Sakamoto Days · Character Guide
Taro Sakamoto
The protagonist of Sakamoto Days — a legendary former assassin turned mild-mannered convenience store owner, whose old life keeps catching up with his new one.
Taro Sakamoto is the protagonist of Yuuto Suzuki's Sakamoto Days, introduced as the most feared assassin in the underworld before the series' actual premise kicks in: he retires, gets married, gains weight, and opens a small convenience store — only for his past to keep intruding on his quiet new life.
The core premise
The series' comedy and action both stem from the same joke: Sakamoto is still every bit as lethal as his reputation suggests, but he's committed to solving problems without killing, largely to keep a promise made to his family. That constraint turns fights that would otherwise be simple for him into genuinely tense set pieces, since he's deliberately fighting with one hand tied behind his back for most of the series.
Role in the story's climax
As the manga has moved into its final battle arc, Sakamoto has been pushed further than the earlier, more comedic stretches of the series — including suffering serious injury during the current confrontation with the assassin Slur (Uzuki). That escalation marks a tonal shift for the series, treating the stakes of its endgame with more weight than its earlier convenience-store-adventure framing.
Why the premise still works at scale
What's kept Sakamoto Days from feeling like a one-joke premise stretched thin is how consistently the story ties Sakamoto's restraint back to character stakes rather than just using it as a punchline generator — every fight where he refuses to kill is also a fight about who he's chosen to become since retiring, which gives the climax arc's higher stakes somewhere real to land now that the story is asking harder questions of him.