Why you should be consuming ‘Chainsaw Man,’ in all of its forms

But as Fujimoto draws this fantastical interpretation of the world, there's a very real despair at the heart of Chainsaw Man, which early reviewers called “Dickensian.” The protagonist Denji lives in debt to the Yakuza, inherited from his father, and works a violent and dangerous Devil Hunter job for them—quite literally selling pieces of himself to claw back to some semblance of actual humanity. Because he's poor and treated like a dog, more so than the dog-like devil Pochita, whom he has befriended. The comic's setting in the 90s also feels important in this regard, a moment in time when the Japanese economic bubble burst—the anxiety of the so-called “Lost Decades” bleeds into the series even as it approaches the subject of material comfort with a playful sense of humor.

The early stages of Chainsaw Man might be off-putting for some because of Denji's puerile ambitions—he mostly just wants to touch boobs at the beginning—but it comes from the position of having so little that loftier goals were out of reach for him. Chainsaw Man gradually moves him past this point, and he begins to wonder about finding something more meaningful, and becomes aware of how his more materialistic principles make him easy to manipulate or easily bought. There's only one person that treats him with benevolence, and that's Pochita, who dies and becomes Denji's heart by the end of the first chapter.

As the screenwriter of the Chainsaw Man anime adaptation (both the series and the new film), Hiroshi Seko, puts it in an interview with Crunchyroll, “the most shocking thing I realized when I read it first was seeing Denji as a character, a main protagonist of a story, having this very honest and raw need and want: He makes money in order to gain food and women.” He continues, “having that sort of raw need as the driving force of the character's attributes is very unique.”

Those superficial interests are what keep Chainsaw Man feeling authentic—whether it's Denji's lust or his perpetually nervous coworker Kobeni staying on in a job she hates because she needs the money. (That same study of petty impulses also makes Look Back, based on another manga by the same author, one of the best anime of its year). The design of the show amplifies those cravings of economic safety and human intimacy. The realistic detail of the animation draws out the simple pleasures Denji seeks, in sequences like an extended scene following Denji's surly co-worker, then roommate, Aki, around on his morning routine as he makes and drinks coffee, the scene living in the moment so as to convey why Denji is so willing to pay whatever price for these comforts.

That and the “raw need” screenwriter Seko mentions makes Denji easy to exploit. It's apparent from the moment he meets Makima, a government agent running a division of official devil hunters, unglamorously named Public Safety Devil Extermination Special Division 4. She looks to use his newfound power for her own cause. The earliest red flag—so, almost the moment she begins talking to him—sees Makima openly referring to and treating Denji as a dog in the same way the Yakuza do: he's traded one exploitative boss for another. Knowing this doesn't stop him from following along, in part due to his crush on her. He's become so used to having nothing that self respect is a small price to pay for food and a real place to sleep.

This is to say that even the most basic comforts exact a cruel price in Chainsaw Man, which as noted by the anime blog Wrong Every Time (which also underlines the very real financial struggle at its core), is constantly weighing up the costs of living both in the material and moral sense. The only devil hunters that seem to live or get by are the ones who, according to the older hunter Kishibe, are the ones “with a couple of screws loose,” but he really means those with a warped sense of morality. It's a catch-22—even if Denji lives long enough, it requires a hardened heart.

In so much popular culture and everyday parlance, the United States is treated as an aspirational example of the comfort Denji wants. In Chainsaw Man, the violent consequences of the United States are all that's seen of it.

The comic is at its most fascinating when it goes for examples even bigger than Kishibe or Makima to show how the scales of power and wealth tilt towards the morally bankrupt—none more than the United States as a whole. In so much popular culture and everyday parlance, the United States is treated as an aspirational example of the comfort Denji wants. In Chainsaw Man, the violent consequences of the United States are all that's seen of it. The main example is the gun devil, empowered by the fear of gun violence.

Some anime and manga fans have resisted the idea of Fujimoto having a political angle, but it's also not the only time that the United States comes up as an ultimate representation of the violent and capitalist evils haunting the characters of Chainsaw Man—in the second part of the series, Fujimoto evokes the image of the Statue of Liberty in an ironic moment of mass destruction. Later, the personification of war itself sings the U.S. national anthem over images of rows of corpses claimed by American imperialism.