Summer 2022 First Impressions – The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Kirishima is a Yakuza who’s generally known as a pretty bad dude – his way of solving most problems for his organization typically involves beating the living daylights out of people. Dealing with children seems like an unnatural fit for such a demonic man, so when his boss initially assigns Kirishima to act as a guardian for his young daughter Yaeka, he initially believes that assignment to be a joke. Unfortunately for Kirishima, it’s a serious as a heart attack.

Babysitting doesn’t suit Kirishima, but to his credit he tries his best. When Yaeka starts to withdraw, Yaeka’s aunt Kanami helps him figure out what’s bothering her. When he shows up to her elementary school’s open house, Yaeka is surprised and bashful, but it seems to do the trick – it allows her to work up the bravery to give her dad the art project she made just for him.

Impressions: I don’t talk about manga much here (mostly because I feel like it’s more of a “literary” part of the fandom and I don’t feel like I have the skill to talk about it effectively), but I do read it from time-to-time. One of the so-called “benefits” of being stuck inside for so long the past few years is that I’ve finally embraced digital manga distribution platforms. While I love the smell and the feel of a real paper book, I also have had to come to terms with the fact that I don’t have unlimited shelf space for physical books, so I save that for “special” series or one-offs and get the rest of my manga via services like Azuki and Amazon Kindle, among others. The manga on which this anime adaptation is based has been in my queue for a while on Azuki, but because I tend to prefer watching anime to reading manga, I put it on hold once I knew there was an anime arriving.

So was it worth the wait? I’m finding it difficult to say one way or the other, and I think that may be a case of muddled expectations. These types of stories, in which bachelors end up in charge of kids (and yes, I feel like this has become its own subgenre), tend to unfold in a couple of different ways. On the one hand, the whole scenario is, on its face, purely comedic. People with no parenting skills (such as myself) left in charge of young people and forced to grapple with their own lack of skills and ill-preparedness is just funny on its face. Characters as “fish-out-of-water” is almost always good for a few laughs. On the other side of the coin are those stories in which the newly-minted parental figure is forced to grapple with the emotional weight of the situation in some way. These types of stories can be very emotionally gratifying when written well, and you all know I love being made to feel wrung-out like a used wash rag.

The issue I’m finding that I have with this first episode of The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting is that it seems to want to be both things – a comedy and a heartwarming slice-of-life series, a combination which is very possible! – without being very successful at either. Kirishima doesn’t feel like a fully-realized character to me. If the point was to contrast him against the violent persona that people ascribe to him, then I would have to be convinced that being a “nice guy” was a real stretch for him. Yet for most of the episode he seems mostly normal aside from the opening minutes (where he beats up a bunch of guys) and some moments throughout the episode where he gets a little bit slapstick-y with an underling. I’m not convinced that he’s dangerous, which makes his “transformation” sort of toothless. The same goes for Yaeka, who’s cute in her own way but doesn’t really seem to embody the type of anxiety a young kid in her place would probably have. Her mother was killed and her dad is distant due to his work, so she’s left mostly unmoored but for her aunt (why can’t she just stay living with the aunt, by the way?), and yet the drama seems to be pulled mostly from the facts of her situation and not her reactions to them.

This episode wasn’t bad by any means, but I definitely feel like it could have benefitted from some stronger character direction. I might just end up checking out its manga source after all.

Pros: This is a really cheery looking production, with bright colors and well-rendered characters that are pleasant to look at. The character designs have some nice personality (including Kirishima’s sharp canine teeth).

Cons: Why-oh-why are we left to deal with yet another dead anime mom? It’s a trope I’m just really tired of, not only on its face, but because its use is based on a lot of gendered assumptions about who can and should take care of children, and what happens when that person is unavailable. I’d love to see a similar story to this in which the unprepared caregiver is a woman who just isn’t good with kids and doesn’t have some mythical, inherent parenting instinct. Those people exist in the world (and anime does include them from time-to-time in various capacities), and it would be a nice way to turn the tables on the formula a little bit.

Content Warnings: Parental death, including brief scenes in a hospital, violence/gore (fighting, including images of blood), slapstick humor.

Would I Watch More? – Do not know if want, to be honest. I was looking forward to this series, because it seems like it would be up my alley in many ways. The execution, however, just hasn’t impressed me.