“Take away the reason two people keep meeting, and you find out quickly whether the reason was ever the point.”
The Leveling System
Episode 6 begins with a routine health checkup and eventually takes us eight years into the past, to a register where the Yamada persona she built for work didn’t exist yet. Between those two moments, the episode does something the show had carefully avoided until now. It threatens the one excuse that keeps Sasaki and Tayama meeting behind the store, and then shows us that what connects them started long before either of them realizes.
The focus falls on two people. Sasaki, who finds out that giving up cigarettes would cost him a lot more than cigarettes. And Tayama, who comes one sentence away from dropping the mask, then decides, the moment the danger passes, that she doesn’t have to yet.
Checkups and Other People’s Lunches
It opens on another joke about Sasaki’s age, this time the periodic health checkup, which he dreads mostly for the nerves that come with it at this age. In Japan, this isn’t simply a personal choice. Under the Industrial Safety and Health Act, employers are required to provide annual health checkups for their regular employees, who are in turn required to take them, as the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare explains, which is why the whole thing is treated as part of the job rather than a doctor’s visit.
His coworker Suzuki notes that Sasaki’s results last year were clean, unlike his own, which came back outside the healthy range and got his wife packing him healthy lunches, something he’s clearly happy about. Something crosses Sasaki’s face for a second, the brief look of a man who lives alone and has nobody making him lunch.
Then it’s back to the checkup paperwork, and the very first question asks whether he smokes habitually. He answers yes, obviously, a box he ticks without a second thought, though it’s the one the rest of the episode keeps coming back to.
At the store that night, Yamada hands him a discount ticket for a new non-alcoholic beer, and he mentions he might switch to it until the checkup is over. Behind the Yamada smile, Tayama clearly files that away for later.
What Quitting Would Actually Cost
After that, Sasaki finds Tayama behind the store, and she immediately teases him for coming out to smoke with a checkup around the corner, using information he only ever gave to Yamada. From there, the conversation turns to the checkup itself. He asks whether her workplace does them too, and whether she plans to change anything before hers. She glances at her arm and decides she’ll have some soup, and that’s apparently the whole plan, a nice contrast between his tendency to take rules seriously and her far more relaxed relationship with them. His own plan has its limits, though. He admits he can cut back on most things, but not beer. And when she notices he’s bought more food than usual, he explains that last year he was told to gain weight, which earns him a pinch on the stomach, half teasing, maybe half envious of someone who has to be told to eat more.
Then she asks the real question. If a doctor told him to quit smoking, would he? He doesn’t want to, and the way the scene lingers on his hesitation makes it clear the cigarette isn’t really what he’s afraid to lose. They end up blurting out the same joke at the same time, a callback to his boss chewing him out over the smell of smoke, and the timing says more about the two of them than the joke does. She gives him a soft punch, tells him it’ll be fine, and his mood lifts on the spot, a quiet echo of Suzuki brightening over his wife’s lunch earlier. Different gesture, same effect. Later, Sasaki replays her question, and the episode makes his real worry plain. Quitting cigarettes would be hard. Losing these nights would be worse.
A Result That Changes Everything
His face when the results arrive says everything before he does. He shows up behind the store looking wrecked, and when Tayama asks if it’s his boss again, he says no, it’s his body this time. He’s been flagged for further examination and treatment over a possible lung problem. For a man whose meetings with Tayama supposedly depend on a cigarette, the implications are immediate. Tayama just stares at him, eyes wide.
The episode then turns to her. Talking with Goto, Yamada is insecure and visibly down, because if Sasaki quits smoking, he loses his reason to come behind the store, and she loses him with it. Goto hints, without saying it outright, that the fix is simple given the kind of man he is. Just tell him Yamada and Tayama are the same person.
Tayama understands exactly what she’s being told, and that’s what scares her. As long as the two halves stay separate, nothing has to be tested. The moment she tells him, the ideal he’s admired at the register collides with the real woman he smokes with, and she has no way of knowing which one he’ll actually want, or whether she’ll lose both.
A Goodbye Interrupted
Some time later, he walks past the back of the store, maybe on his way to say hello to Yamada, and Tayama comes running out to slap him on the back, clearly having watched for him, clearly afraid he’d stop coming. She holds off on smoking out of solidarity. He tells her to go ahead, he’ll just keep an unlit cigarette in his mouth and pretend, his own small way of easing into a life without it. He admits he isn’t sure he can manage, then starts something that sounds a lot like a goodbye, thanking her for coming to talk to him that first night. She stops him with a finger on his lips. “Sasaki, actually, I…”
His phone rings, right on cue, the way phones always do in romantic comedies at exactly this moment. It’s about the checkup.
