Imagine: You are a 16-year-old boy. You have no family because your dad killed himself and left you with tens of millions of yen in debt to the Yakuza. You sold your right eye, a kidney, and a testicle to pay it off. You have no friends, but you have a chainsaw devil dog named Pochita. You live together in a squalid toolshed in the forest where you pay rent and utilities to the Yakuza. You take shits in the forest. You cut trees sometimes, but that makes no money. You kill devils with your dog sometimes, but that’s dangerous. You are dying of a heart condition, so danger isn’t really a concern. You have never been graced with Womankind’s divine and loving affection.
Denji, the protagonist of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s smash-hit Shonen manga Chainsaw Man, isn’t imagining any of that. When Weekly Shonen Jump began serializing Chainsaw Man in late 2018, audiences quickly picked it out as ‘peak’ in the Shonen canon. Drawn to its absurdist tone, thrilling twists, and bad-ass action, Chainsaw Man is a killer spin on the Shonen genre. But not in the way you might initially expect.
In America, recommending manga is a risky business. There is a palpable stigma, and Shonen partially perpetrates it. As the platinum-star child of the manga industry, Shonen is sort of like a gateway drug you take to dive deeper into the medium. Although appealing to some, there is a conspicuous, almost dumb boyishness to the genre. No wonder — Shonen translates exactly to ‘young boy.’ This tone, or perhaps this demographic, is embodied in trope-y dialogue, ubiquitously flashy and grand art styles, kitschy character designs, and fan service — oh God, the fan service. There are barriers to Shonen that many find insurmountable and reasonably so. Chainsaw Man is not really an exception. However, through Denji’s depiction as a tragic hero, Fujimoto sets out to subvert the stale Shonen standards that stigmatize this classic genre beloved by manga fans worldwide.
The first chapter hooks readers by delving into how disastrously down-bad Denji is. There’s his sickly character design: his dejected posture, his eyepatch, and his dirt-beat clothes. There’s his behavior: his restless sputum coughs, his shameless subservience to authority, and his acceptance of his mortality. There’s even a funeral flashback scene, complete with a flash frame of his father hanging from a noose. Immediately afterward (impeccably tragic timing), a mortally wounded Pochita is introduced, with whom Denji must make a blood bond to save. Denji’s fucked-up life is brutally vivid. But there’s also a silly little chainsaw dog derping around, a Tomato Devil with googly eyes and tentacles, and some destitute self-deprecating banter. It’s terribly comical and comically terrible. This is a line Fujimoto is adept at blurring throughout this story and his corpus of work at large.
And then, right when it looks like things can’t get any worse, Denji and Pochita are ambushed by zombies. Their disfigured, dismembered corpses end up inside a dumpster. Welcome to Rock Bottom’s basement. Rest in peace. Or pieces, in this case.
Then Pochita heals by drinking Denji’s blood, makes a contract to become his heart, and transforms him into a human-chainsaw-devil hybrid to save his life. Denji shreds the Zombie Devil to bits in a stunningly storyboarded berserker fight sequence. The chapter ends with an isometric overhead shot of an exhausted Denji lying in the arms of a beautiful woman, surrounded by a pool of blood flowing from a carpet of zombie corpses. No longer is Denji down-bad. He is practically a God. At least by his standards.
The rest of Chainsaw Man Part 1 is about pushing the Shonen grandeur to the limits of the absurd. Like other Shonen leads, Denji starts the story a bum. Unlike other Shonen leads, however, Denji doesn’t have a single noble dream whatsoever. Where Naruto strives to be the Hokage, Goku strives to be the strongest in all the universes, and Luffy strives to find the One Piece, Denji strives for stuff like money, food, attention, and Makima (the aforementioned beautiful woman). Denji’s dreams are all iterations of immature, boyish desires. He is vapid and vulgar by design, thus embodying what gives the Shonen genre that so-to-speak ick.
From Denji’s POV, all he wants is a “normal life.” And now that he’s an immortal chainsaw human hybrid, maybe a “normal life” isn’t that unattainable after all, right? Wrong. Being normal and being Chainsaw Man are incompatible for two reasons. Firstly, Denji’s power is founded on his wish to live a “normal life.” This is the condition Pochita offers Denji before resurrecting him; Denji must continue to try to live a “normal life” to be Chainsaw Man. But secondly, this “normal life” is not a “normal life” at all. It’s Denji’s blanket term for his boyish desires and hubris. The tragic part is that the guy doesn’t know any better. He has had nothing, and he has suddenly been given everything. The bud of Denji’s tragic hamartia, the engine of the hero’s eventual downfall, is planted in the first chapter. Fujimoto wields this hamartia gruesomely throughout the story, but spoilers prevent further from being said.
For what is arguably his manga-num opus, the description of tragic comedy works in both the literal and literary sense. Chainsaw Man is a superposition of serious and unserious content matters; nothing new. What is fresh is how Fujimoto incorporates aspects of tragic comedy to obliterate everything Shonen has stood for prior, that is, its bro-factor. Chainsaw Man’s borderline traumatic absurdity historicizes the boob-quests of Shonen’s past into a genealogy destined to be subverted. It is a provocation of what a genre is supposed to do—something that Shonen has needed for a long, long while.
