It seemed rather silly of me to speculate last time that this would be the start of the final confrontation with Kibutsuji himself, as there are still 5 volumes to go after these two but I’m still surprised at how many of the Twelve Kizuki are still alive. I could’ve sworn we’d seen more of them get taken out. Think they are on a recruitment drive that I missed?
Cover by Koyoharu GotougeWritten and Illustrated by Koyoharu Gotouge
Translated by John Werry
English Adaptation by Stan!
Lettered by Evan Waldinger & John HuntThe Demon Slayer Corps plunges into Infinity Castle to confront Muzan. Shinobu engages in a fierce fight against Doma, the Upper Rank 2 demon. Poison doesn’t work on him, so she finds herself in an intense struggle. Will she be able to defeat the demon who killed her older sister?! Then another demon appears before Zenitsu and blocks his way.
I did a bit of digging because, as a side-effect of the rather brisk pace of “Demon Slayer” and its information density, I sometimes miss details that inform later revelations and sometimes the manga just leaves those details out entirely. Like, I don’t remember finding out that Zenitsu’s teacher had committed seppuku at some point in the last arc but all the wikis seem to put that as when he died. For the story itself, it doesn’t actually matter but were that detail actually dropped earlier, it would have strengthened the reveal and provided an example of the kind of long term pay-off “Demon Slayer” tends to be the weakest at.
The other big reveal is with the Upper Rank demon Zenitsu fights: Kaigaku. For some reason I thought he was there during the last big demon check-in way back before the start of the Swordsmith village arc but NOPE turns out he’s brand new, literally formed during the Hashira Training arc. He’s taken over the spot of Upper Rank Six from Daki & Gyutaro and turns out not only to be the jackass older student who slapped Zenitsu around but ALSO the fucko who betrayed the kids at Goymei’s orphanage.
Man, no wonder he became a demon. This guy sucks! And the narrative device of “demon flashback,” or lack thereof in this case, backs me up on this. Selfish and cowardly, he was willing to sacrifice others in order to survive himself, did nothing to atone, and ultimately saw the development of others as a zero-sum game. When Zenitsu could only learn the first form, while Kaigaku could learn all the others, he disparaged Zenitsu, seeing him as an adversarial force rather than a complementary one.
Thus, we understand him through the eyes of Zenitsu, transforming his death into a tragic one. Keeping with the theme of heroes striving to be selfless and thinking of others at all times, Zenitsu even blames himself for Kaigaku’s fall, which, with how Zenitsu was when we first met him, is an argument that holds maybe a teaspoon of water but disregards the more salient fact that it was Kaigaku’s choice to reject Zenitsu’s attempts to get along. Therefore, we close the battle not on Kaigaku’s reminiscence but on Zenitsu’s reconciliation with Gramps and his affirmation.
Narratively, the battle also serves to show how far Zenitsu has grown, both as a demon slayer AND as a person. He is serious, he can fight while awake, and for all the ridicule around only knowing one form to perfection, he did what no one else from the Thunder school has: developed a new technique. That’s so cool! I may not “get” the difference between the forms but I understand what it means to add something significant to tradition. I’m so glad my boy Zenitsu is getting his time to shine in this way.
But that’s just one of three battles that happens across these volumes, and it’s the shortest of them by far; fitting for a character with as much hubris and lack of demonic experience as Kaigaku. The other two are with Doma, who didn’t die at the end of volume 16, and Akaza, the bastard who killed Rengoku. Doma’s fight still isn’t over by the time volume 18 ends but god damn, Gotouge has really sold exactly why he’s the #2 Kizuki, and has been for a long time. I’m both annoyed and glad that he not only survived his battle with Shinobu but provides a book-end for the two personal fights of Giyu & Tanjiro vs. Akaza and Zenitsu vs. Kaigaku.
Continued belowBefore I go farther though, I have to admit that I actually yelled at volume 17 when it was revealed that Doma wasn’t dead. I yelled even louder when Shinobu was EATEN BY DOMA and Kanao rolled up just in time to see her get killed and then absorbed. I cried. I’m crying now. Fuck.
That’s the opening fucking chapter of volume 17! I don’t know if Gotouge or the Jump staff planned it to be that way or if it was a coincidence but either way, it was an excellent but devastating way to kick things off. Gotouge, as I am all too aware at this point, knows exactly how to push the devastation buttons with maximum efficiency and chapter 143, “Wrath,” is another perfect example of it. Shinobu ruminates on all the people that demons have killed and the anger she has but is not allowed to feel. Her final gambit fails to even get Doma to shed his smile. Kanao is forced to watch her mentor get murdered. We see the rage and fury of both of them and then Gotouge twists the knife by juxtaposing that with happier times and with melancholic words of hope.
Then, later in volume 18, we learn that not only did Doma kill Shinobu’s sister but he ALSO killed Inosuke’s mother, a person he had all but forgotten since he was raised by boars after her death. Is this a weird development? Yeah, but I can forgive “Demon Slayer” for this since Inosuke didn’t get to exact revenge on Akaza for Rengoku’s death AND it gives him a more personal motivation for this fight. Moreover, we have to take this explanation with a grain of salt anyway as it’s clear that Doma seems to be changing his story about the religion he was a head of: from the involvement of his parents in creating Paradise Faith to their state of aliveness to the purpose of the religion. I’ll ruminate more on this once we get some resolution in the next couple volumes since there aren’t any good answers and the battle has yet to resolve.