Back to Comfortable
The medical results were wrong. His lungs, and everything else, are in great shape for his age. He lights up immediately, embarrassed about the whole fuss, and Tayama starts hitting him, half furious and half relieved. Then he admits how glad he is that he gets to keep smoking with her, and she goes completely soft. When he asks what she was about to say, she tells him to forget it, it’s fine like this.
It’s a retreat, but an honest one. The confession only came close because the situation forced it. The second the pressure disappears, so does the urgency, and she picks the comfort of what they already have over the risk of changing it. People rarely change when nothing is pushing them to. Her relief comes out the only way she seems to know how to show affection, sideways, through a few hits instead of anything said directly.
Building Yamada
Then the episode shows the Yamada persona being made. Tayama gets ready for her shift, applying her makeup before using her fingers to push the corners of her mouth into a smile, a gesture reminiscent of Arthur Fleck forcing a smile in Joker. It’s a small moment, but it says a great deal about the character she plays at work. Even the expression Sasaki finds so comforting is something she had to learn how to wear. Goto congratulates her on winning yet another award for it, and admits she misses the days when Yamada didn’t smile at all.
Eight years earlier, she really didn’t. The cashier in the flashback has none of the charm the job demands, keeps causing problems, and gets coached, patiently, by Goto into the person who now wins awards for that smile. Yamada isn’t someone she was born as. She was trained into existence, one adjustment at a time.
The Man Who Stepped In
The flashback centers on a customer who seems determined to make someone else carry whatever frustration he brought into the store. He always picks the same register, the same cashier, the same complaint, unloading his anger on someone whose job makes it difficult to push back. It’s a familiar pattern. People who can’t fix what’s frustrating them tend to hand it to somebody who can’t hand it back.
The man who steps in is never named, but there’s little doubt it’s a younger Sasaki. He doesn’t play the hero. He just points out, gloomily, that the guy is holding up the line, that he does this every single time, and that none of it even makes sense. Afterward, when she goes to thank him, he insists it wasn’t heroism. He’d had a bad day at work and was in a foul mood, and she was clearly a dedicated, efficient cashier whose line he liked. What’s worth noticing is what he did with that mood. Two men walked into that store carrying their own frustrations. One dumped his on the weakest person in the room. The other spent his defending her.
The conversation that follows happens outside the store, by the ashtray that used to stand out front, and it’s the most carefully built scene the series has delivered so far, doing the most emotional work with the least spectacle.
Out there, she breaks down, asking how she’s supposed to deserve a job she loves when she keeps failing at it no matter how hard she tries. He tells her that if she really loves the work, the skills will come with time, especially with the effort she’s clearly putting in. It’s the same shape of advice she’d hand back to him eight years later, in Episode 2, when he was the one convinced a single bad moment had made him the villain.
She cries harder, blames the cigarette smoke for her watering eyes, a small detail that hints she may not even have smoked back then, and remarks on how over the top his reactions are, which is exactly the Sasaki we know now. It feels like the kind of moment that could stay with someone for years, long before they understand exactly why. And it raises the possibility that what she feels for him today isn’t a coincidence at all, but the same chord struck twice by the same man.
A Face She Can’t Quite Place
Back in the present, during an interview about her award, Yamada asks Goto if she remembers the customer who stood up for her all those years ago. Goto doesn’t. Yamada can’t picture his face clearly either, but the details she does remember describe a younger Sasaki almost exactly, general enough to fit plenty of men, which is probably why she hasn’t made the connection. The episode leaves it there, with the audience knowing exactly who she’s looking for, and her still not realizing he’s the man she smokes with behind the store.
It’s a fitting place to leave the story for now, and one that also aligns with the anime’s release history. Before the regular July broadcast, ABEMA released an early version on June 3, 2026, dividing the first six television episodes into twelve shorter installments. Episode 6 therefore marks the end of that initial run, closing the first part of the story by returning to where the relationship actually began, even as neither of them realizes it yet.
Conclusion
For a while, this episode put the cigarette on trial, and both of them reacted the same way. Neither one was worried about the habit alone. They were worried about losing each other. Then the threat vanished, and they went straight back to pretending the cigarette is why they keep meeting.
The flashback makes that pretense harder to sustain. The smile that has kept Sasaki coming back to the store since the very first episode is one he helped make possible eight years ago, and the persona Tayama now hides behind was built, at least in part, on encouragement from the very man she’s hiding it from. The kindness he gave away without expecting anything back has been returning to him across the counter all along, in a form neither of them recognizes yet. Their story didn’t start the night she invited him to smoke. It started eight years earlier, at a register, with a stranger in a bad mood choosing to spend it on her side, and everything since has been the two of them circling back to that moment without realizing it.
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