Iguro? IGURO?! IGUUUUUROOOOOOOOOOOO!
Cover by Koyoharu GotougeWritten and Illustrated by Koyoharu Gotouge
Translated by John Werry
English Adaptation by Stan!
Lettered by John HuntThe Demon Slayers fight hard to get their blades closer to Muzan’s neck! To avenge her family, Kanao must continue to battle Doma head-on while Iguro and Kanroji find themselves slashing through the shifting rooms of Infinity Castle. Elsewhere, Tokito, Sanemi and Genya come face-to-face with a villain who recognizes Tokito, but Tokito doesn’t know him. Who is this powerful adversary?
I know. I know. The Serpent Hashira only shows up for one chapter alongside Mitsuru but with him gracing the cover of volume 19, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. My guess is we’ll get the battle between them and Upper Rank 4, the Biwa demon, next time alongside the final search for Kibtusuji. That or we’ll cut straight to the end of that battle because it’s very similar to Tanjiro’s first major battle with Kyogai back in volume 3 and they’ve already lamp-shaded how tedious and lengthy the battle is going to be. So long as we get to see a bit more of these two fight, I’ll be good.
What’s really fascinating about these two volumes, to me at least, is that Tanjiro is present for just as many pages as Mitsuru and Iguro and yet, because he and Nezuko were the catalyst for the major status quo change that “Demon Slayer” charts, he becomes central to every battle in small ways. For the battle with Doma, his previous comments to Inosuke about how Tanjiro “bet his mother loved him very much” drove him on and provided him an emotional catharsis beyond the confident artifice of strength he projects. For the battle with Kokushibo, his comment, “the weakest person has the greatest potential,” drives Genya to push harder and consume a piece of Kokushibo’s demon eye sword, which is gross, but effective.
What’s nice about this, however, is that he remains a minor presence rather than being utterly central to these battles. It is important that the battle with Doma is about Shinobu rather than Tanjiro, as that is what makes it personal for Kanao. Not once does he factor into her thoughts during or after the fight. Instead, she fights for her found family in Shinobu, Kanae, and the others of the Insect & Flower breathing schools. She risks her sight and her life to defeat Doma and is able to do it, albeit at great cost, and only because of Shinobu’s sacrifice to deeply poison Doma and with an assist from Inosuke’s swords. Again, “Demon Slayer” reinforces its central message of success through communal struggle.
I think I cried, like, 5 times throughout these two volumes but none harder than when Kanao finally got a chance to process the deaths of Shinobu and Kanae post-fight. She’s come a long, long way from the girl on the mountain, unable to make decisions for herself and detached from her emotions. Now, she’s able to cry and yell and mourn and, hopefully, truly feel joy again, while also being confident in her actions, so much so she expressly does the opposite of what Shinobu told her to do. I didn’t catch it at first because I was so focused on the revelation of Shinobu’s plan to poison Doma from the inside.
It’s a HUGE moment for Kanao and by placing it in this moment, where the focus is on Shinobu’s concern for Kanao rather than on Kanao’s choice to utilize the final form, Gotouge can successfully hide the full implication of the moment until we have the time to reflect on it later. I absolutely love the care that goes into moments like this. “Demon Slayer” is rife with them too and each time I notice, I’m in awe of how effective it is on a surface level as well as on those deeper levels. That’s hard to do on a weekly schedule and it just goes to show how good of an eye Gotogue has for these characters.
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This eye extends to the antagonists as well, much to my utter surprise. Doma is still a garbage person, as evidenced by his final flashback being a confirmation of his story last time being both a misrepresentation of the truth and still being accurate by the point that Inosuke’s mother entered the picture. I was wrong in that his story of Inosuke’s mother would be false but it was clearly being framed from his warped perspective, with the art counteracting the narrative in small ways to give us a more full picture. As for his parents, they were about as good as can be expected from two people who created a cult around their newborn and Doma felt no sadness at their death. In fact, it’s pretty telling that he was more annoyed at the blood on the ground than on them being gone.
However, Gotouge clearly has empathy for Doma’s position, even if it’s only a tiny little bit. By contextualizing his upbringing, we can see how power and an uncaring, abusive family can help warp a life by creating a context through which all others are seen as inferior and to be pitied and to be used. Only after death does Doma finally feel something like real care for another person, twisted though it might be. He does not get redemption, or even sympathy, in his final moments though because it is not deserved. By having Shinobu deliver a brutal but subtle final retort to his invitation, Gotouge reminds us of this and reminds us that, ironically, his life is something to be pitied.
The same is true of Upper Rank Demon #1 Kokushibo, though he is empathized with in a manner sitting somewhere between Gyutaro & Daki and Akaza. Just like those two, we spend two full chapters on his journey to becoming the demon he is now. Two chapters full of hardships, flaws, and revelations. Through them, we learn the usual developments about his life but with Michikatsu (Kokushibo’s human name,) some major questions about “Demon Slayer’s” world are answered, foremost upon them being why he looks kinda like Tanjiro’s father, the swordsman robot from volume 12, and the mysterious swordsman from Tanjiro’s visions.
