Overview: Toru Kirishima (also known as The Demon of Sakuraki) is a diligent, hardworking member of the Yakuza, with fighting skills like no other. After bungling a critical operation, his boss, Kazuhiko Sakuragi insults him for lacking responsibility and grants him a new assignment to fix this. A bizarre assignment. Toru is tasked with babysitting Kazuhiko’s daughter, Yaeka, and is threatened with death if he doesn’t. Not having a choice in the matter, Toru ventures into the new and exciting world of raising a child.Our Take:It’s definitely an original concept, I’ll give it that. It’s the sort of off-the-wall idea and execution that only the Japanese could come up with. It runs the gamut from saccharine sweetness to big violent fight scenes to an ending that is surprisingly heartwarming. It’s a mixture one wouldn’t think to try normally, but I think it’s one that works for the most part.
The episode definitely has a rapid pace. It wastes very little time with pretenses. Not even a third of a way into the episode, Toru and Yaeka are already introduced to one another, and they immediately hit it off with one another, something I think is a wise decision. If the relationship between the two of them is going to be the core of the show, better to get it introduced right away.
It’s very hard to definitively say this now, given that it’s just the first episode, but one potential problem I foresee in the future is the possibility for the show to wildly shift in tone constantly. One scene that demonstrates this is when Toru is walking Yaeka to school and notices two punks trailing him. He wants to fight them before they cause any trouble but thinks Yaeka seeing it would break her heart. So he tells her to play a game of red light green light with him, giving Toru the cover to beat the shit out of the punks. I felt this type of scene, mixing cuteness and violent action together, didn’t really work in this instance. Will have to see how this sort of thing holds up in later episodes.
Kei is a big part of why I liked this episode. He’s a fellow Yakuza tough just like Toru, a blonde guy who serves as the comic relief character. One early scene focuses on Toru, who has no idea how to deal with Yaeka’s hair. He notices that Kei has long hair so he practices on him against his will, and Kazuhiko walks in on them and sees that Toru has given Kei pigtails, with Kei having a look of sheer terror on his face. I hope that doing more embarrassing things for Yaeka’s sake is in his future.
“The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting” is a promising starting point for this series. Our pair of protagonists have nice chemistry together, and it makes me legitimately curious about what sorts of wacky hijinx they’ll get into in the future, be they sickly sweet or tense and dramatic.