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, Vince 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 91: Kanaguri vs. Sakamoto
Written & Illustrated by Yuto Suzuki
Review by Vince J Ostrowski
After several shorter initial story arcs, “Sakamoto Days” has gone all in with its focus on the JCC (Japan Clear Creation – a highly exclusive school for training budding assassins). The JCC backdrop has produced a few individual arcs itself, but it has really felt like one long overarching arc that, in practice, began in chapter 50 and continues unimpeded. What this has resulted in, unfortunately, is turning the series from an enigmatic study of a past-prime assassin and his unlikely understudy, to act out much more of a conventional shonen manga premise. That is to say, “Sakamoto Days” has effectively become a “fighting tournament” manga.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing. The “tournament arc” is a tried and true formula that has stood the test of time in manga for decades. It usually produces a fun, varied cast of colorful heroes and villains and the natural intrigue that comes with seeing who advances and who is just a jobber, to steal a professional wrestling term. But it does represent a shift from what “Sakamoto Days” was, which was a series that both expertly flexed its artistic muscles and kept me guessing what the protagonist’s whole deal was. Now, that latter concern is missing in action, for the most part.
Luckily, mangaka Yuto Suzuki is operating at such high craftsmanship from an artistic standpoint, that a new chapter of “Sakamoto Days” should still be considered appointment reading. What plays out over chapter 91 is a chunk of a fight between Sakamoto and Kanaguri, a “Film Freak”, who likens every human interaction in his life to that of a director grappling with shooting a movie. While the filmic puns are stretched incredibly thin, that’s something that is wholly in the spirit of serial tournament manga, so it gets a pass. It knows what it is, and it knows it is a little corny. The fight itself is anything but corny, as Suzuki uses a library setting to set up a game of cat and mouse between the two fighters. They weave their way through the stacks, spotting one another through shelving, and sometimes bursting through, sending pages flying. As Kanaguri fights, he uses a 35 mm film reel to ensnare his opponents and disorient them. This imagery, contrasted with that of the library books and the general chaos of fighting in a crowded but tight setting, is as clearly rendered as can be. Simply put, Suzuki’s fight sequences are consistently the highlight of this series.
And it’s a good thing too, because as I said earlier, the story itself has lost a little of its intrigue with the slight switch in genre focus. The sheer artistry of the mayhem makes up for it.
Final Verdict: 7.5 – “Sakamoto Days” is a perfectly enjoyable romp, but it has lost a bit of that je nais se quois that had it standing out from its Shonen Jump peers before it began the assassination exam arc
