The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World

Content Warning: Mild fan service

What’s it about? Hamada Kenichi is just your everyday middle-aged man, working as an illustrator in his daily life. Until one day, he finds himself transported to another world and in a dangerous forest filled with monsters set on devouring him. Yet he’s not alone in this new world: Kenichi has a power that can help him out in a massive way…

The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World (hereafter Middle-Aged Shopper) is another entry in the growing sub-genre of slow life isekai: series where thriving, not surviving, takes precedence over finding success. Often, success comes as party of the overall plot, but it’s almost never the goal. Like the cozy sub-genre of Fantasy and Sci-Fi, it centers things like serving as a tea monk or running your own coffee shop in a D&D-esque world. Rarely is the plot slaying a dragon: more often, it’s slaying your past and coming to terms with the world around you.

At first glance, Middle-Aged Shopper is traveling down the same path, centering a forty-something in a world where there’s monsters, sure, but there’s also commerce. There’s community and food and the adventure of making a sale and seeing the world. But is this premiere worth investing in, or is it dead on arrival?

Kenichi collapses at his job, resulting in his health and outlook on life changing forever.

Episode 1, “An Unfamiliar Forest,” opens with a quick-paced montage of Kenichi’s life until now. At some point, he got incredibly sick, causing a collapse from overwork. He ends up leaving the city, living a more quiet and rustic life with a garden full of produce and a view of the Japanese countryside. All the while, he watches isekai anime and works. One day, it happens, and there’s not even a truck: Kenichi finds himself in another world surrounded by fantastical creatures and no way home.

Then he gets genre savvy and his new life begins.

Immediately, Kenichi accesses his power of being able to shop at the online store Shangri-La, wherein he can buy anything his heart desires. This ranges from food to a mountain bike that even Higurashi Kagome would envy. But life isn’t easy yet: Kenichi’s got to toughen up if he’s going to survive and live past middle-age to see this new world.

On instinct, Kenichi summons his stat screen to check if he's in another world.

I couldn’t help but compare this to Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill. Both deal with adult men who have access not to god-like abilities but the ability to use there consumer savvy to make their residency in another world a bit easier, adding a certain whimsy to the isekai formula by combining age and quirkiness

Here, I found that the same love I have for Campfire Cooking is starting to take seed. I love that my guy Kenichi is getting to shift his focus from soul-crushing work to just kind of getting to wander around, learning the lay of the land as he incorporates the new world’s writing system into his life: the slow life, of course. Kenichi isn’t about to burn out again.

That said, there’s a bit of fan service in this premiere that might be noticeable to viewers of all interest. Mostly, it comes from a scene with beastfolk Myaley, a teenager who gets a bit too close to Kenichi. It doesn’t come to anything, but it’s…weird. I guess it’s there to show that Myaley’s a cat, but like…I don’t know there’s a million other ways to do that and have it be “funny.” Other than that, this is a pretty tame premiere, which is welcome. You never know how these isekai stories are going to go.

Kenichi introduces the power of modern spring clothespins to Azalea and his new world.

Speaking honestly, this is right up my alley. I love the cozy fiction genre and enjoy the slower things in life, especially in anime. Plot and more serious stories are good, but sometimes, you just need the comfort of relating to a middle-aged man who’s central goal is to live comfortably and peacefully (the stuff of the fantasy genre now, apparently). Of course, the opening implies there’s going to be a cast of characters complicating that simple dream, but I suppose that’s just life. When mapped onto reality, the same could be said: to live is to meet people and be changed, and isn’t there something nice about that?

For now, if you’re also down for something cozy then this is an easy recommendation for me to give as we start getting towards the back half of this season’s premieres: it’s just goofy enough that it’s easy to get into while balancing Kenichi as a character that feels lived-in enough to be painfully relatable. Plus, he gets a big car and multiple pieces of tech like a construction-style Gundam in the ED: that’s enough to make me stick around to see where this goes. Will you join me? I sure hope so! See you in another world!