“I like characters who possess strong gaps”: Sakamoto Days Creator Yuto Suzuki Has a Solid Reasoning Behind the Genre-breaking ‘Fat Assassin’ Protagonist
Sakamoto Days is unusual on many levels, with a story that revolves around a former hitman, Taro Sakamoto, a retired legendary hitman who has settled into a quiet and mundane life as a family man. However, the most unusual part is the protagonist himself.
The protagonist of the series, Taro Sakamoto, does not look anything like your regular shonen protagonist. Despite being a former hitman, Sakamoto is a chubby and fat, bespectacled individual with graying hair and a mustache. The author of the series states his reason behind it.
Yuto Suzuki States The Reason Behind Creating A Fat Protagonist
In an interview (translated by @reioftheikeda on X) with Yuto Suzuki in the Jump GIGA 2023 WINTER issue, Yuto Suzuki talked in detail about Sakamoto Days, his biggest growth between drawing a one-shot and his current work status, and why he created such an unusual protagonist for his series.
When the interviewer asked Suzuki how he came up with the idea of a “retired hitman”, he said that he found the idea fascinating if fat people were incredibly strong. The idea originated with the question of why was Sakamoto fat, and the answer to that is that he was retired, which prompted the next question of why Sakamoto retired, and it came in the form of the answer that he was married.
Next, the interviewer displayed an interest in the character design claiming that Sakamoto’s retired plump figure is cute but an exceptional character design for a shonen manga protagonist. The interviewer then asked Suzuki the story behind the “fat assassin” to which he replied:
I like characters who possess strong gaps, so I combined several elements from two extreme opposites such as the strongest old man, and the strongest fat guy. Consequently, the one I found more interesting to draw was the strongest fat guy.
Suzuki also mentioned that back then he just wanted to publish a one-shot, so he emphasized on making an impact and he was not expecting Sakamoto Days to turn into a series. He continued that he did not model Sakamoto after any character, but he learned about the movie Enter The Fat Dragon and found the setting to be similar.
Yuto Suzuki Talked About How He Got Into The Profession Of a Mangaka
The interviewer brought up the unique action scenes in Sakamoto Days, such as Sakamoto repelling bullets with a ball (cough drop) or having battles on the train. The interviewer asked Suzuki how he came up with such ideas. Suzuki responded:
I’ve been fantasizing about actions ever since I was little. In movies, for instance, you could wonder how you never thought about this direction, or “Do battles take place in such situations?!” I like direction that takes the audience by surprise. And I think those things I like accumulate inside me.
The interviewer then asked Suzuki how he got into drawing manga and how he chose it as his profession. Suzuki said that when he was about to graduate, he wondered about his future career path and that’s when he came across Katsuhiro Otomo’s Domu, which made him develop an interest in becoming a manga artist.
