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A former yakuza enters a supermarket and asks for white powder.

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“Y’know,” he says, “the good stuff.”

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The shopkeeper responds, “We don’t sell that.”

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That’s when his wife steps in. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, smiling. “I think he’s actually looking for flour.”

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Misunderstandings like this fill Tatsu’s day-to-day life. Once, he was known as the Immortal Dragon, a fierce and powerful member of an organized crime syndicate. Tatsu left that all behind when he met Miku, his career-woman wife, to become the househusband of her dreams. The Way of the Househusband is an anime comedy from Netflix following his exploits, based on the manga of the same name.

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Sit-coms live and breathe on placing goofy characters in wacky situations once a week. However, few commit to such a striking backstory for their protagonist. The absurdity of the premise is what gets the viewer in the door; what they find behind it is somehow exactly what you’d imagine and nothing you could expect.

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Tatsu approaches every task with the intimidating confidence only a former thug could have. He declares his robot vacuum cleaner is “in charge of this turf” (his living room). A neighbor lets him babysit her son, so Tatsu teaches him to play chō-han, a gambling dice game. When that same child accidentally breaks one of his wife’s action figures, Tatsu buries the “evidence” in the yard.

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The comedy of these bizarre reactions is emphasized by shots of Tatsu from sharp angles with dramatic lighting. The quick pace, with five or more stories packed into one episode, also means that you can’t get used to one bizarre situation before another comes along to bamboozle you. Nor does it hurt that Tatsu looks like a cartoon criminal, complete with a shiny black suit and aviator sunglasses. The only exception is a cutesy apron plastered over his ensemble.

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Those who have sampled widely from the genre know that the most mundane activities can be elevated to extreme emotional beats in anime. You would only be surprised by Tatsu’s passion if you had limited yourself to action-adventure anime. We expect intensity from the characters in Sword Art Online because they’re dealing with a harsh fantasy world, but you’ll get the same amount of passion from the characters in Haikyuu!!, even though they’re playing high school volleyball instead of fighting for their lives.

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We can only imagine what these passionate story beats might have looked like in full motion; the show is not animated. It’s more akin to a narrated comic book, with motion added to important actions and the character’s mouths. The result is a clever illusion; your mind fills in the gaps. When dice appear in mid-air, you don’t need to see them clattering to the ground to know what happens next. After a few episodes, you’ll forget to think about it. Still, you’re left afterwards mourning the lingering loss of something you never had.

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Fans speculated for a while that Netflix may have been tight-fisted with the budget. However, the director, Kon Chiaki, eventually revealed that it was a purposeful creative choice. They wanted to maintain the manga style, a decision that was praised by the author. The tradeoff, fans of the manga tell us, is an incredibly faithful adaption of the source material. Readers are used to directors taking creative liberties with their favorite works, but seldom encounter the opposite problem: that the adaption is too like the source material. We’ll never know if the comedy would have suffered or benefited from full animation, so each viewer is left to judge for themselves.

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The Way of the Househusband doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. It isn’t plot heavy; the bite-sized stories have no overarching story to tell, except to introduce new characters. It isn’t revolutionary; the joke of the show is that Tatsu does his work as a househusband as if he were still a yakuza, and they tell that joke in dozens of different ways and places. It isn’t a serious examination of the trauma that a character like Tatsu might have; moments that could be attributed to PTSD are played off and discussions about his past life are limited.

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It is good for a couple hours of laughs.

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Written in January 2023 by Gabrielle Huston for a specialty arts and culture journalism class at Carleton University.