The Assassination Attempt on Taro Sakamoto

Lore & Background

In the world of Sakamoto Days, assassins operate within a loosely structured underworld of organizations, rivalries, and codes. Taro Sakamoto once stood at the very apex of that world—his name was a whispered legend among hitmen, a mark whose mere existence was a career-ending threat to any rival. His retirement was not a gentle fade; it was a deliberate, hard-won severing from that life, cemented by his marriage to Shuri, a fellow former operative, and the birth of their son Haru.

The assassination attempt that opens the series is therefore not just a plot device but a thematic statement. The assassin world has a memory, and it does not respect a man's right to put down his weapon. The attempt reveals how networked and persistent the underworld is: even a retired legend is a node in a web of old debts, old rivalries, and old loyalties that others are still trying to exploit. For Sakamoto, the attempt is an act of violence, but for the reader it is a window into the machinery of the assassin world—its hierarchies, its information networks, its willingness to use children and civilians as pawns.

What makes the arc resonant with fans is Sakamoto's response. He does not monologue, does not give a grand speech about his past glory. He fights with the same practical, almost bored efficiency of a man clearing a spill from the floor, and then he goes back to restocking the shelves. That quiet, grounded humanity in the middle of lethal violence is the emotional signature of the entire series, and this arc plants it firmly.

Reader's Guide

The central conflict of this arc is simple in structure and rich in implication: a retired assassin is targeted by the very underworld he left behind, and he must defend his family and his chosen life without fully re-entering the world that destroyed his first one. The tension is not whether Sakamoto can win a fight—he can, and the series makes that clear quickly—but what the attempt costs him in terms of privacy, safety, and the fragile normalcy he built around Haru and Shuri.

The arc spans the opening stretch of the manga, roughly the first several chapters of serialization in Weekly Shōnen Jump. It moves from a quiet slice-of-life prologue (Sakamoto's store routine, a tender moment with his son) into the sudden violence of the attempt, then into the immediate aftermath: assessing damage, identifying the shooter's connections, and the first hints that this was not a one-off but the opening move in a larger game.

Pivotal turning points include the moment Sakamoto chooses to fight back rather than flee, which signals to the reader (and to the underworld) that he is not as retired as they assumed. Another key beat is the introduction of the broader assassin network surrounding the attempt, which expands the story from a single confrontation into an ongoing threat landscape. Finally, the arc closes by reframing the convenience store itself as a site of conflict, not just a backdrop.

In terms of larger story threads, this arc sets up the series' recurring dynamic: Sakamoto's domesticity versus the assassin world's demands. It introduces the supporting cast (Shuri, Haru, and the first allies or rivals who orbit the store) and establishes the rules of the underworld that later arcs will test and subvert. Every subsequent assassination attempt, organization clash, or personal stake in the series can be traced back to the premise planted here: a man who put down his gun is being told, repeatedly, that he never really did.