The second volume of Chainsaw Man is a good deal like the first: irreverent, incendiary, and too preoccupied with the base necessity of things like food and shelter to concern itself with high-minded heroism. As Denji and Power are drawn further into the machinations of the Public Safety Bureau, they remain emphatically indifferent to its goals, finding more motivation in the prospect of boobs or gum than the pursuit of justice or civil order. And how can you blame them? What has justice or civil order ever done for them, either when they were wild and desperate on the streets, or now as imprisoned agents of the state? If Denji and Power come across like beasts, it is only them reacting to a world that’s already assigned them that designation, a world that wouldn’t accept them even if they played by its stultifying, hypocritical rules.
Denji makes his motives and intentions clear right from the start, as he does battle with the Bat Devil in a visual celebration of Fujimoto’s unique aesthetic strengths, careful draftsmanship and studious anatomy sharing space with distorted forms and ink splatters of energy. Fujimoto’s art marries studiously realistic backgrounds with unchained expressions of fantastical violence, making it easy to see why the anime’s production team went all-in on cinematic realism. A monster in a land of horrors is to be expected; a monster interrupting a mundane, realistic downtown is a crisis.
Plummeting through the air as he wages war with this creature, Denji once again announces his unyielding desire to touch a boob. His blunt declarations of intent keep any of this from feeling genuinely heroic; Denji doesn’t want to be a hero, he just wants to eat and sleep and maybe have a girlfriend. You don’t have to be special to fight monsters, you just have to be desperate – and for Denji, fighting monsters like this is essentially the best he can do professionally. Excepting the monstrous specifics, Denji’s position isn’t even that unusual; after all, I’m sure we can all remember the public paeans to “brave service workers” during COVID, who weren’t trying to be brave and weren’t actually rewarded. With capitalism having rusted the engines of civil support into ruin, we are often forced to risk injury or death in order to avoid starvation.
The distance between humans and beasts is consistently challenged throughout this volume, beginning with the flashback detailing Power’s kinship with Meowy. Power makes for an excellent companion and counterpoint to Denji: while he is a human who is treated (and thus acts) like a beast, Power is a beast who finds herself acting like a human, and gaining genuine emotional connections. And Power is only exceptional in that she is able to express these connections beyond the realm of other beasts; after all, even the monster that follows the Bat Devil mourns the death of its mate. This parallel can be interpreted as positively or negatively as you wish: perhaps we are all secretly beasts, or perhaps all beasts are capable of learning to love. Either way, their similarities emphasize again that what we in society label as abhorrent is often simply that which we don’t want to see or deal with, like the global underclass that supports our modern convenience.
Regardless, the quick bond that develops between Denji and Power makes intuitive as well as thematic sense. In a world full of characters who condemn Denji for things beyond his control, or shame him for finding kinship with the only people whose motives make sense, Power is the one person who speaks clearly and seeks rational desires. People like Aki work in service of an alleged justice that has never done a thing for Denji, and in fact has promised to kill him simply for the crime of existing. While Denji is certainly naïve in many ways, it is Aki who is blind to the nature of this work, content to believe in a morality that flatters his desire for revenge. It’s no wonder that Denji sympathizes with the victims of this “justice” more than its arbiters – after all, he himself proves that Aki’s condemnation of all devils and fiends as “always desiring the death of humans” is wrong.
Both Power’s flashback and Denji’s subsequent claiming of his reward also reflect Fujimoto’s refreshing approach to sexuality, and in particular sexuality as distinct from “fanservice.” In spite of Denji’s stated pursuit of boobs, the manga itself does not leer over Power’s naked body – her nudity is treated like the “nudity” of a cat or wolf, the unconsidered natural state for any animal. While Chainsaw Man literally titles itself after a horny adolescent, Fujimoto himself isn’t also trapped within a state of predatory, juvenile leering. The cast themselves are framed the way they’d want to be framed, making it that much easier to believe in them as people.
