamoto Days presents itself a straightforward celebration of familial bonds, of bonds that create a supportive place of love where the subject is able to feel home. Throughout his narrative, Fukada contrasts different dynamics of violence – killing under contractual obligations, killing for prestige and fame, and fighting to protect the space one calls home – to underline that the only kind of violence that has any ethical worth is the violence that seeks to protect social bonds and one’s loved ones.
Within the narrative, Fukada also effectively plays with the well-known fact that men are, within their marital bonds, the subject of their wives. While Sakamoto, in the world of assassins, is the one who has the phallus – the main reason why many wish to take his life is not the bounty as such but the allure of taking hold of his phallus, of his legendary status, he is but a mere castrated being within the familial structure: Aoi sets the law, the rules to ensure and support the family’s happiness. In a certain sense, she allows him to be pose as the bearer of the phallus within the family.
The element of clairvoyance, on the other hand, is utilized to stage the brutal alienating consequences of being able to go beyond the social ego, the ‘verbally supported’ image presented by the subject to the other, and perceive the private ego, the thoughts the subject lets wandering within his head. Fukada, thus, highlights the importance of the imaginary field to create a false yet necessary sense of harmony and support the stability of the ego within a community.
Sakamoto Days, however, is not a serious narrative – light-heartedness and silliness reins. Teh narrative is not only littered with silly elements (e.g. Sakamoto gets back into shape by being physically challenged, gets fat again causes a grey moustache to sprout, Shin thinks the fried chicken (karaage) are poisoned, a prisoner holding an important antidote, …) but also full of outrageous action set-pieces (e.g. Shin’s antics on the riding roller-coaster – and fighting-sequences that pleasingly blend silliness with brutality – Shin fighting as Sugar the bunny against Tatsu (Shintaro Anzai) on stage, the moving dinosaur enemy).
It is, in our view, not only the inventiveness in creating unexpected silly reveals concerning characters and establishing interesting situations that keep the spectator engaged, but the effective pace by which these elements are interwoven within the narrative. There is always something ‘silly’ lurking around the corner, there is always a light-hearted something to look forward to. This emphasis on silliness partially mitigates the lack of investment by spectators unfamiliar to the source material, yet it is not enough to truly emotionally engage such spectators.
The action sequences within Sakamoto Days are framed with a pleasant dynamic flair. Fukada plays with pace and dynamism in an effective manner – e.g. tracking shots, fast cutting, shift in pace to enhance the flow of the action – to not only give the action-choreographies a pleasing yet subtle sense of viscerality but also to breathe life into the legendary dimension of Taro Sakamoto. The decorative use of slow-motion, which further spices up the framing of action, adds a coolness to Sakamoto that compels the spectator to please his neurotic fantasy of phallic power via this image. The coolness of certain moments of action, on the other hand, is spiced up by fluidly interwoven CGI moments – e.g. bullets, the roller-coaster sequence, … etc.
Of course, the visual delivery of the action also benefits from the dramatic musical accompaniment. By aurally evoking the proximity of danger or the presence of a dangerous situation, Fukada does not only increases the spectator’s ability to invest in Sakamoto’s legendary status, but also heightens the pleasure the spectator can derive from action sequences featuring other characters.
To stage action sequences with other characters like Shin and Lu’s, Fukuda utilizes a similar dynamic approach, yet decreases his indulgence in visual decorations. In the case of Shin, this somewhat more subdued approach does not only emphasize his prowess with respect to the ‘faceless’ goons of the boss, but also signals he has not yet reached a state of legend like Sakamoto has. Whenever moments of slow-motion enter the composition, it is rather to elevate a spectacular event or the underline the subjective impact Sakamoto’s ‘familial’ acts sorted than to ‘celebrate’ the prowess and skills of his family members as such.
The director utilizes a combination of energetic dynamism and tensive musical support to emphasize – i.e. Shin’s mind-reading and visualisations – that Sakamoto must continually suppress his drive to assassinate during his daily life. By contrasting the staging of his violent reflexes – it is either me or you – with the restraint he must show as a mundane upstanding citizen, Fukada underlines that Sakamoto’s assassination reflexes lie, supressed, in wait under the kindness his plump presence emanates.
Given the fact that Sakamoto Days is a comedy-action narrative based on a manga, it comes to no surprise that the film is full of silly over-acting and slap-stick moments. While static shots are most common in framing the physical-kind of comedy, Fukuda also utilizes sudden zoom-ins to heighten the impact of an over-acted expression. In some cases, he even turns to silly sounds to amplify the comical impact of certain acts, emotional expressions and facial responses.
At the level of music, we can find a similar ‘manipulative’ dynamic. Fukada decorates some moments within his narrative with sappy emotional musical pieces or cool musical pieces to amplify the impact of dry deadpan enunciations, enunciation that cut the musically-induced mood radically short, or unexpected events, e.g. Sakamoto receiving a phone call during the speech of his enemy.
Sakamoto Days offers the spectator a pleasant and light-hearted experience. However, not all spectators will enjoy this film equally. The crazy and silly elements provide enough pleasure to keep the spectator who has no prior investment into the manga or the anime engaged, but are unable to mask the lack of a decent dramatic build-up (e.g. too many characters, a too sudden shift to the finale) nor animate the flat emotional flow. Fun but forgettable.
Notes
Character-note 1: We are, for instance, introduced to Heisuke (Junki Tozuka), a sniper, and his pet-parrot Piisuke, Nagumo (Takumi Kitamura), an assassin armed with technology to ‘shapeshift’, Boiled (Shinya Kote) with his Super Ball Bombs and Rocket Dynamic Punches, and his partner Obiguro (Hinako Sakurai). As the narrative transforms into the finale, we are suddenly introduced to two formidable opponents: the weaponized Kashima or Mr Reindeer (Akihisa Shiono) and invisibility master Natsuki Seba (Keisuke Watanabe).