The Yuzuki family is a family of four brothers. After their parents died, the oldest brother, Hayato, put himself through college and became a teacher, all while raising his brothers.
Mikoto, the second son, is calm and collected, assisting his older brother. The third son, Minato, is energetic and troublesome, often clashing with Mikoto who is only just 11 months older and in the same grade as him. The fourth son, Gakuto, is studious and mature for his age.
While it is difficult to live without parents, the Yuzuki brothers do their best and are supported further by the people in their lives around them.
Family-friendly friendly family anime is always a balm for the soul if you just want anime to peacefully enjoy. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like The Four Yuzuki Brothers, head on down below.
Anime Like The Four Yuzuki Brothers
For Fans of Caring For Younger Siblings
Minami-ke
This is the story of three sisters – the responsible high school-aged Haruka, wild child middle schooler Kana, and the devious elementary school-aged Chiaki.
They live together without their parents and go about their surprisingly average life. Helping each other get through everything from love confessions to cooking, this is the story of three average girls doing normal and slightly abnormal things.
Both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and Minami-ke follow a group of siblings who live alone because their parents are not around. The oldest sibling is responsible and motherly, the middle sibling(s) are trouble makers, and the youngest sibling is mischievous, but stoic about it as they try to help their oldest sibling.
While both series actually follow the daily lives of the family as well as the various friends of the family, Minami-ke is much more focused on comedy. As each season of Minami-ke had a different studio animating it, sometimes it is pure gag comedy and sometimes it is wholesome family comedy.
Gakuen Babysitters
After the death of his parents, teenage Ryuuchi becomes the caretaker of his younger brother Kotarou. After meeting a chairman of an elite academy at his parent’s funeral, they are given room and board in exchange for him becoming the school’s babysitter – a role established to support the female teachers.
Although The Four Yuzuki Brothers is about doing it on a larger scale, both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and Gakuen Babysitters are about older brothers taking care of younger siblings after their parents die.
While Gakuen Babysitters is about a boy only taking care of one younger brother, it adds more kids into the mix by making him the school babysitters for the young children of the teachers in exchange for room and board.
Both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and Gakuen Babysitters are cute series that show the softer side of male characters as they take care of younger kids tirelessly. They also both balance out diabetes-inducing cuteness with just a touch of drama and melancholy since both families lost their parents.
Listen to Me, Girls! I Am Your Father
Segawa Yuta is now a freshman in university. Since a young age he was raised by his sister Yuri, but now she is married with a family of her own.
One day, Yuri and her husband decide to go on a trip and ask Yuta to look after their three daughters. When Yuri’s plane goes missing, the three children are at risk of being divvied up among relatives.
In order to prevent this, Yuta decides to step up and care for them on his own.
While The Four Yuzuki Brothers offers a wholesome take on a family that lost their parents and has to come together to survive, Listen to Me, Girls provides a more dubious one.
It is wholesome in that a guy steps up to raise the daughters of the sister that raised him after she dies, but it is also a college guy raising girls that run the gamut of the age spectrum. The series is also a romance, but the older two girls are technically only his step-nieces, which makes the fact that he romances one of them less gross, but still very suspect.
Regardless of the dubiousness, both series provide the same sort of wholesome family fluff that you may be looking for as well as helping orphaned children deal with the drama that goes along with that.
Baby and Me
After the sudden passing of his mother, fifth grader Takuya is left picking up the slack and caring for his baby brother Minoru while his father works to pay the bills.
While the neighbors blame him for Minoru’s constant crying and he has to watch his friends have their childhood, his trails may teach him the true meaning of family.
While both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and Baby and Me are about boys who suddenly have to parent their younger siblings, Baby and Me is a bit different in that the boy’s dad is still alive, but toiling as the traditional absent salaryman father role that is common in anime.
While not raising three brothers, Baby and Me follows a very Hayato-like story of a young boy forced to grow up himself and care for his much younger brother. It is definitely less wholesome than the The Four Yuzuki Brothers, but Baby and Me offers a more serious portrayal of what Hayato would have had to have gone through if he and his brothers were younger.
For Fans of Family Life
Kotaro Lives Alone
Unsuccessful manga artist Shin Karino has his daily routine interrupted one day with the introduction to his new neighbor – a four-year-old boy who moved in next door, lives by himself, and talks like a samurai.
While this boy is more put together than most of his neighbors, living alone has its difficulties at any age.
Both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and Kotaro Lives Alone offer cute, silly, and often cheerful glimpses of either a blood-related family or a found family that all live in the same apartment block. However, when you are least expecting it, both series hit you with a big dose of melancholy to keep things from being too fluffy.
Kotaro Lives Alone seems the more silly and childish of the two, but it tackles surprisingly serious subjects. It is the silliness of the series that makes those subject hit a little harder.
If you like your wholesome family series with more than a few dark undertones, Kotaro Lives Alone is a must-watch.
Sweetness and Lightning
After the death of his wife, high school math teacher Kouhei Inuzuka is left to care for his young daughter, Tsumugi. He does his best, but his busy schedule and poor culinary skills limit them to eating convenience store food separately.
One day, his daughter expresses an interest to eat together after talking to one of his students in the park, Kotori, who deeply enjoys food. He rushes over to the restaurant owned by the student’s mother, but she is not there.
While Kotori tries her best to cook for them, her skills are lacking. However, together, Inuzuka-sensei, Tsumugi, and Kotori learn to expand their cooking skills.
