The Delicate Line Between Work and Fun: Salaryman’s Club First Impressions
Salaryman’s Club gives us a welcome surprise with a nice mix of seinen, slice of life, and sports anime, doing its own thing without pretending to be the badminton version of Baby Steps or Prince of Tennis. This anime immediately grabbed my attention by showcasing how badminton players are not only expected to do everything they can to win a game but also display their growth as athletes to the company that invests in them through incentives and employment.
As a person who has studied and worked at the same time, and as a former member of a soccer team sponsored by the company for which I used to work, I empathize with Mikoto Shiratori, our protagonist. He tasted defeat and failure at the same time after not showing any progress playing singles for a year, which forced his company to fire him. Using workers as players of a company team is common practice with many well-documented stories in other sports like soccer, but you don’t often see anime that show the hardships of adulthood and struggling with doing a hobby professionally and working at the same time.
The plot begins with Mikoto Shiratori practicing singles with the rest of Mitsuhoshi Banking’s badminton team. The same day Mitsuhoshi Banking fired him while traveling on the train home, Makoto almost instantly gets a job offer from Sunlight Beverage to play for their team. Mikoto has vowed not to play on a doubles team following an incident at his inter-high match in high school. However, his co-worker, the optimistic yet silly and devoted Tatsuru Miyazumi, encourages him to be his doubles partner, and Mikoto must work through his past trauma to overcome the struggles in their teamwork.
Mikoto is a typical lone-wolf prodigy with a good head on his shoulders, choosing to handle his incident by trying to play singles instead of quitting the sport completely unlike so many others. I’ m looking at you Taiga Amakado from Futsal Boys. The dynamic in which Mikoto engages with Tatsuru is funny and interesting since their fateful encounter in the park. The way they learn to play together as a cohesive unit feels organic because they learn more about each other as they work on their flaws by both playing with each other and cooperating as coworkers.
My first reaction was very positive to the power-driven hard-rock opening song “The Warrior” by j-rock band Novelbright. The drawings display a mix of dark tones in the color palette and simple strokes with realistic structures, slight and deep shades, fluid animation style with clear movements, and imaginative designs for the uniforms.
The anime gives us a realistic approach to how skills develop through time, not by performing miracles or physics-defying gimmicks. By watching characters learn from defeat, the shower offers a more human narrative of improvement by noticing mistakes and working towards improvement. The depiction of corporate culture, and how this affects the performance of each team member, feels fresh because the show establishes parallels between how teamwork skills are useful in sports and work alike. As an example, when Mikoto uses his foresight ability to stop a shoplifter and Tatsuru tackles the thief from a blind spot before he can attack Mikoto, both can keep the best client Tatsuru has after he almost lost it. This experience gives both the feedback they need to come up with a strategy while they face the Unisics team, making Tatsuru cover the angle Mikoto leaves open after his foresight fails to predict the direction of the shuttlecock. This provides us with a new interpretation of the road that sports enthusiasts take to achieve their goals. I will not deny that some similarities exist when you compare this with other sports anime franchises, but the idea of fighting to not only win a game but also keep your job is enough to engage with the plot. Therefore, I think this anime is for newcomers unfamiliar with classic sports anime and fans of slice of life and sports anime alike.
Drama and appeal spice up the interactions between Mikoto and Tatsuru as protagonists with a light-hearted feeling considering the generational gap between them, making Tatsuru the mentor and Mikoto the apprentice on the court and in the office.
Salaryman’s Club is valuable from a self-improvement point of view when you see how Mikoto decided to participate in the product proposal competition although he knows nothing about how to do that but tries anyway after Tatsuru convinces him instead of letting the opportunity pass by as most people do. Another example is how Mikoto retries to play badminton in doubles after his defeat against Tatsuru which is the first step in his process to overcome his lack of confidence in others, the kind of tough love that forces you to keep pushing to achieve what you desire.
The foresight special technique that Mikoto uses to predict the movements of his opponents feels natural considering it is not 100% effective all the time, while drama manifests in an empathic form. For these reasons, the anime is good enough to give a nice perspective of how it feels to participate inside a company’s sports team. Therefore, my suggestion is to view it until the end and enjoy the ride.
Title: Salaryman’s Club (リーマンズクラブ)
Based on: It is an original Japanese anime television series.
Produced by: Liden Films.
Streaming on: Crunchyroll.
Episodes Watched: 1–4
This article is a part of AniTAY’s Winter 2022 Early Impressions series, where our authors offer their initial thoughts on the new, prominent, and exciting anime from this season!
