The Shonen Jump series Sakamoto Days has featured its fair share of brutal fights, but its latest conflict is easily its most graphic so far.
Warning! Contains spoilers for Sakamoto Days Chapter 97!Many Shonen Jump series have featured brutal fights, but Sakamoto Days takes them to a graphic new level. Given that the manga in Shonen Jump are targeted towards young boys, this level of violence may be shocking to many readers. But it is a perfect example of what makes Sakamoto Days‘ fights so great.
Sakamoto Days is a manga by Yuto Suzuki following the retired hitman Taro Sakamoto as he becomes embroiled in the fight against a rogue group of assassins. The series has a wide cast of likable characters each with their own fighting style. This enables it to often shift focus away from Sakamoto and showcase important fights between other top assassins. The best of these hitmen are the members of the Order, an elite group that stands at the top of the Assassin world and Slur and his followers, who want to tear down the pre-existing order. These two groups have clashed before, such as when Shishiba and Osaragi fought against Kashima and his subordinates in the Okutabi Lab arc. But the most recent clash between the groups has forced Shishiba to use much more brutal attacks than fans have seen before.
In Chapter 97, Shishiba and Osaragi are fighting against the ex-Order member Yotsumura and a myriad of his henchmen. Continuing Sakamoto Days‘s trend of featuring unique weapons, Shishiba fights them with his signature hammers and dispatches them easily with brutally effective attacks. For two of the henchmen, he hooks the claws of his hammers to their faces and then twists their heads off, casually remarking that they need to work on their neck strength. And then even more graphically, at the end of the chapter he rips open Yotsumura’s cheek by attacking with his hammer through a door.
Sakamoto Days‘s Brutal Fights Make the Battles Feel Real
These attacks are much more violent than those that usually appear in other Shonen Jump series. Even Jujutsu Kaisen, which featured a character Nobara who used hammers in combat, never used them to inflict such brutal carnage (although that series also has pushed the limits of Shonen Jump‘s tolerance for gore, featuring a fight in which Maki ripped off an enemy’s face with a sword). This serves to highlight one of the best parts of Sakamoto Days‘s fights: every character is attempting to inflict as much damage against their opponent as possible as efficiently as possible. This makes the fights feel much more real than in other series where the characters will spend time monologuing to each other when they could be fighting. Instead of feeling like mere posturing, these fights feel like attempts at murder.
Part of what makes this fight so awesome is that it pushes the boundaries of what can be shown in a Shonen manga. Much like with the similarly groundbreakingly graphic manga Chainsaw Man, this more adult content makes the series more unpredictable and exciting. This sets Sakamoto Days apart from Shonen Jump‘s other series and will hopefully help the stellar series become even more popular.
Sakamoto Days Chapter 97 is available to read from Viz Media.
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