This mature approach to sexuality unfortunately means Denji’s long-awaited touching of boobs is not a rapturous moment of pure bliss, but more an awkward exchange ending in confusion and disappointment. Romance and sexuality in manga are generally framed as adolescents hope them to be, a series of dreamlike occurrences that validate all of your idle fantasies about what it would be like to be in a relationship. In truth, our first attempts at romance and sexual contact are almost guaranteed to be fumbling, confusing, and so much less than we were hoping for. Having arrived at the summit of his ambitions, Denji finds not validation, but instead an unsettling hollow feeling, and the dawning understanding of what life is truly like.
“I finally got hold of my dream, and it was so much less than I expected. Now when I pursue new dreams, am I gonna realize I was actually happier during the chase then, too? Isn’t that just crap?” In classic Chainsaw Man fashion, Denji goes hunting for boobs and instead finds a profound, devastating realization about life and happiness. Denji believed that his unhappiness was a result of his deprivation, and that if he was given the simple things he needed, he would be happy. In the wake of his “victory,” he is instead forced to acknowledge the unfortunate reality all of us face: happiness is fleeting and ephemeral, but you still have to go to work in the morning.
Realizing this fact could have been a real turning point for Denji, a moment when he turns away from immediate pleasures to consider what long-term happiness might look like. Unfortunately, he offers this confession to Makima, who sees a threat to her power emerging, and instead turns it into a fresh tool to exert her control. She, an adult with a full understanding of seduction and sensuality, is able to evoke the sense of fervent sexual passion he hoped for simply by biting his finger – and then uses that brief taste of ecstasy to rope him into fighting the Gun Devil for her. Denji is a wounded soul who needs to learn to find happiness in the everyday, but Makima needs him to be perpetually malleable and hungry, so she simply reconstructs his desire to touch a boob in a new form.
After a volume and a half of mostly coming off like a stuck-up prick, Aki’s own backstory swiftly humanizes him in the starkest possible terms, while also showing off Fujimoto’s mastery of personal vignettes. The panel of Aki’s home being obliterated is indeed a terrible shock, but it only works because of the pages leading up to it, of idle yet crucial moments shared by Aki and his brother. The key with Fujimoto is that he seems to be genuinely interested in people as they live, in the mundane happiness and disappointments of everyday existence, rather than just impatient to get to the next piece of action. As a result, every time we do get reminded of the horrors of this world, they come as a terrible and unwelcome shock. Fujimoto has managed the difficult task of making an action manga where action genuinely feels like a great violence upon the world, with the incidental death toll of each “epic clash” made emphatically clear. When the world your characters live in is actually a place worth protecting, you don’t need to perpetually scale up powers to create a sense of threat.
That threat hovers closely above the cast as they embark on their next mission, and finds themselves trapped within a hotel’s endless eighth floor. New characters Himeno and Kobeni offer fresh wrinkles in the story’s moral philosophy: Himeno further proving the fallacy of “all devils hate humans” with her bonded eye, Kobeni revealing how you don’t need to be a devil to be reviled and exploited, you just need to be powerless in the face of capital. None of this matters much to Denji, of course; in fact, upon hearing they may be trapped forever, he immediately takes the opportunity to sleep in a comfy hotel bed. The world is hostile and comfort is fleeting – being told “we might all die” is nothing new for Denji, but a big comfy bed is a unique experience, and so he’s not going to worry himself.
Though Makima has him ensnared, Denji’s beast-like philosophy has brought him to an understanding of the world far more realistic than the high-minded philosophizing of Aki. We paper over the cruelty of our system with flattering words like justice and fairness, but Denji understands humanity’s true face, and how little distance separates us from the beasts we hunt. We play at civilization and charity when we are comfortable; take away the trappings of comfort, and we will fight with tooth and claw just like the creatures we revile. It can take no more than one misfortune for the mirror’s glare to shift, and for us to see something horrible yet undeniably recognizable staring back at us. Sure enough, this volume ends with Kobeni staring Denji down, knife in hand, her overpowering urge to survive securing her place among the beasts.
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