‘Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You’ series review: The sweetest nicotine fix of 2026

A slow-burning frisson of unsaid somethings, ‘Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You’ knows a cigarette break is rarely just a cigarette break

Published - October 05, 2026 12:54 pm IST

A still from ‘Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You’ | Photo Credit: Crunchyroll

If I had a rupee for the number of anime around smoking that also happen to be among my favourite anime of 2026, I’d have two rupees. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

This hyper-specific Dr. Doofenshmirtz joke may not be nearly as funny as I’d initially convinced myself it was (probably even less so to my lungs), but Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is the second, and exponentially less disgusting of those two little miracles 2026’s anime calendar has coughed up.

Based on Jinushi’s 2022 manga and adapted for TV by Asahi Production, the series follows Sasaki, an exhausted corporate salaryman whose one dependable pleasure each day is making a pilgrimage to his local supermarket and joining the queue at register number two, where Yamada, a relentlessly cheerful and winsome cashier, can reliably brighten what remains of his increasingly despondent evening. One night, however, a late finish keeps him from catching her shift, so he wanders behind the supermarket in search of somewhere to smoke and instead encounters Tayama, a mysterious, teasing woman with a smoking spot to spare. The catch is that Tayama is Yamada, who has deliberately concealed her identity from Sasaki because watching him remain spectacularly oblivious is simply too entertaining to resist. The running gag is that Sasaki is somehow the last human on Earth to realise that the woman he worships at register number two and the woman he smokes with behind the supermarket are, in fact, the same person.

It’s fairly familiar sleight-of-identity romance, yet Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You somehow turns that modest conceit into one of the year’s most tender examinations of metropolitan loneliness. It is technically a romance, technically a comedy, technically a slice-of-life, and, yes, technically a show about cigarettes, but each of those labels feel inadequate the more time you spend with Sasaki and Tayama behind that supermarket.

Across its twelve episodes, the anime keeps bringing us back to the same little concrete alcove behind the same konbini, usually at roughly the same hour, where the same two people get together to smoke and talk about whatever happened that day. The cigarettes give these encounters a beginning, middle and end; like a tiny narrative clock to be lit, smoked, allowed to burn down while the conversation meanders, and finally extinguished when the allotted pocket of time is over and they have to return to the world. Every visit deposits something small into the relationship, whether it is a private joke, a remembered detail, a new piece of personal history or simply another reason to wonder whether the other person will be there tonight. Even the very space itself feels neither home nor workplace; not private, but not exactly public either — its a kind of social limbo that sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a “third place”, where Sasaki and Tayama can briefly clock out of the roles imposed upon them everywhere else.

A still from ‘Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You’ | Photo Credit: Crunchyroll

Sasaki is what Higuruma from Jujutsu Kaisen might look like after having his Domain Expansion confiscated and his cursed technique downgraded to the considerably less formidable art of apologising at approximately 20 sumimasens per second. At 45, he is chronically overworked, visibly worn down and so thoroughly lacking in self-esteem that even the most innocuous social interaction can metastasise into a full-blown crisis. Even so, Sasaki’s complete and utter obliviousness to the Yamada/Tayama identity switch is what makes his attentiveness elsewhere so funny, and so affecting. He can stare directly at the mountain of evidence connecting Yamada and Tayama and somehow remain unconvinced, yet he notices when Tayama is uncomfortable, remembers the stray details she has mentioned, worries about imposing on her and treats her with an absurd degree of consideration and respect. There is nothing particularly heroic about it. He is simply a man who knows what it feels like to be worn down, and who therefore makes a point of not adding to somebody else’s burden. For Yamada, who spends so much of her life calibrating herself to what other people expect from her, Sasaki’s unforced consideration becomes difficult not to fall for.