While the characters in The Four Yuzuki Brothers are much older (and there is much more of them), Sweetness and Lightning provides a similar, more compact wholesome family life experience with a much large focus on food.
Outside of wholesome father-daughter moments, Sweetness and Lightning is about learning to cook for said daughter. It keeps Sweetness and Lightning from having a problem that The Four Yuzuki Brothers itself faces where after awhile of wholesome slice of life family fluff, you get a bit fatigued from it.
Deaimon – Recipe for Happiness
It has been ten years since Nagomu Irino left home to pursue his dream of music. While his dream is failing, he receives a letter hearing saying father has been hospitalized, so he returns home to help run his family’s traditional Kyoto sweets shop.
Once there, he finds his father is fine, but they have picked up an abandoned 10-year-old girl named Itsuka Yukihira, and his father has chosen her as successor.
It isn’t long before Nagomu bonds with Itsuka, viewing himself as a father-like figure to her.
While The Four Yuzuki Brothers focuses on four brothers doing the best they can with the lot in life they were dealt, Deaimon is more of a found family anime about an adult man discovering that his elderly parents are taking care of an abandoned child.
Like Sweetness and Lightning above, Deaimon also has a food focus as well, this time focusing on the creation of traditional Japanese sweets.
Aside from cute slice of life moments about a family and the other people close to them, The Four Yuzuki Brothers and Deaimon share a passion for injecting a lot of more melancholy moments and acknowledging the sort of trauma that kids have when they either lose their parents or their parents leave them.
Usagi Drop
Daikichi Kawachi is a 30-year-old bachelor that works long hours at a respectable job. However, upon hearing the news of his grandfather’s death, he returns home for the funeral only to find out that his grandfather had an illegitimate daughter named Rin.
Shy and unapproachable, this young child is shunned by the other members of the family.
In his anger that no one will take her in, Daikichi steps up himself and begins his days anew as a single father with no prior childcare experience.
Both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and Usagi Drop focus on an unconventional family and warm your dead little heart with the wholesome ways they learn to live together. While The Four Yuzuki Brothers follows four brothers after their parents die, Usagi Drop follows a man raising his grandfather’s secret bastard daughter that none of his other family members wanted to take in after his grandfather died.
As such, while you get nice family moments and see this unconventional family grow together, you also have more serious and dramatic moments of the characters dealing with more difficult emotions that come from grief and abandonment.
The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting
Tooru Kirishima is known as the Demon of the Sakuragi crime family due to his overly violent tendencies. Because of his skill and loyalty, he has been selected by the boss of the family for an important job – the job of babysitting the boss’ daughter.
Both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting provide wholesome family stories in a non-traditional family setting. However, The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting is, obviously, about a yakuza member raising the bosses’ small daughter.
The Four Yuzuki Brothers gets its cuteness from rather normal slice of life adventures, but The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting gets its cuteness from watching otherwise rough and violent guys be super soft with a small child who doesn’t quite grasp the danger and violence that goes along with their profession.
For Fans of Pleasant Slice of Life
Barakamon
After losing his temper on a critic, renowned calligraphy artist Sieshuu Handa is exiled to the Goto Islands by his father for a period of self-reflection.
There, he seeks to find new inspiration for his art, but finds that his neighbors and some neighborhood kids keep getting in his way.
While The Four Yuzuki Brothers focuses on the life of four diverse brothers, Barakamon focuses on one main character under siege by a series of silly neighborhood kids in a rural island community. This means that the main character in Barakamon puts on a grumpy front, but is always left with a positive experience by the variety of childish shenanigans.
Both series have their moments of drama, but mostly both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and Barakamon present you with a calming and cheerful slice of life experience that highlights the positive change fostered by various situations and interactions.
My Roommate is a Cat
Subaru is a novelist, and not very good with people. He’s been alone since his parent’s death, but one day while praying at their grave, a cat comes and eats his offering.
Deciding to take it home, he now is shouldered with a cat, and this stray is shouldered with caring for a human who can barely care for himself.
Sure, you could watch an anime about four brothers cutely stumbling through life together OR you could watch a series about a lonely guy that adopts a stray cat and does the same thing.
Both The Four Yuzuki Brothers and My Roommate is a Cat are slice of life anime about character just living their lives. They get some light drama from the trauma of losing your parents at a young age and living alone, but you get wholesome moments from the people (or animals) they make connection with.
Both series balance out drama and melancholy perfectly with cuter and comical moments between the characters that live together.
Play It Cool, Guys
Despite having different personalities, four boys in various stages of young adulthood all have one thing absolutely in common – clumsiness.
All four boys are naturally clumsy, but often cover their small slip-ups with a smooth recovery to keep the cool air they have cultivated around themselves in front of others.
Although The Four Yuzuki Brothers puts a large emphasis on the support that family can provide, there are moments when the male characters are just fumbling youths trying to do their best in life. Play It Cool, Guys builds its plot around the fumbling of cute boys and makes a comedy out of it.
The Four Yuzuki Brothers is a distinctly wholesome slice of life comedy about a family of brothers, which is different from the multiple unconnected characters who are a little air-headed or cutely clumsy. However, if you enjoyed the softer representation of men in anime, or just like Cute Boys Doing Cute Things, then Play It Cool, Guys is very much your next watch.
Do you have more anime recommendations like The Four Yuzuki Brothers? Let fans know in the comments section below.
