Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof

Episode 4

Last week, A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof took things in the social commentary direction by lampooning Japan's entry-level job market—everything from unprepared young people moving into the cities to how replaceable they are despite the horrible working conditions. This week, this dark comedy takes on a new target: yuri anime.

There's always been more than a little yuri subtext in A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof—I mean, there's not a single male character in the entire series as far as I can tell. Kuro, the leader of the escaped ninjas, lives with her girlfriend who's literally called “Yuri” (short for “Yuriko”) by the rest of the cast.

However, despite this, this show's passively been an anti-yuri rom-com as far as our lead pair are concerned. Every time a cliché yuri situation has come up, the two react in the opposite way they would in a normal story. After all, it's not a personal connection that has drawn these two together but rather a professional one. Konoha needs someone to clean up the bodies and do housework while Satoko needs protection from the ninjas after her life and someone who can help her assimilate into normal society.

This episode takes this aspect of their relationship and pulls it from the background into the foreground. Basically, Konoha and Satoko are experiencing growing pains. Konoha has a strict, professional boundary when it comes to their relationship. From her point of view, Satoko is a live-in maid who helps on her assassination jobs. So while Satoko may get half the money from the assassinations and they may live in the same apartment, they don't sleep in the same room. Simply put, they are coworkers, not friends.

Satoko, on the other hand, sees what they have as a friendship—perhaps the closest friendship she's ever had—and wants it to grow even stronger. The big joke of this episode is that Satoko, as a total pushover, is so ignorant about normal interpersonal relationships that she doesn't understand the difference between a friendship and a romantic relationship. When she see how well Kuro and Yuri get along, she decides she wants this and ask Kuro for help. Thus, we get a series of scenes where Satoko tries to seduce Konoha without realizing that's what she's doing while Konoha treats Satoko as usual.

Then, for the back half of the episode we get a peek into Kuro and Yuri's actual relationship—namely that it is far from the idealized yuri relationship so often portrayed. While there seems to be no malicious intent, Kuro is the epitome of a “deadbeat” girlfriend. She lives at her girlfriend's place, sponges off her financially, and spends her days “searching for a job” (read: gambling). We also see that Yuri is far from her first lover—and that past girlfriends are so disposable to her that she doesn't even remember their names.

The result of all this is hilarity. What else can I say? From Satoko showing off why cooking in nothing but an apron is a stupid idea to Kuro having to deal with her first ninja-of-the-week, there are a ton of laughs this week. I'm excited to see that even four episodes in, A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof continues to mix things up and I can't wait to see next week where it appears we'll get to see one of Konoha's assassin enemies for the first time.

Rating:

Random Thoughts:

• Konoha killing the ninja of the week mid-sentence and simply continuing what she was saying without missing a beat is a great gag.

• In this week's super dark gag, Konoha uses the dead bodies/leaves of all the ninjas they've killed so far to bake sweet potatoes.

• If Konoha does end up being able to turn the leaves back into people, why does everyone assume that they will be alive and not… well, corpses?

• To be fair to Kuro, since she doesn't want to do assassin work, she has no way of getting enough money to buy a fake identity—and thus no way to get a normal job. Her choices really are illegal work or gambling… so I get why she'd choose the latter.

Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.