I know I haven’t speculated much here in these columns about those connections but it’s always been on my mind. I suspected that either this WAS the mysterious swordsman who both inspired the robot, fought Kibutsuji and was Tanjiro’s ancestor or was simply a red-herring meant to be a samurai. I was kinda right about the first one, though we have yet to get any direct confirmation on any of those connections. It turns out that Michikatsu’s twin brother was named Yoriichi and he was either the originator of sun breathing or the one who perfected it and then disseminated it among the Demon Slayer Corps.
Yoriichi’s outlook on life completely differed from Michikatsu’s, but not in the ways one might expect. One isn’t “good” and the other “evil,” but rather Yoriichi is, say it with me, selfless while Michikatsu is selfish. However, more than that, Michikatsu’s ultimate failing is that he is jealous of Yoriichi. He is jealous of his skills, yes, but also of his effortless ability to care about others AND act in the right manner. It’s one thing to know that one must support their ailing mother. It’s another thing to protect her dignity as well at the expense of your own by literally, physically supporting her as she walks so no one notices. It’s one thing to save your brother from demons. It’s another to sincerely apologize for not being faster in order to save his retinue as well.
It’s one thing to want to be the best samurai because of your skills. It’s another to genuinely, joyfully want to be the second best samurai because your brother’s goal is to be the best.
Michikatsu isn’t able to act in this way, as we see over and over, and it eats away at him. He didn’t realize his mother was ill, he cannot learn sun breathing, and what he struggled so hard to achieve, Yoriichi mastered without effort and without joy. In fact, Michikatsu was even only able to remain the heir because Yoriichi realized that he was no longer going to be sent away and so left early and disappeared so that he could not be used to replace Michikatsu. Furthermore, Michikatsu views being a Samurai as a personal accomplishment while Yoriichi sees it as a communal one.
Continued belowWhen we learned that every form of breathing was an offshoot of sun breathing, I assumed that meant relearning sun breathing was the ultimate goal. While it remains true that it is the strongest against the demons, “Demon Slayer” makes it very clear that sun breathing is not the only way to fight nor is it the best in every situation. Michikatsu views each form of breathing as inferior, as a derivative, but this isn’t what they are. They are modifications of sun breathing in order to better fit the skills, physique, whatever of their practitioners. Just as the practitioners have different strengths and weaknesses, so do these techniques. Sun breathing may be the hardest to learn and master, the most elusive, but that matters less than how the techniques are applied and how they grow.
For Yoriichi, the self has no place in the development of skills because the ultimate goal is to pass those skills along to others. Self-improvement is important but because humans are finite, it is more valuable to see oneself as a single step on a set of stairs. It is impossible to be the best forever, and that is something to be celebrated, not feared as Kokushibo does. It is folly to believe your generation, and your generation alone, is special and that there will never come a time when others will surpass you.
It is telling that in his final moments, he laments how he never really had a legacy. While that’s not technically true – as he does have descendants, though they no longer retain his name – he cannot claim them as his legacy because he abandoned their ancestors and, as far as I know, killed one of his last descendants: Tokito. In his selfish desire to be the “greatest” samurai, he left his family to chase his brother, he never passed on moon breathing, and eventually relinquished his humanity and, in doing so, made it so that he never could be the greatest samurai.
In this, we see the great tragedy of Kokushibo. That, just like all the other demons, he compromised the reasons behind his desires in order to achieve them. As a demon, he acted against the samurai code but, more importantly, he acted in the opposite manner as his brother, whom he both so earnestly desired to be and jealously desired to overtake. In his final moments, Kokushibo realizes this and while he does not have a full revelation, lamenting still his inability to be his brother, he does reconnect with that humanity he once lost. It is sad, it is tragic, and it is just one more example of how damn good Gogouge is at capping off fights in meaningful but nuanced ways.
What a fight it was, too. If Doma’s fight was a red-hot, rage-fueled brawl, and Akaza’s fight was a precise, high-tension dance, then Kokushibo’s fight was a knock-down, dragged-out desperate struggle against an overwhelming foe. It takes four – four – Corps members, three of which are Hashiras, to fight him. That’s the most of any fight thus far against a single enemy and throughout most of it, they’re fighting to just barely stay alive.
The action throughout volumes 19 & 20 continues to be excellent, showcasing Gyomei and Sanemi in battle as well as leaving plenty of time for character growth. Genya gets to demonstrate his own development and watching all four work together is heartening. It’s made all the more resonant because we learn that Sanemi doesn’t actually hate his brother but is instead afraid for his safety, having been traumatized by their family’s death and the death of all his comrades in the Corps. Were it not for Gotouge’s impeccable control of tone, this would have felt out of place.
We also see more of why Ubuyashiki was so respected, even by Sanemi, a moment that comes at just the right moment in the battle to provide a reprieve from the action and infuse it with greater emotional complexity. Basically, it was another “tear your heart out with feels” moment, one which allows you to redouble your desire to see the protagonists succeed, which they do, but at a terrible cost.
I’m sure I will explore this in either volumes 21 and 22 next week or volume 23 in two, as there has not been much time to decompress after the fight with Kokushibo nor has there been 100% confirmation of their deaths, but I would not be surprised if this was truly the end for Genya and Tokito. We’re in the endgame now, after all.
