Kaiju No. 8 is the big new shounen series of the spring season. It’s about a guy named Kafka who unwillingly swallows a giant parasite and thereby gains the ability to turn into a kaiju—you know, a kaiju, as in a giant, terror-bent monster like Godzilla, Mothra, etc.
Kafka is the next in the proud line of “shounen protagonists turning into the thing they hate in order to defeat that thing,” like Denji in Chainsaw Man, or Yuji Itadori in Jujutsu Kaisen, or Eren Yeager in Attack on Titan. If you’ve been watching shounen this last decade, you know the drill—except unlike all of his protagonist peers, Kafka is 32 years old, and the series sure won’t let you forget it.
Kaiju No. 8′s third episode saw Kafka embark on the final test for the anti-kaiju Defensive Force he will ever be able to take, since the age cap was recently raised to (you guessed it!) 32 years old. Unfortunately, it’s really not going well for him at the moment. Like, “broken bones and fractured organs”-level bad. But because anime, I have faith that Kafka will be able to turn the situation around. And that fateful turn will most likely occur in episode 4.
But when (and where) can we expect episode 4 to drop?
You can do it, Kafka!
New episodes of Kaiju No. 8 premiere in Japan at 12:30AM on Sunday “morning,” which translates to our actual Saturday morning in North America. Luckily, the good folks at Crunchyroll typically get the new episodes up around the time of the Japanese premiere, which translates to 11:30AM eastern/8:30 Pacific on Saturdays.
This means that episode four should enter your Crunchyroll feeds around 11:30AM eastern on the morning of Saturday, May 4.
It’s sure to be a spicy episode, because if Kafka is going to stay in the running for the exam to join the Defense Force, my guess is that he’s going to have to pull some stunt like he did to show up Shinomiya when she moved his car—namely, he’s going to have to use his kaiju powers. Can kaiju generate punctured organs? We’re probably about to find out! I haven’t read the manga, so I genuinely don’t know.
But otherwise, Kafka seems poised to fail the exam, which would mean the series is probably over. That seems unlikely. We have at least 12 episodes to get to.
(featured image: Production I.G)
