Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You works because it understands something most romance anime don’t bother with: the specific comfort of finding one person you can be completely normal around. No grand gestures, no manufactured drama, just two people in a quiet corner of the world having conversations that actually go somewhere.
Unfortunately, that’s a harder thing to replicate than it sounds, which is why finding something to watch after it can feel surprisingly difficult. This list pulls together ten anime that share at least one piece of what makes Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You work, whether that’s the adult setting, the slow burn, the hidden double life, or just two unlikely people gravitating toward each other in the same spot.
1. Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku
Narumi has just started a new job, but she’s already keeping a secret. She’s a hardcore fujoshi, and every boyfriend she’s had has dumped her as soon as they find out. On her first day, she runs into Hirotaka, a childhood friend who’s just as obsessed with gaming, and by the end of episode one, they’re dating. It sounds like it skips over the usual buildup, but that’s kind of the point. The show isn’t about the confession itself; it’s about what comes after.
The comparison to Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You comes down to one thing. Both shows are about adults who need somewhere private to drop the version of themselves they show the world. A smoking area behind a supermarket, a corner booth at a bar after work. A-1 Pictures produced the 11-episode series in 2018, and it holds a 7.9 on MAL with fans consistently praising how refreshingly undramatic the whole thing is. If you watched Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You and immediately wanted more adult characters actually talking to each other like real people, start here.
2. After the Rain
Akira is a teenage track star whose career got cut short by an injury, and now she works part-time at a family restaurant with zero enthusiasm for basically anything. Her manager, Kondo, is 45, divorced, bumbling, makes dad jokes constantly, and has absolutely no idea she’s fallen for him. The age gap is upfront, and the show doesn’t pretend it isn’t there, but what actually drives the story is something quieter than a romance. Two people who both abandoned something they loved, stuck in the same rainy corner of Yokohama, slowly pulling each other back toward the things they’d given up on.
Wit Studio handled the animation and went all in on rain-soaked visuals and tight close-ups that give the whole thing a literary quality you don’t expect from a 12-episode series. The manga had over 2 million copies in circulation by the time the anime aired in early 2018, and the ending theme by Aimer became genuinely iconic in its own right. If the workplace dynamic and age gap in Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You are what hooked you, this one scratches exactly that itch.
3. Recovery of an MMO Junkie
Moriko Morioka quit her corporate job at 30 after 11 years and has absolutely no regrets about it. She spends her days in her apartment playing an MMO as a handsome male avatar named Hayashi, forming a close bond with a female healer called Lily. The twist is that Lily is actually a guy named Yuta who keeps running into the real Moriko at the convenience store down the street, neither of them realizing they already know each other pretty well.
It sounds like a gimmick, but the show handles it with a lot of warmth and zero melodrama. The adult cast, the low-stakes humour, and the way both characters are clearly using the game as a pressure valve for real-life exhaustion are exactly what make it feel like a natural follow-on from Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You.
4. My Senpai is Annoying
Doga Kobo, the studio behind Oshi no Ko and Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun, has a specific talent for making workplace settings feel genuinely warm and lived-in rather than just a backdrop for romance. That’s exactly what they brought to this one. Futaba is a small, sharp office worker who gets mistaken for a child constantly, and her senpai Takeda is enormous, loud, and completely oblivious to how she feels about him despite the fact that literally everyone else in the office has already figured it out.
The reason it sits on this list is that the show is less about whether they’ll get together and more about the small daily rituals of two people who genuinely like spending time with each other. Lunch breaks, late shifts, after-work drinks. The manga started as a Twitter webcomic in 2017 and even managed to win the Next Manga Award in the web category just one year later.
5. The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague
Himuro is a descendant of the Snow Woman from Japanese folklore, which sounds dramatic until you see what it actually means in practice. Whenever he gets flustered around his colleague Fuyutsuki, he accidentally starts a blizzard in the break room, his plants freeze solid, and his feet get stuck in blocks of ice on the office floor. Everyone around him can track exactly how he’s feeling at any given moment purely by monitoring the indoor weather. Fuyutsuki, the one causing all of it, remains completely oblivious.
