Welcome to This Week in Shonen Jump, our weekly check in on Viz’s various Shonen Jump series. Viz has recently changed their release format, but our format will mostly remain the same. We will still review the newest chapters of one title a week, now with even more options at our disposal. The big change for our readers is that, even without a Shonen Jump subscription, you can read these most recent chapters for free at Viz.com or using their app.
This week, Brian checks in with “Sakamoto Days.” If you have thoughts on this or any other current Shonen Jump titles, please let us know in the comments!
Sakamoto Days Chapter 27
Written and illustrated by Yuto Suzuki
Translated by Camellia Nieh
Lettered by Eve Grandt
Reviewed by Brian Salvatore
I’m new to “Sakamoto Days,” but it seems like a relatively straightforward story. Sakamoto himself is a fun character, as he’s, as described in text, as a teddy bear, but is also an incredibly dangerous and deadly person to mess with. On one hand, it is hard to root for someone who can be so calm and also so violent at the same time. That’s essentially sociopathic behavior, and yet, Sakamoto doesn’t do anything in this strip to make you really want to root against him. He’s defending his turf and while, yes, he’s trying to kill a dude, his actions are more or less in line with what’s going on all over this manga, so it isn’t like he’s acting out of an increased sense of malice or evil. He fits in nicely with the trope of the ‘retired warrior,’ but just in a factory setting instead of, say, running a sushi bar like in Kill Bill.
Yuto Suzuki’s art is bombastic and fun, though for a relatively new reader, there are an alarming number of characters with long-ish blonde hair, and so it was a little hard to tell some folks apart. But overall, Suzuki’s zen-like Sakamoto rubs up nicely with the more over the top characters, like the ‘Weapon Man’ with a gun coming out of his mouth who is annoying at Sakamoto’s Mr. Miyagi-ish dodges and blocks. The Weapon Man is the most visually striking piece of the chapter, though the ‘Invisible Bastard’ gets some bonus points for just how effectively Suzuki illustrates him, without really giving up on the gag of him being invisible. It’s the perfect calculation for just how much to show without it spoiling the bit.
There’s also some nice logic with the way that the battle with the Invisible Bastard goes, and while the solution is far from 100% original, it plays out really nicely, and gives the reader an unexpected charge.
Overall, the chapter was a lot of fun and a nice way to introduce a new reader, as was likely intended by giving it the featured banner on the Shonen Jump wbesite, to the story. I’m very curious to see if my initial read on Sakamoto is true, or if there’s more to the character than just a deadly history.
Final Verdict: 7.3 – A fun, if a little visually confusing, tale.
