10 Anime Like Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You

Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is the quietest show of its season and, somehow, the one people won’t stop recommending. A middle-aged salaryman’s only daily pleasure is the evening smoke behind the supermarket — and the cashier who finally tells him to cut it out turns out to be the person he’s been unwinding with all along. No apocalypse, no battle arcs, no misunderstanding tropes stretched over twenty episodes. Just two adults, a convenience store, and the slow discovery that the person you relax with is the person you want.

That’s the actual assignment for this list: anime about adult (or adult-feeling) romance built on small rituals — the shared smoke, the after-work drink, the comfortable silence. Shows where the connection is in the routine, not the confession. Some picks are close matches in premise, some in tone. I’ll tell you which.

1. The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague

The closest match on this list, down to the office setting and the snow. A descendant of a snow spirit works in an ordinary office, freezes things when his emotions spike, and the woman at the next desk thinks it’s all perfectly normal. It’s a workplace romance where the entire story is two people being quietly good to each other — no drama, no rivals, no will-they-won’t-they dragged past breaking point. The coziness of Smoking Behind the Supermarket lives here, with an office instead of a parking lot. Warm, low-stakes, and deeply rewatchable.

2. Recovery of an MMO Junkie

The “adult romance between people hiding their real selves” pick, and the strongest match in spirit. A 30-year-old woman quits her job and retreats into an MMO, where she bonds with a player who is — surprise — a colleague from the life she just left. It shares Supermarket’s exact engine: two people who know each other in one context discovering each other in another, with the age and life-stage of the leads mattering to the story. It’s funnier than Supermarket and more conventionally romantic, but the grown-up texture is the same, which is rarer than it should be.

3. Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku

The office-romance classic, and required viewing for this specific mood. Two childhood friends reconnect as working adults over a shared secret — they’re both otaku — and decide to date on the pragmatic grounds that dating each other is less exhausting than hiding from everyone else. It’s the most “we’re adults, let’s not be dramatic about this” romance in anime, and the friend-couple dynamics around the main pair are just as good. If you love Supermarket for the grown-up normalcy, Wotakoi is the genre’s thesis statement.

4. Natsuyuki Rendezvous

The most underrated pick on this list, and the one that goes deepest into the adult side. A young widower falls for the florist whose shop he visits, and the ghost of her late husband — visible to him alone — has opinions. It’s a strange, mature, melancholy little series about loving someone who’s still mourning someone else, and it treats all three of them with real respect. It’s heavier than Supermarket by a lot, but it shares the core belief: adult romance is about carrying your past into something new, not erasing it.

5. Sing “Yesterday” for Me

The messiest, most human pick on this list. A convenience-store worker stuck in his own arrested development drifts between the woman who got away, the coworker who’s quietly been there all along, and his own refusal to decide anything. It’s frustrating and true in equal measure, and it shares Supermarket’s setting — the neighborhood store, the dead-end job, the feeling of life happening in the margins — more than any other anime. The ending rushes (the manga is better), but the atmosphere is exactly right.

6. Barakamon

Not a romance — hear me out. Barakamon is about a young calligrapher exiled to a small island after punching a critic, and the village that slowly rebuilds him. The connection to Supermarket is the essential thing: the joy of watching a stressed adult find peace in a small, ordinary community, one daily ritual at a time. It’s warm, hilarious, and quietly profound. If what you want from Supermarket is the “adult learns to breathe” feeling with the romance optional, this is the show.

7. Your Name

The blockbuster pick, included for one specific reason: nobody in anime does “connection through small daily moments” better than Shinkai. The body-swap premise is just the machine for the real subject — two strangers living each other’s ordinary days until the ordinary becomes the thing they can’t live without. It’s epic where Supermarket is intimate, and it’s a film, so the commitment is different. But the emotional wavelength is identical, and the twilight-scene payoff is one of the best sequences in modern anime. If Supermarket made you want to feel that again, amplified.

8. The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting

The wildcard, and I’ll defend it. A terrifying yakuza enforcer is reassigned to babysit his boss’s daughter, and the show is about a violent man discovering that his real talent is gentleness. It’s the most Supermarket-adjacent show on this list in one specific way: the story runs on the gap between how a person presents and who they actually are — the same gap that powers the cashier-and-customer premise. It’s also just lovely. The sweetness is earned, which is the only kind that matters.

9. Life Lessons with Uramichi Oniisan

The dark-comedy pick, and the funniest show about adult burnout ever made. Uramichi is a children’s TV host who is deeply, visibly done with everything, and the show follows him and his equally broken coworkers through the daily humiliation of performing cheerfulness. It’s the “adults, at work, barely holding it together” energy of Supermarket turned up to eleven and played for comedy. The humor is dry and occasionally too real. Watch it when you need the exhaustion without the romance.

10. Tsuki ga Kirei

The finale pick: the most honest depiction of first love in anime, and the spiritual prequel to Supermarket’s grown-up tenderness. Two middle-schoolers fall in love slowly, awkwardly, through LINE messages and stolen glances at the school festival, and the show refuses to rush any of it. It’s young where Supermarket is adult, but the texture — communication as a series of tiny, brave acts — is the same. The ending credits sequence alone is a masterclass. Watch it for the reminder of where all this starts.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What’s the closest anime to Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You? The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague for the setting and tone; Recovery of an MMO Junkie for the hidden-identity premise.
• Is Smoking Behind the Supermarket finished? The anime’s first cour aired in Summer 2026. The manga continues well past it, so expect more of the story either in print or in a future season.
• Which of these are adult romances (not high school)? Wotakoi, MMO Junkie, Natsuyuki Rendezvous, Sing Yesterday for Me, and Uramichi (no romance) are the adult picks. Tsuki ga Kirei and Your Name are the high-school exceptions, included for tone.
• Which should I watch first? Wotakoi for the classic. The Ice Guy for the closest match. Barakamon for the best show on this list that isn’t a romance at all.

The supermarket parking lot is the whole story: a place between work and home where two people let their guard down. Every show above understands that the best romance lives in that in-between space.

Still hunting for your next binge? Our anime that will make you cry roundup and our anime where the bad boy changes for love guide are the natural next stops.

More low-key romance with adult energy? Browse the Romance & Drama collection — and our Summer 2026 romance anime roundup lists what is airing right now.