Chainsaw Man #39-43 (part one)

This review was commissioned by @Bernkastel


Where last we left off, Fireteam had been defeated and its known (human) leaders all captured or dead. Makima has the entire Tokyo public safety directorate under her thumb. Power started to regenerate her old Blood Devil physiology, but was quickly dragged away by Makima to be blood-drained in order to keep her controllable. Most importantly, Division 4 now has enough Gun Devil material in its possession to begin tracking the location of its main body, assuming it still has one.


Before any of those dramatic threads can be pulled, though, we get a bit of a breather in #39 "Tear Jerker."

First, as Power's de...powering...will take some time, Makima is shuffling her personnel to give Denji a new fiendish partner in the meantime. Streetshark is normally so violent he can't even hold a conversation (he's probably the fiend who was briefly mentioned during the restaurant scene before Fireteam's introduction), but something seems to have changed. He's been *begging* to work with Denji ever since they got back from the raid, and now it quickly becomes apparent that he actually wants to work *for* Denji.

He's like if Power had her polarity switched from "worship self" to "worship someone else."​

Either the Shark Devil and the Chainsaw Devil have some history from before either of them got their current hosts, or else Streetshark had an offscreen encounter with Katanaman that he got chumped in and now he's awed by the person who managed to beat him. Or else he IS into dudes and is hoping Denji is a master-dom. Hopefully not the third one, that's going to disappoint both of them.

Whatever else is going on with him, the shark devil apparently answers to the name "Beam." Fiends that are capable of speech apparently take weird names that have nothing to do with their original devilish ones. Denji himself wonders about this, but he isn't quite curious enough to ask anyone about it, because he's Denji. Anyway, while he can (barely) talk, Beam still isn't as smart or humanlike as Power. He can't pass for human, so Denji has him Street Shark along next to him when they're out together so as to not attract undue attention.

He really likes water though, being a shark and all, so Denji has to yell and stamp his foot at Beam to stay underground when it's raining. Heh.

Speaking of toxic D/s, the other thing that happens in this chapter is this:

Not sure why she's doing this now, per se. Maybe she decided Denji needs just a glimpse of a reward for his performance against Fireteam, if she wants to keep him convinced he can get more. Or else this is part of some much more elaborate piece of manipulation that we haven't seen the rest of yet.

Their "date" ends up being quite a strange one. And not quite in the way I would have expected. After meeting him in a strangely old-fashioned outfit that makes her look almost eerily young (I wonder if this is to make her having a movie date with teenaged Denji look less wtf to passerby?), she takes him to see a bunch of movies at different theaters all night long.

Denji is a bit bemused at this, but he isn't complaining. They watch what seems to be about four different movies. Makima and Denji are, owing to decent theatre etiquette, silent through all of them. They see a samurai film. A romcom. A drama. Denji watches the people in the seats around them laugh, or cry, or hold their breaths, but he feels nothing. Neither, going by the expression (or lack thereof) on her face, does Makima.

During a snack break before the last film, Denji - after hearing Makima openly criticize the films they've seen so far - feels like it's safe to express his own apathy toward them. Denji is, of course, thinking back to his earlier anxieties about his own apparent lack of empathy, when he failed to feel anything like grief or loss after Himeno's death. In that framework, Makima's next lines are very interesting ones.

Is she letting a kernel of truth show itself amid the lies? Or is this just an anglerfish beacon of affected vulnerability that she's deploying as cynically as everything else she says?

It's these occasional moments with Makima, where she does or says things like this in situations where you can't tell why she'd bother lying, that really keeps you guessing as to whether or not there's anything humanlike in there after all.

In any case, for now, it serves to reassure Denji that he may actually have a (metaphorical; his physical one was replaced by pupper) heart after all.

Although, all of this just adds more questions to what happens at the end of the final movie. A weird historical-ish art film with hardly any audience besides themselves. And, finally, Denji has a reaction.

It's not entirely clear from the little we see of the screen, but one panel shows a shot of an older man and a younger man embracing, one of them wearing a traveller's cloak. I *think* the implication is that this is a reunion (or, perhaps, a goodbye) between a father and a son about Denji's age.

We know Denji's an orphan. We know he lost his mother long before he lost his father, as he'd been living alone with the latter until said father's own death. He's never mentioned his mother, but he has mentioned his father. Mostly in the context of Denji being stuck with his unpaid yakuza debts, but still. He might have been the only experience of being loved and cared for, or even of the concept of "family" at all, that Denji ever had. So, an emotional scene about a father and son that most people don't think twice about could very easily get a major reaction from Denji.

