The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

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

Kenichi, an almost 40-year-old single man, is suddenly transported to another world. As he navigates its dangerous forests, he realizes he can use a huge online shopping site. Kenichi aims to use his cheating ability to live a slow life in another world.

The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World is based on a manga by Umiharu adapted from a light novel series by Hifumi Asakura and illustrator Yamakawa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

As I write this entry for the Preview Guide, I have been waiting in the lobby of my local dealership for a little over ninety minutes. I have no idea how much longer it will take for the service people to fix the issue my car got recalled for. The television screens in the lobby are tuned to some History Channel show about old, white, bearded guys who live out in the middle of the woods and spend their days trapping animals to make leather for their handcrafted survival gear—though the closed captions are not turned on, so I have no Earthly idea what any of them are actually saying. Right next to the big TV is a fancy coffee machine that has apparently been on the fritz for a while; two older gentlemen have been standing beside it, chatting earnestly about their appreciation for the dealership's complimentary coffee, and how disappointed they are at missing out on their daily vanilla lattes.

I am telling you all of this because my efforts to watch the first episode of The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World have consistently been thwarted by my brain's attempts to seek actual entertainment from literally any source it can find. I don't know what this Walt-Whitman-looking dude on the History Channel is putting together with all of that wood and dried beaver skin, but even with absolutely no context or personal interest in the art of stitching bootsoles or whatever, it is infinitely more engaging to watch than the agonizing twenty-two minutes of Middle-Aged Online Shopper's premiere. I cannot overstate how much more emotionally invested I am in the plight of these two car dealership employees' inability to get a middling cup of instant coffee than I am in the saga of Kenichi and his attempt to resell a bunch of cheap clothespins to a city full of fantasy RPG NPCs. There is a pamphlet on the desk next to me advertising a car I already own, and I have flipped through its pages three or four times since starting this ordeal because you'd better believe I'd rather look at glossy photos of nifty electric cars than the cheap, ugly art that this adaptation has settled for.

I have been scrolling back through scenes of this episode to look for something, anything, positive to say about Middle-Aged Online Shoppers. Outside of the fact that the show isn't overtly misogynistic or hateful (which should not be something that an anime should get free kudos for, dammit), the only other thing I can find is that I was kind of happy that the premiere gets its perfunctory main character's perfunctory backstory out of the way with a montage. That could have been a whole few extra minutes of my life that was wasted, instead of the standard twenty-three.

Oh, wait a minute. The nice lady from the front desk just turned the lobby television to the channel that plays old game show episodes, and she turned on the captions! Sorry folks, there's no way my brain will allow me to expend even one more calorie of energy on trying to concentrate on thoughts about the isekai anime with the title I've already forgotten about. Wheel of Fortune is on, and this putz at the podium is about to whiff on buying a vowel.

The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Shopper in Another World does start with a rather clever bit: a sped-up montage of the protagonist (whose name I have already forgotten) collapsing from overwork, moving to the country, starting a hobby farm, and then getting isekai'd set to “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” No narration, no clunky explanation: just pure visuals and music. It was a hell of a way to start the episode and one that made me think, “Oh, maybe this won't be so bad.”

Unfortunately, it was that bad. I don't want to overstate how awful it was because I've watched worse; for the most part, it was extremely middling. Protagonist-san (he's older than me, so calling him “-kun” would be inappropriate) sails through his new life in this other world thanks to his item box and his ability to buy whatever he needs from Amazon - sorry, I mean Shangri-La. There's some lip service paid to how he has to pay for things, but that doesn't seem to be an obstacle at any point.

The biggest point of difference between this and, say, Campfire Cooking in Another World is how the wish-fulfillment element cheerfully embraces the sleaze. There are no slaves, thank god, but a receptionist happily jumps into bed with Protagonist-san as a thank you for him gifting her cheap fruit drop candy. I can almost respect this choice – too many fan service anime have a childlike view of sexuality, with lots of tits being thrust into our faces but very little actual sex. This dude, on the other hand, gets some actual tail. On the other hand, this is still blatant wish-fulfillment with a kind of nasty view of women.

