A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof – Episode 1

Content Warning: Blood, Fan Service

What’s it about? One day after school, Koga Konoha rescues escapee ninja Kusagakure Satoko, a runaway from her village. But that’s really the least of their mutual problems because it turns out, Satoko is being pursued by everyone and anyone. Good thing her rescuer is in a similar field of work…

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I like ninja. I like assassins. I like ninja and assassins, and when they end up in a kind of meet-cute situation, I think it’s natural to expect that I’ll like them even more. 

However.

Comedy anime can often be hit and miss. It’s a fine line to walk: you have to make people laugh but you also have to make people like the characters enough to laugh; and I find that recently, very few comedy anime pull that off. That’s not to say comedy is dead: just that I find it harder to find the funny stuff in the midst of the deluge of series coming out every season.

Enter A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof, which kind of tells you the base premise. This is a show about a female ninja and a female assassin, both teenagers, coexisting under one roof. But is that all there is to the premise? Will it slay the day, or will I be finding my chuckles elsewhere? 

Only one way to find out!

Episode 1, “A Ninja and an Assassin Meet” begins with an almost Hannah-Barbara look at the life of a teenage ninja. Namely,  Kusagakure Satoko, a ninja-in-training from a village of ninja, some of whom are also probably in training. It’s action-packed, sending her flying through the air doing sick flips and nin-tastic kicks, setting the tone for what is quickly shaping up to be an oddball comedy.

But that’s just one half of the equation. Enter Koga Konoha, a high schooler who stumbles upon a seemingly dead ninja only to discover its just the rather hapless Satoko, deprived of all energy and very hungry. But Konoha isn’t here to make friends or even enemies: she’s got her own life as an assassin and a high schooler, but that’s quickly interrupted when Sataoko moves in and brings all manner of trouble to her front door and neighborhood.

I return to the fact that comedy is subjective not because I didn’t like this premiere but because I didn’t expect it to strike the comedy beats its going for. That said, here, the comedy kind of works: you leave this premiere with a really good understanding of who Konoha is and who Satoko is, as well as the aim of the larger plot. Konoha is definitely the more cold of the characters, playing the cool girl to Satoko’s cute girl. This comes across in two main ways: her lack of hesitation with murder (funny in this context) and by constantly withholding food from her and immediately expecting her to keep house. This part is less funny, largely just because I don’t think it has the same charm as say, The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated! did with its starving protagonist. It just comes off as cruel, even when Satoko does finally get to eat an actual meal.

That said, what makes this less funny is the camera. I feel like it’s so strange to have those leering shots of high schoolers in anime, but alack and alas, even an assassin and a ninja can’t outpace a shounen manga giving high schoolers mature bodies that the camera wants to look at. And this isn’t denying the fact that high school girls can have bodies that are developed: my upset is strictly about the sexualization of those bodies, which I genuinely didn’t expect this premiere to do.

It just feels like a bit of a slap in the face to see that bit of fan service in a premiere that has a genuinely funny premise and introduces a ton of characters and solid action sequences that would otherwise be really neat to enjoy as a kind of murderous Nichijou-esque series. Instead, we get shots that focus too much on Konoha’s breasts, Satoko tracking Konoha based on the scent of her (presumably unwashed) underwear, and a panning shot of a corpse that includes underboob. 

I’m just going to say it: the yuri vibes are strong with this one even though this is just a comedic shounen manga that happens to have tons of girls in its cast. Then again, this could be said of many shounen and seinen series, so honestly, A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof is in good company. I doubt anything will come of it though, but it’s there and I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t mention it. 

That said, I’m not so sure I’ll stick around past three episodes, largely because there’s finite minutes in a season and I will likely want to play catchup and keep up with current series. Plus, I’m not sure I’m the actual target audience for this series. Still, there’s definitely appeal to be found here in seeing an unlikely duo survive one another against the backdrop of everyday life. This is ultimately a watch if you want: I can’t help but fence sit a bit here as, while interesting, I just didn’t like those bits of fan service. Fingers crossed that that lessens as the plot thickens.