Since the supernatural element is quite light, more of a running visual joke than a plot driver, it never really takes center stage. What the show is really about is the same quiet daily rhythm that makes Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You work so well, which is two people finding small reasons to be around each other. The show is not the most complex show on this list, but genuinely one of the most relaxing.
6. Call of the Night
Ko Yamori stopped sleeping. Not in a dramatic way, just gradually, high school started feeling like something happening to him rather than something he was part of, and one night, he slipped out through his window and started walking. That’s how he meets Nazuna, a vampire living alone in an abandoned building who spends her nights wandering the same empty city he does. She’s the first person he’s actually wanted to talk to in a long time, which creates a problem since the only way she can turn him into a vampire is if he genuinely falls in love with her first.
The connection to Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is less obvious than the other entries on this list, but it’s real. Both anime treat a specific place and time as a kind of refuge where two people can drop whatever version of themselves they show everyone else, and both let that space do most of the emotional heavy lifting. Produced by Liden Films on Fuji TV’s Noitamina block, the manga won the 68th Shogakukan Manga Award for the shounen category in 2023 and had over 5.3 million copies in circulation by 2025.
7. Sing “Yesterday” for Me
Before recommending this one, it’s worth noting that the ending is divisive, the pacing frustrated a significant chunk of its audience, and the love triangle at the centre of it gets genuinely messy in ways that not everyone will find satisfying. If you watched Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You specifically because it felt uncomplicated and warm, this might not scratch the same itch.
However, what it does share with Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is the adult setting and the very specific feeling of someone who has quietly stopped moving forward. Rikuo graduated from college and settled into a convenience store job, not dramatically, just gradually, and the show watches him and the people orbiting him with a patience and visual care that some called near movie-level. Best suited for viewers who don’t mind a romance that gets complicated and uncomfortable before it resolves.
8. Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It
Himuro is a grad student who tells her colleague Yukimura she thinks she might be in love with him. As a scientist, he treats it like a hypothesis that needs testing.SO, they start running “experiments” like measuring heart rate when they hold hands, setting controls, and even calculating margins of error. The whole thing is played completely straight while being genuinely hilarious, and like Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You, the romance builds through two people spending time together in a very specific shared space, in this case, a university lab rather than a supermarket smoking area.
Produced by Zero-G and streaming on Crunchyroll, the 12-episode series aired in early 2020 with a second season following in 2022. A recurring mascot bear appears throughout to explain actual statistical concepts to the audience, which somehow makes it funnier. Similar to Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You, this anime has natural and unhurried chemistry between the leads, just with significantly more spreadsheets involved.
9. See You Tomorrow at the Food Court
Wada looks like the kind of girl who has everything together. Good grades, composed, quietly intimidating to approach. Yamamoto is a gyaru who makes other students nervous just by walking past them. What nobody at either of their schools knows is that these two meet every single day after school at a mall food court, eat together, complain about everything, and are completely different people around each other than the versions everyone else gets.
Like Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You, See You Tomorrow at the Food Court is built around a specific location that functions as a private world for two people who need somewhere to just exist without performing. This is genuinely one of the best picks on this list if what you’re after is something chill that doesn’t ask much of you but never gets boring either. Only 6 episodes were produced by Atelier Pontdarc and directed by Kazuomi Koga of Re: Zero – Starting Life in Another World, with series composition handled by Jukki Hanada.
10. I Have a Crush at Work
Most romance anime spend their entire run building toward a confession. This one skips that part entirely and starts with the couple already together. The twist? They are secretly dating while spending their work days pretending they can barely stand each other in front of their colleagues. It’s a genuinely fresh angle for the genre and one that shares Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You’s specific energy of two people carving out private space in a very public setting.
Produced by Studio Blade and adapted from Akamaru Enomoto’s manga that ran in Kodansha’s Morning magazine from 2019 to 2023, the 12-episode series aired in early 2025 with an opening theme by Polkadot Stingray. Reviews flagged the pacing as uneven in the second half, but the central couple is charming enough to carry it. A good closer for this list and probably the most structurally similar show here to what Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is actually doing.