Sure, we had a fantastic few chapters of Kanao fighting Doma on her own and then one or two with Inosuke joining in on the fight with his horrible bendy arms, but the majority of volumes 17 & 18 were, rightly, focused on the fight with Akaza.
If I were to rank the fights in “Demon Slayer” thus far, I would have to put the fight with Akaza near the top because of how many expectations Gotouge breaks while still retaining the themes of the work within those broken expectations. Like, I did not think we would get a multi-chapter flashback for Akaza but we do. I didn’t think we’d get an empathetic look at him, despite the fight being with Tanjiro, but we do. And I certainly didn’t think it would be Tanjiro’s words and fighting spirit that ended up getting Akaza to take himself out rather than being taken out by the teamwork of Tanjiro and Giyu, which only just barely kept themselves alive.
It is a tense fight, full of desperation and calculation and reversals of fortune, and a fast one too. Clocking in at only 10 chapters, and even less if you consider chapter 146 barely has any fight and chapters 154-156 are essentially the falling action, it’s shorter than many of the other recent “Demon Slayer” fights and certainly shorter but more dense than other Shonen battle manga.
Moreover, I keep forgetting that memories and the dead have a real, tangible effect on the world of “Demon Slayer,” which is something I love. Akaza punching behind himself at the memory of the man who took him in when he was a punk orphan kid is a powerful moment and having it be acknowledged within the world makes the action real rather than narrative artifice.
Memories are a vital part of ourselves. They shape who we are today and what we want to be in the future. They influence our current actions and can, in very real ways, change what we are doing in real time. This is why demons often no longer have memories of when they’re humans. This is a narrative convenience to be sure, ensuring a reason to have the demons reminisce prior to death. However, it also plays into the greater ideas of “Demon Slayer” related to what it means to be human and what it means to be a good human. Akaza, whose human name was Hakuji, lost everything in his life twice due to the selfishness of humanity: his father due to a societal valuation of property and wealth over people’s wellbeing and his soon-to-be father-in-law and wife due to a personal vendetta and jealousy.
Continued belowWe see how these two events shaped Akaza’s worldview, where weakness is to be squashed and rejected, and strength is to be wielded for its own sake. While the pursuit of strength and the denigration of weakness is not fully formed in him until he became a demon, society writ large laid the foundation through its actions.
At first, Hakuji needed strength to get medicine for his father and avoid the law. He wielded it to protect the weak from the overwhelming strength of the magistrate & a system set up to punish them for not having the power of money. Upon the death of his father by suicide, the selflessness that animated him began to morph into an unconcious resentment of himself and a conscious resentment of the world writ large. Once he was taken in by Keizo to help take care of Koyuki, who was sickly much like Hakuji’s father, he began to lose that resentment and recommit himself to using his strength of will to take care of Koyuki. It is only when they, too, are taken violently via poison in the well, that he detaches “strength” from a human purpose – the protection of others – and props it up as a goal in its own right, redefining “weakness” as an antagonistic force to strength.
For Akaza, weakness isn’t simply physical. It is multifaceted and, crucially, deeply rooted in the personal traumas he suffered. The rival dojo hid behind a poisoned well (moral weakness,) Koyuki and his father had illnesses and were often bed-ridden (physical weakness,) and Hakuji himself had poor self-control (emotional weakness.) Once he becomes a demon, those are the things he reviles. If you don’t fight head-on, you’re weak. If you apologize for something you cannot control, you are weak. If you cannot keep your promises, you’re weak. Moreover, because his father and Koyuki were taken from him by violence, he twists their infirmity and inability to live on their own into a reason to hate human bodies, folding that into his pursuit of strength. It’s tragic but not irreversible.
Tanjiro embodies what Hakuji wanted to be. He wanted to be strong – morally, emotionally, and physically – in order to protect the people he loved. Because of this, Tanjiro is able to hold up a mirror to Akaza and reflect back at him all the things he could no longer see, both in his conscious actions and words and unconscious moments such as when he “loses the strength” to hold his sword and has to punch Akaza instead. Through this, Akaza realized that he hated weakness because he hated himself for being unable to be the person his father knew he could be, for being unable to protect Koyuki and Keizo, and for using “fists meant to protect” to kill. He lost the selfless reason for his desire for strength, wiped away by Kizuki’s blood. It is important, then, that Akaza be the one to take himself out, with the help from Tanjiro and Giyu to get him to that point.
For Tanjiro, this battle also helped illuminate some lessons from his own past. These manifested as a new technique – the transparent world – and as wisdom about what it means to take the life of an enemy. The bear Tanjiro’s father killed had devoured humans and still he empathized with it. He showed it respect but stood firm, refusing to allow it to bring harm to his family or anyone else. Tanjiro’s fighting with demons is the same, though up until this point he had been unable to fully inhabit this dual-state.
I suspect there is at least one more lesson to be learned before his fight with Kibutsuji but that will come later. For now, it’s time to prepare for the battle with Doma and the hunt for Kibutsuji in volumes 19 & 20.
