By Variety | Created at 2026-09-04 01:19:02 | Updated at 2026-09-04 01:56:58
1 hour ago
A master assassin’s toughest job isn’t a kill order. It’s finding a wife.
That premise carried “Marriagetoxin” from a running Shonen Jump+ series into one of the standout anime of Spring 2026, and creators Joumyaku and Yoda Mizuki are already looking toward a second season set for January 2027.
The series follows Hikaru Gero, a master assassin whose latest assignment is to secure an heir by finding a wife. The target of his most recent job, a marriage swindler named Mei Kinosaki, ends up joining him for that mission instead. Serialized on Shueisha’s Shonen Jump+, “Marriagetoxin” has surpassed one million copies in circulation worldwide, and its anime adaptation, directed by Hori Motonobu, is streaming on Crunchyroll ahead of a second season premiering in January 2027.
On how the manga came together, Joumyaku says, “It started with the single idea of ‘a Poison Master goes on a search for marriage,’ and from there, as we built the characters and the story, everything I had read, experienced, and picked up along the way got layered onto it.”
The audience reaction has exceeded what either creator anticipated. Joumyaku points to Kinosaki’s reception specifically, crediting the anime staff for carrying Yoda’s character designs and action work faithfully into the adaptation. Yoda says they are grateful to the readers who have supported the series, to everyone involved in making it, and to Joumyaku for teaming up with them. “What surprises me most is that so many readers have enjoyed it – enough that Volume 1 went straight into a reprint and the dream of an adaptation came true.” Yoda says.
Both creators are already looking ahead to the second season. Joumyaku promises that even more captivating heroines will appear one after another, deepening the relationships surrounding Gero. “There is plenty of cool action we want you to see,” Joumyaku says, adding that they are very much looking forward to delivering it to fans. Yoda echoes that heading into Season 2, captivating new heroines arrive along with several characters they are fond of themselves.
Because the story operates within the shonen framework even though most of its cast are adults, Joumyaku says the protagonist’s growth remains the story’s central axis, which is why depicting relationships and identity carries so much weight for the work. Yoda, who illustrates the manga, says the story itself is built by Joumyaku and the series editor rather than by them, but that the emotions are already fully expressed at the storyboard stage. For an artist who wants to depict emotion richly above all, they call it a genuinely enjoyable story to illustrate.
That approach has extended to how the series treats gender presentation, an element fans and critics have singled out as unusually progressive for the genre. Joumyaku describes the subversive elements as something that emerged naturally rather than as a plan set from the outset, with the protagonist caught between family expectations and the pull to live authentically. “I have a rough picture of where things go through the final chapter, but it feels like we are building the story while working out together how the protagonist comes to terms with it all,” Joumyaku says.
Asked about designing Kinosaki, Yoda says, “I had been told in advance that this character would appear in both traditionally masculine and feminine clothing, so on the art side, I designed Kinosaki so that the character holds up in either presentation.”
Working with Hori, whose credits include “Metallic Rouge” and “Carole & Tuesday,” has also shaped the manga going forward. Joumyaku says ideas raised in the anime’s script meetings have fed back into key parts of the source material, pointing to the fully realized car-splitting sequence in Episode One as an example of the level of craft involved. They single out a scene from Chapter 12 of Volume Two, in which Ureshino dumps yakisoba on her head, as the one that stayed with them most, noting that it was given what they call a proper through-line in Part B of Episode Four. “It was amazingly good,” Joumyaku says.
Yoda says the anime’s action choreography went well beyond anything scripted in the manga panels. Of watching it unfold, they say, “so this is how they were moving all along.” They add that seeing the anime’s rendering of Kinosaki’s eyes pushed them to draw the character bigger and cuter in the source material going forward.
Looking toward the manga’s climax, Joumyaku says the urge to give everything to the story’s endpoint grows stronger by the day, while Yoda says they never expected their own dream of seeing their character designs made into figures to actually come true, and that going forward they want to draw even better character designs and illustrations, ones that also get made into figures.
