Meet Aggressive Retsuko – she might look cute but her rage-filled internal monologue has struck a chord with overworked Japanese

While Hello Kitty appealed to an earlier generation of young Japanese women, for whom cute was cool, Aggretsuko is a very different character for a very modern kind of woman.

She is neither pink nor fluffy, like her hugely popular predecessor at Sanrio, but 20- and 30-something working women in Japan say she is a great deal more in tune to their real, everyday lives.

In an animated series, Aggretsuko – a contraction of Aggressive Retsuko – is a red panda who works in the accounting department of a traditional trading company in Tokyo. Before joining the firm, this was her dream job.

The reality, however, is very different from what she anticipated and, as the series progresses, viewers see her increasingly struggling to cling to her sanity.

She despises the morning commute, where she is obliged to stand on a packed train with her head in the armpit of a malodorous fellow passenger. Her boss – a wilderbeest – has a habit of dropping piles of extra work onto her desk five minutes before she was planning to head out of the door. Her office colleagues, variously a hippopotamus, gorilla, snake and hyena, annoy her intensely with photos of their offspring on their mobile phones and office gossip.

And then there is the virtually obligatory after-work drinking, when she has to make sure that everyone’s glass is constantly topped up and no one can go until the boss says so.

Around her colleagues, Aggretsuko largely manages to keep up appearances – despite the voices in her head telling them exactly what she really thinks of them – but she spends her free time singing thrash metal songs in karaoke parlours to vent her true feelings.