FEATURE: The Best Anime are About Characters with Mundane Jobs
Many anime are larger-than-life affairs. Characters are transported into vast new worlds. Teenagers defeat evils the world has never seen. High schoolers fall in love and go on wild adventures, making unforeseen friends along the way. But some of the absolute best anime out there are about characters with regular, everyday jobs doing regular, everyday things.
Now, I’m not just saying this because I’ve hit my mid-thirties and want to watch a show about people my own age — though I have to admit it’s a nice bonus sometimes. There’s plenty of comedy and horror to be had in all manner of professions, but anime about mundane jobs also have a tendency to find hidden beauty in the things that make the world keep spinning.
The everyday, mundane lives of regular, otherwise unimportant people make for the best stories regardless of if they’re comedic masterpieces or award-winning mystery stories. They are our stories, the stories of us, the stories most lived and, perhaps, least shown. And yet, these are the stories that linger the longest.
My Senpai is Annoying
Sales is a place many of us have found ourselves in at one point or another, and we’ve certainly all been in the unenviable spot of a junior team member. This is exactly where Futaba Takeda finds herself in My Senpai Is Annoying, navigating a workplace that can still feel new and daunting two years into her tenure there. Her short stature makes people mistake her for a kid, and being “the new guy” doesn’t help. But Harumi Takeda, her senior coworker, is always there for her… even if he does tease her relentlessly. And, well, maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all.
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My Senpai is Annoying is a perfect balance of workplace antics and the struggle to balance work and home life. Having a crush on a coworker isn’t easy. Do you hide it and try to move on, or is changing team dynamics worth it? What happens when coworkers become work friends and then just…friends, people you hang out with on days off?
This is an anime about adults just living their everyday lives. Grandparents are still overprotective, despite you being an adult. Having a crush still makes you feel like a teenager again. Personal and work relationships don’t necessarily get easier to navigate just because you’re older. My Senpai is Annoying captures this absolutely perfectly, making it a heartwarming, humorous and very relatable watch.
Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san
Retail. We’ve all been there, and we definitely all have stories. With coworkers from every walk of life, beloved regulars, and customers who seem to have stepped out of a meme, there’s definitely never a dull moment.
You know who else has been there? Honda, our friendly skeleton bookseller in Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san. Honda has a very mundane, everyday job as a bookseller. Sure, he might get to work with one of the things he loves most — books — but being a bookstore employee comes with more challenges than most people would think.
Seeing Honda deal with all the same things we’ve had to, from getting shipments with none of the promised promo material to providing perfect customer service even when you find you don’t speak the same language, is oddly soothing in a lot of ways. It’s easy to get frustrated in these sorts of circumstances (believe me, I’ve been there), but Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san always brings out the comedic and hilariously baffling side of things, as well as the camaraderie between coworkers in the situation.
ODDTAXI
ODDTAXI is an anime that needs experiencing. It’s a story about a very normal, everyday walrus and his seemingly very normal, everyday job as a taxi driver.
The city Odokawa lives in feels strangely familiar, almost like you’ve been there before. So does the story… at least in some ways. It’s a celebration of all those people we know, or sort of know — the people you see every day who are more acquaintances than friends and whose nicknames may be more familiar than their full names. Those short, fragmented moments with people every day add up, making their own stories, dragging us into tales bigger than us, ones where we may not be the main character.
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ODDTAXI is much more than the sum of its parts — whatever I put here simply won’t do the series justice. Odokawa is like us — just a regular guy living a humble life who gets caught up in more than he ever asked for, doing the best he can in his situation.
Hozuki’s Coolheadedness
Image via HIDIVE
Ah, the joys of middle management. All the work, none of the perks. And no one has it harder than Hozuki in Hozuki’s Coolheadedness.
As the chief deputy of Lord Enma, ruler of Hell, Hozuki has his hands full. There’s plenty of paperwork to do, not to mention making sure his employees are running the afterlife smoothly. Seriously, if any workplace bureaucracy is going to give you a headache, it’s this one. It’s Hozuki who winds up handling all of the diplomatic relations and necessary negotiations, not Lord Enma.
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This darkly comic series highlights the life of someone in the unenviable position of singlehandedly keeping the whole place running. Hozuki is beloved, his immense skill and talent are recognized by his boss and junior employees alike. Not everyone is this lucky, of course, but we can all live a little vicariously through him. So grab the popcorn and settle into Hozuki’s Coolheadedness, a comic tale of Hell’s management system.
Spice and Wolf
Most of us aren’t traveling merchants nowadays — not the literal sense, at least. However, many people do sell their own products, whether that’s selling your own YouTube-channel-related products, handcrafted cosplay outfits or professionally made art. And nothing related to that is easy.
The wolf deity Holo is less deity and more folktale when her path crosses that of Kraft Lawrence in Spice and Wolf, and she proposes a business deal. She gets to be a partner in his merchant business if he takes her north to her original home of the far-off Yoitsu.
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Selling goods takes a little bit of everything — math skill and the ability to calculate all manner of things on the fly, negotiating methods, an abundance of charisma and so much more. This is the story of two business partners from very different worlds following their own motivations while trying to make their way as merchants, which, of course, is something not uncommon in our own lives. Sure, maybe we don’t throw around the term merchant anymore, but we do have small businesses and Etsy stores. All of the difficulty of that is shown here, but so is the creativity, cleverness and boldness.
Maybe more importantly, the human side is shown too — the business associates who come and go, the winding paths we find our personal and professional lives taking and the people who will leave everlasting marks on us.
BLEND-S
Many of us have worked some sort of food-related job. These tend to be fast-paced, high-stress environments filled with an eclectic collection of coworkers you find yourself in the trenches with. And all of this is certainly true in BLEND-S.
Maika Sakuranomiya — a high-schooler desperate for a job so she can go study abroad — only finds a single place willing to hire her despite her unintentionally menacing looks. Cafe Stile is a special cafe where employees all embody different personas, a place where Maika can be herself. It’s also a place that seems to attract employees with very colorful personalities who wind up becoming unlikely friends.
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This is a highly comedic, often meme’d (though not as often these days) anime, one that is more relatable than may first appear. Where My Senpai is Annoying features a main character constantly attempting to prove her worth as a junior employee, BLEND-S is very much a story of finding your niche and people you get along wonderfully with completely unexpectedly. Forming strong bonds, gaining confidence and learning new skills in a place you never expected to find yourself are highlighted here. Whether you’ve experienced this at your very first job, like Maika, or stumbled onto it unexpectedly later in life, it is certainly an important, memorable experience in our otherwise mundane lives.
There are tons of anime that highlight the endeavors of everyday, mundane jobs and the people who do them. What are some of your favorites? Let me know in the comments below!
