Night shift always brings out the weirdos, and that's especially true for the convenience store in Osaka, where the late-night customers aren't always human! A cute, slice-of-life story about a demon girl working the late shift and the customers she encounters each night.

When night falls over Osaka's premier entertainment district, a deep darkness gathers, as vagrants and bar-hoppers alike flock to late-night minimarts to feed their basest cravings and vices...

Hoping to harvest this evil energy for her own ends, the haughty-but-hardworking demon Allura has come to the human world to work at one such convenience store—where she quickly finds that the night shift sucks, and she can't reap the precious human evil she wanted. Will she be able to hold down the job, or will the crushing reality of working retail send her back to the underworld?!

Workin' the Night Shift at Akumart has a story and art by Najimi. Translation by Evan Ward. Lettering by Isabell Struble. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (June 23, 2026). Rated T.

Lucas Deruyter
Rating:

This could entirely be a me thing, but I have a weird soft spot for low-stakes jobs. Between the Catholic guilt that I inherited from my Mom and the late-stage capitalism brain rot I was born into, I have a back-of-the-mind compulsion to always be productive and make money. Retail or physical labor jobs were great for this when I was younger, because they let me scratch that itch while letting me turn my brain off and save my best self for the parts of my life that I really wanted to pour my enthusiasm into. Furthermore, as I worked these kinds of jobs — bank teller, landscaper, waiter, coffee shop assistant manager, expo, barback, and bartender, to be specific — while I was in my teens and the first half of my twenties, I'm almost nostalgic for these kinds of gigs as I associate them with a time in my life when I was figuring myself out.

NAJIMI's Workin' the Night Shift at Akumart does not share my fondness for side-gigs, emphasizes all of the parts of this kind of work that I rarely think about, and expresses its story in a less-than-conducive format for this kind of narrative. Focusing on Allura, a devil girl who travels to Osaka to harness negative energy to restore her clan to its former glory, she begins working the night shift at a 24-hour convenience store because it has an abundance of the resource. While already too high-concept a premise to fit cleanly into the “cute girls doing cute things” genre, the humor in this work being fairly mean-spirited also brings it down a few notches in my estimation.

The “jokes” in Workin' the Night Shift at Akumart usually fall into one of three categories: Allura being ignorant of the ins and outs of her job and the human world, her coworkers being either frustrated or burnt out by this place of work, or customers being mean to Allura and her falling into an exaggerated panic. I did this kind of work for a solid decade and only rarely remember interacting with a rude or weird customer, and I recall getting drunk or bumming around with my coworkers far more than their daily shortcomings. While there is a little bit of soul searching and self-discovery in these characters, it all feels secondary to the frustrations of their job, and that makes Workin' the Night Shift at Akumart a bit of a bummer to read.

It also probably doesn't help that this is a 4-koma manga. While that format can work super well in small doses and when the writing is punchy enough, when the jokes miss as often as they do in Workin' the Night Shift at Akumart, it becomes an overly wordy slog to read. For instance, one of the final gags of this volume is that Allura's demon crow familiar, Elena, absorbs enough energy to gain the power to transform…and she takes the shape of another moe demon girl like Allura.

While Workin' the Night Shift at Akumart is by no means offensive, it's not inspired enough or knowledgeable enough about its subject matter to entertain or inspire any kind of introspection.

Erica Friedman
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Allura, known to her co-workers as Allie-chan, is a very specific type of character. We're told she is thousands of years old, but she looks and acts about 11. With flailing arms and overconfidence from being a Demon King's daughter, she's an agent of chaos in the Osaka night, unless she's busy unboxing cup ramen on Aisle 2.

As a gag comic, Workin' the Night Shift at Akumart's first volume relies on adding characters to create new situations. So the staff on this overnight shift in a small convenience store in Osaka is quickly up to three workers and a manager, which is how you know this is a fantasy. Once the cast is established, the comic turns a jaded eye toward life as a convenience story clerk in the nightlife side of town.

Allie-chan will meet overworked workers, drunken holiday-makers, angry complainers, and other ogres, goblins, and zombies as they serve the nighttime denizens of the area. Friends fill everyone's lives with gags. We'll also see Allie and the crew struggle to find room for all the items in a new shipment on the very limited shelf space.

Like most 4-panel gags manga, take this in small doses, when you need a little levity, some light physical humor, and a cute little girl having a tantrum about being poor, hungry, not being demony enough, or some other humorous set-up. While Allie's plans to absorb humans' dark energy and become powerful are a bit of a dud, we're sure that she'll make a great Demon Queen one day.