The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer

In a world where murder and torture are legal, numerous "torture contract companies" exist. Cero and Shiu work part-time for the "Spirytus" torture company, which is known for treating its employees well and only targeting bad people. Two new part-time hires — Mikke and Hugh — also join the company, and the four enjoy their torture-working life.

The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer is based on the manga series Gōmon Baito-kun no Nichijō manga by Yawora Tsugumi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

I feel like if I express my discomfort over the use of torture at the center of The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer, people are going to roll their eyes at me and accuse me of not being able to distinguish fantasy and reality. That's not what's going on here, though! A character participating in torture, even comedically, isn't a deal-breaker for me. Just ask me about my feelings about Shin from Dorohedoro (which is that I love him). But it needs to be right for the setting and the tone of the show; while it fits in well enough with the down-and-dirty nature of Hole and wizard culture in Q Hayashida's masterpiece, the world of The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer is too clean, making the torture discomfiting by comparison. Plus, Shin's form of torture–magically dismembering his targets so they stayed alive even in pieces–was purely in the realm of fantasy, but Cero and his compatriots pull teeth, remove fingernails, and waterboard their unfortunate clients.

I do understand that the incongruity is the point and, to many people, the appeal. Still, I just can't find it in me to chuckle as Cero thinks in the opening sketch about what a waste of his time it'll end up being if the guy he's tormenting doesn't actually have the information he's seeking out. I grimaced at the posters promoting torture as a way of helping keep the world clean and safe, and the assurance that the men strapped to their chairs are all confirmed villains, so it's totally okay.

Beyond my distaste for the premise, which I could shrug off as purely a personal reaction, the show commits a much greater crime: it's a tepid workplace comedy with only a vague idea of what a joke is. The ins and outs of normal professional life have been replaced by instruments of torture. Shiu and Cero go shopping, not for office supplies but for new ways to hurt people. The new kid learns to dress plainly for the job when he gets his nice clothes covered in blood. Something something senpai/kouhai dynamics. Once the shock value wears off, it's the kind of dull sitcom that I've been writing negative reviews of for years.

I will give this episode exactly one thing: the character designs are quite nice. Okay, Mikke's permanent :3 face annoys me, but otherwise they're all good-looking men in sturdy, practical clothing. I can only assume that's a major factor in the manga's popularity; there's someone here for everyone, as long as you're okay with your boy doing shift work causing mooks indescribable pain to extract information for a major corporation. I wish I could be so chill about the banality of evil.

The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer is one of those anime that immediately begs the question of “Who the hell is this even for?” When I first saw the trailer for this little oddity, I just assumed it was either going to be an ultra-dark, violent satire of modern capitalist culture or a horror-themed, possibly kinky spin on a classic workplace sitcom. As it turns out, though, the show ends up falling somewhere in the middle of those two extremes by failing to be much of anything in particular at all.

Clearly, the show is trying to be a cute workplace sitcom with an edge, but for the life of me, I cannot imagine why a comedy this tame and relatively devoid of jokes even chose such out-there subject matter. The one and only source of humor that isn't just a repeat of every sitcom bit you've ever seen is the fundamental contrast of “Regular seeming anime folks have a weird and comedically inappropriate job.” Spirytus and Shiu make the usual office small talk, except they're discussing legalized torture. When they go shopping for supplies, they're buying whips and pliers instead of staplers and copier toner. Newcomers Mike and Hugh are goofy characters whose diverse personalities add to the wacky dynamic of the office…and then they torture people too, because, you know, that's the whole deal of the show.

To be generous, this is maybe the sort of setup that could work for a recurring bit on a sketch-comedy show. If this were a five-minute short with some tighter pacing and stronger jokes, even, I could see The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer finding some kind of audience. As a full-length series that is meant to stand on its own, though, I simply have no clue what demographic it's catering to. Casual comedy fans will likely be bored by the stale jokes and weak characters, or they will otherwise be turned off by the grim subject matter and violence of the gimmick, even if we never see more than a few spurts of offscreen blood. The boys might as well be food-court employees getting covered in ketchup.

Likewise, anyone who is actually interested in the “torture” angle of the premise probably isn't going to get much out of Daily Life either. It's not like we're getting into enough minutiae for the show to qualify as some capital-X extreme parody of a hobby anime, if that is something that most viewers would even be interested in. Also, as a proud aficionado of shlocky and tasteless exploitation cinema, I think I can safely say that the gorehounds in the audience will be irritated that the series doesn't go nearly far enough. Forget Hostel or Martyrs; there are episodes of Sailor Moon that are more disturbing and violent than anything that happens here. Hell, if you're really jonesing for something that combined edgy violence and cozy sitcom vibes, just queue up an episode of Gantz and set an old laugh-track to play at random intervals on another tab. I'll bet you end up having more fun than you would if you stuck with The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer.

When I was a teen and had just discovered the world of Quentin Tarantino movies, I remember my mom mentioning she didn't like them. When I asked why, she replied, “Because they make murderers seem like normal people.” While the dialogue is in no way on par with Tarantino, The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer is very much in that same kind of vein when it comes to the setup.

Here we have a group of pretty boys, living their normal lives and dealing with normal problems. One is an aspiring novelist, and another is dealing with the issues that arise from being too damned pretty. They go on shopping trips for work, go out for drinks, and just chat about everyday, mundane, things. It just so happens that they are all professional torturers. This is the joke at the core of the series: the contrast between their gruesome work and their all-too-ordinary interactions.

Thus, we get scenes like where newbie Hugh faints at the sight of blood—something you'd think would be a problem for a torturer—but his coworkers all come together in a heartwarming moment to teach him all the ways of torturing without lacerating the skin. In the same vein, there's the scene where Sero and Shiu go shopping for new torture tools using dialogue more akin to shopping for clothes than devices made to cause pain.

What's most baffling about this anime, however, is how it attempts to make our heroes seem not just “normal” but “good.” In this world, a torturer is apparently a legal job. All the people sent to them are guilty of something—even if it's not the crime they're being tortured for. So it's totally okay that they're being crippled and/or disfigured, right? Well, the show sure seems to think so.

Honestly, when it comes to The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer's overall premise, it already seems to have worn thin by the end of the first episode. The show never managed to get a laugh out of me, though I admit to smiling once or twice at the characters' reactions. Still, it's not a show I can see myself watching (or even thinking about) ever again. I'm honestly not sure who this anime is for, but clearly, it's not me.