Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You premiered 9 July 2026 on TBS and 27 affiliated Japanese channels, airing new episodes weekly on Thursday nights for a confirmed 12-episode run.
Crunchyroll streams the series internationally with a confirmed English dub cast that arrived alongside the Japanese broadcast. Before the standard premiere, Crunchyroll and Japan's ABEMA jointly released 12 mini-episodes of roughly 10 minutes apiece starting 4 June, condensing the first six full episodes into a chronological preview, a low-risk way for studios to seed word of mouth weeks before a title's real premiere.
The anime adapts Jinushi's ongoing manga, which began life as a webcomic posted to Twitter in March 2022 before Square Enix picked it up for serialization in Monthly Big Gangan that August; the series won the 2022 Next Manga Award in the web category, an early signal that its premise had crossover appeal beyond typical romance-manga readers. The story follows Sasaki, a burnt-out, middle-aged salaryman who gets through his days on small pleasures, mochi chips, a cigarette, and pleasant small talk with Yamada, his favorite supermarket cashier, then starts meeting a cool, intimidating regular named Tayama on her smoke breaks behind the store, unaware the two women are one and the same. Directors Tadato Suzuki and Aoi Mori lead the adaptation at Asahi Production, a Tokyo studio with five decades of history whose recent slate includes Heaven's Design Team, with Mio Inoue handling series composition.
The premise reads, on paper, like a standard age-gap romance setup, but early coverage has specifically credited the show for sidestepping that trap. Anime News Network's review of the first three episodes called the series "such a vibe" for viewers who recognize the specific exhaustion of demanding, precarious work, and praised how the conversations between the two leads avoid ever feeling like anyone is being objectified, framing the relationship as workplace-comedy companionship built around shared vices rather than a will-they-won't-they hook. The same review flagged the animation as merely serviceable, with some repeated establishing shots in the opening episodes, but found the character writing strong enough to carry the show regardless.
Confirmed: the 12-episode count, the Thursday-night TBS broadcast slot, Crunchyroll's global streaming footprint and dub cast, and the manga's Big Gangan and Next Manga Award pedigree. Unclear from official sources: whether a second season or any home-video release has been greenlit, since the production committee has only confirmed the current run. Viewers weighing whether to start now should know the mini-episode cuts covering episodes 1-6 are a different edit than the full broadcast versions, so catching up via Crunchyroll's standard episodes will show more than the shortened preview clips did.
