Character · Sakamoto Days
Taro Sakamoto
The greatest hitman of his generation fell in love with a shop clerk, retired, and gained about forty kilos.
In Otakana the clue reads: Retired hitman running a corner shop
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Sakamoto Days
- Letters
- 8 · Normal
Taro Sakamoto ran a corner store. That is the joke the series opens with, and it holds up because the store is real: he stocks shelves, works the register, walks his daughter to school, and defuses assassins in the aisles using a mop, a shopping basket and whatever is on the two-for-one shelf. His wife made him promise not to kill anyone, so he does not, which is a considerable handicap in his line of work.
The organisation he left does not accept resignations, so a bounty goes out and the shop becomes a target. His crew assembles from people sent to collect it: Shin, a former subordinate who reads minds and cannot stop narrating what he hears, and Lu, a Chinese syndicate heir with a chef's knife and no patience. The plot is a chase, and the fights are choreographed like slapstick that occasionally kills someone.
Yuto Suzuki began the manga in Weekly Shonen Jump in late 2020, and TMS Entertainment adapted it in 2025. The appeal is a body-type joke that quietly turns into a competence joke, since the extra weight never once slows him down and the series stops treating it as a punchline within a few chapters.
Spelling SAKAMOTO
SAKAMOTO is eight letters in strict alternation, consonant then vowel, four times over, which makes it one of the most regular long answers in the set. Two A's, two O's, a K, an M and a T. Otakana wants the family name, not Taro. No long vowels are lost here, and the name is common enough in Japan that it should look right.