I’m Having a Hard Time Grappling With Denji’s Parade of Horrors in ‘Chainsaw Man’

I have a confession to make. I have a hard time psyching myself up to read or watch something that I know is going to be emotionally rough. For example, I have not yet watched The Last of Us. And in 2024, I’ve noticed Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man manga has started to fall into this category.

I love Chainsaw Man. I have three (3) Pochita plushies because pure logic cannot stop me. But when you’re a human being going through a rough time yourself, it can be really, really hard to watch a character you care about go through immense suffering.

For the last several months, Chainsaw Man means watching Denji go through horror after horror occurring on a sliding scale from “gut-wrenching” to “heart-wrenching.” We’re essentially being asked to keep the faith that mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto will make it work out, to some degree, in the end. I really want to keep the faith. It’s not always easy.

We’ve been here before, kind of

Major spoilers ahead for Chainsaw Man up through chapter 170

I got a friend to start reading Chainsaw Man right when the first saga had finished. When Makima killed Power, he stopped reading. He felt that Fujimoto was cruel, and that interpretation of the treatment of these characters made him angry.

When you hit that point in the manga, it’s an understandable response. But if you finish the saga, you know it “works out.” The ending is still sad and tinged with cruelty, but the cruelty isn’t from the author himself. Fujimoto creates a humanistic, deeply empathetic ending—and twists the story to give Power both a more satisfying ending and an open door to return down the road. (Don’t pull a Gege Akutani here, please.)

It currently feels like we’re at the “Aki’s dead, Makima just killed Power” moment in the second saga. But this time, the apparent death of someone in the main humanoid cast is just the latest horror Denji’s had to endure. Those horrors have been arguably more plentiful and more multi-faceted, making them feel that much more awful.

Truth be told, I took a several-month break from reading Chainsaw Man after it appeared the Chainsaw Man Church had burned all of Denji’s pets alive—including Meowy, Power’s cat. I’m a big “I can’t deal with animal death” person, and Meowy looks a lot like my own cat.

But that was just the beginning. Since then, Denji has been completely dismembered, his body parts put into individual boxes. As far as he knows, the girl he likes just gave him his first-ever hand job and then told him it wasn’t a big deal to her. Which is piled on top of all the highly relatable existential questioning that was already happening inside Denji: “This is what I wanted, I should be happy, so why aren’t I?”

And then, chapter 170 delivered perhaps the last straw: Nayuta’s head on a sushi conveyor belt. It’s the death of Denji’s one family member, albeit someone who the reader knows might have been plotting to betray him anyway. And if that impression is true, Denji was in a lose-lose situation either way.

It’s rough.

Will Denji get a break in 171?

Chapter 170 may have ruined conveyor belt sushi for a lot of people—or, at the very least, it created an association I will sure as hell have to actively toss out of my brain the next time I go.

Nayuta’s apparent death is a rough revelation. Denji, who has hit a lot of rock bottoms in his tragic life, might be at his lowest point ever. We don’t know if she can come back, but it’s not looking great. The reason Makima was so hard to kill is that she had a contract with the Prime Minister of Japan that meant all attacks made on her were “changed into appropriate illnesses or accidents among Japanese citizens.” Since Nayuta is/was just a regular student, not a government official, it seems unlikely she had any comparable contract.

Of course, we won’t know what really happened until the next chapter, and maybe several after that. But in any case, chapter 171 drops on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. You’ll be able to find it on the Shonen Jump app around 11 AM ET / 8 AM Pacific.

For all our sakes, I hope Denji is eventually able to find some real, lasting joy.