But that's not the thing that bothered me most! My issue was how the episode presented cheap consumer goods as higher quality or preferable to pre-industrial work created by artisans. Those spring-loaded clothespins break if you breathe on them wrong, but that wasn't the one that annoyed me most. No, it was the swords. It was the depiction that the weapons made by a craftsman who has spent years honing their craft were dull and chipped, while the mass-produced hunting sword that will probably go rapidly go dull was sharp and shiny.

But hey, I'll give it something unique: it had a named old woman character who wasn't improbably sexy. What a rarity! I wish it weren't so creepy to literally every young woman.

Stultifying. Dull. Mind-numbing. Stupefying. Any or all of these words can be applied to the first episode of The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Shopper in Another World, no matter how hard the episode tries to disguise it by using “Also Sprach Zarathustra” in its opening montage. Oh, sure, it's moderately clever – the way that Kenichi ends up in the other world barely matters, after all, and the gravitas of the song over scenes of him collapsing at work and going to take time off in a remote cabin is at least a little amusing. But then the stat screens kick in, and everything goes sliding downhill into the swamp of isekai mediocrity.

It's also astoundingly sexist at times. The fact that beastfolk women are more human-looking than the men is certainly a choice – the men all look like giant animals (or furries, if you prefer), but the women have human faces and hair on their otherwise fur-covered bodies, which naturally have secondary sexual characteristics. Presumable harem member Myaley is first introduced licking our hero Kenichi's nose, which may or may not be better than inn server/receptionist Azalea sleeping with Kenichi to repay him for the box of Japanese candy and clothespins he gave her to teach him how to read and write his new home's language. At this point, I'm just hoping that Anemone, the feral child the opening (?) theme implies will join the party, is going to be his adopted daughter.

I appreciate that Kenichi is older and not interested in doing anything beyond figuring out how to live in his new home, even if we saw the same basic theme done better in Campfire Cooking in Another World. I also really like that his bestselling item is clothespins, because that makes a lot of sense in a low-tech world. The sort of clothespins Azalea says they've been using, the wooden kind without a spring, are inferior to the wooden sort with a spring – good luck using one on thick fabric and getting it to stay in place. That the newer model is Kenichi's bestseller is a nice change from the usual for this brand of isekai, which tends towards matches and knives. That said, modern clothespins still break pretty easily, which I doubt the show will mention.

Since I've just spent an entire paragraph talking about clothespins, that should tell you something about how not good this episode is. It's not helped by stiff animation and dull backgrounds and character designs (how does every world in the multiverse come up with the exact same maid outfit?), and any goodwill it occasionally manages to drum up tends to vanish with the next female character to wander by. I suppose it could get better when he gets the Transformer the theme song shows, but it hasn't done anything to make me want to stick around and find out.

I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World. Is it some groundbreaking isekai fantasy? No. Not even close. However, it does spend a lot of thought on its silly twist on the standard isekai premise—i.e., What if you were isekai-ed but could still order things from (legally distinct) Amazon?

The episode starts off on a good foot. Rather than waste a full episode just going through the motions, it gets all the cliche stuff out of the way with a quick, no-nonsense montage. Then, it gets right into the idea of trying to survive with (not) Amazon as your only companion. Basically, (not) Amazon in this anime is functionally its own magic system—powerful but with strict rules that need to be followed. While Kenichi can order anything that would be on Japanese (not) Amazon, his powers are limited in three ways: 1) the amount of money he has, 2) Japan's laws on what can be sold on (not) Amazon, and 3) his own cleverness.

However, the biggest challenge facing him is his lack of knowledge about how the fantasy world works and his own modern-day values. For example, he learns selling pepper could get him killed by the local spice guild—and while knives and plates sell anywhere at any time, it's springy clothespins that everyone is blown away by.

I really enjoyed all the little details about his struggles to set up shop as a peddler. He's basically stumbling around blind, failing as much as he succeeds. As someone who learned Japanese as a second language, I found the reading/writing issue both fascinating and grounded in reality. If the letters are identical in number to hiragana and make the same sounds, I can easily believe he could pick it up in just a few days. (For reference, for my Japanese 101 class back in the day, we spent the first three days memorizing the 46 letter hiragana alphabet—it was easily doable).

So, as far as slow-life isekai go, I have no issue recommending this one. Is it full of riveting drama and flashy action? No but it has a clear core concept and works to explore it in ways both obvious and not—which honestly puts it ahead of many of the fantasy anime we're getting this season.