And...while she may or may not have been telling the truth about her general relationship with movies earlier, I'm preeeeetty sure Makima is just totally bullshitting here:

Crying a single, tantalizing tear, during the same scene that Denji is feeling a very obvious connection to? Yeah, that's way the fuck too perfect. This is her encouraging him to entertain a fantasy of she and him having something in common that most people can't understand. A date (with no actual physical affection, or even much conversation) to make him feel like he's endearing himself to her and that she'll be good for her wish-granting. A tear shed when Denji is shedding them, to let him feel like they have an understanding that defies appearances. Basically letting his imagination do all the emotional manipulation work for her.

Before saying goodbye for the night, she assures him that he does indeed have a heart just like she does. And puts her ear to his chest to confirm it, thus providing his only physical contact with her for this date.

I don't remember if Denji ever mentioned his concerns about his own emotional range to Makima. If so, then that's obviously why she's doing this; making sure he associates her (and only her) with himself feeling like a human being, even as she generally exploits and dehumanizes him. If not...either she has insanely keen intuition, or someone else who he talked to mentioned something to her, or she has some kind of low-grade empathic power along with all the other crazy magic shit she can do.

Denji comes away from the night feeling self-assured, optimistic about himself and his personal development, and absolutely loyal to Makima. Thinks he's in love with her and that it might even be reciprocal.

Which also means that he's now got his self-perception invested in his perception of Makima. So he'll cling onto that. If he loses his idea of her, he'll lose a part of himself that gives him comfort and hope.

This is a breather episode in terms of action and pace and so forth, but it might actually be the darkest issue of Chainsaw Man so far.

Is it just me, or do her eyes look even more hypnotoad than usual in this panel?​

And...thinking about it more, I'm now leaning toward Makima having not actually meant any of it when she said that there are a few movies that really speak to her. Everything else she did on that date was so perfectly calibrated, and that statement fits so perfectly into place with the rest, that it pretty much had to be concocted for the purpose.

...how could she have been sure he'd have a reaction to that movie, though? Does she have an empathy power? I guess she could have used her body-manipulation powers to just make his eyes leak, and then used that to make him *think* he must be experiencing a strong emotion? That would definitely fit with my reading of her as Debordian spectacle incarnate. In that case, though, does no movie really get a reaction out of Denji? Hmm.

On the bright side, for now at least, Denji has a much better attitude about life as he starts the next issue, "Love, Flower, Chainsaw," now that he knows he has empathy after all.

He even demonstrates his aesthetic appreciation of beauty a moment later by putting the flower in his mouth and chewing!

While out walking Streetshark and having empathy, Denji gets caught in a rainstorm without a coat. After slapfighting Sharky back underground, he takes refuge in one of those fully enclosed bus stops that Tokyo is famous for, and has a bizarre encounter with a girl named Reze who comes running over a minute later to take refuge with him.

Honestly, this girl acts so weirdly that with the way her sodden black hair falls over her eyes in the rain I thought that she actually WAS Sharky suddenly getting more articulate, at first.

Anyway, Reze also is a dog person. And is mourning the recent death of her own.

Uh...huh.

And, when he abruptly remembers he has a half-chewed flower in his mouth when he accidentally starts swallowing it, and coughs the masticated blossom up into his hand, she's completely enchanted by his "magic trick."

Uh...huh.

Turns out she's a barista at a nearby cafe. When the flash-rainstorm passes, she invites him to have a cup with her, on the house. Where she simply talks back to her boss when he gets on her for flirting with a customer instead of working. And reacts to every juvenile antic of his like it's the most charming thing ever. Even if she has to reconcile her charmedness by saying things like "hahaha, oh you're such a kid." But keeps pawing and doe-eying him throughout.

Uh...huh.

On one hand, anyone prying away his emotional dependence on Makima is a good thing. On the other hand, there is literally no way in hell that Reze isn't working for the Gun Devil or something.

Granted, if she wasn't an enemy agent, she'd probably be signing herself up for some kind of plausibly deniable misfortune if she got in the way of Makima's control schemes. But, like I said, I'm pretty sure she knows more or less what she's getting herself into.

It kind of makes Denji's situation even sadder. Everyone in his life is either faking affection to manipulate (and probably eventually hurt) him, or is being literally forced to be around him. For all that his juvenile, violent, boorish personality is played for laughs much of the time, Denji is a deeply traumatized child who spent most of his life lodged in the dirtiest, most overlooked cracks in society and needs to have had all of the therapy years ago.

And he can't even pet his dog - the only thing that actually loves him - anymore.


I don't quite understand all the alchemy that goes into it, but somehow, by surrounding its absurd (and ironically presented) middle-schooler's-idea-of-tragedy with an even more absurd candy-shell of weird comedy, it somehow transmutes that core into something genuinely haunting and emotional. It's almost like multiplying negatives to get a positive.

Not for the first time, this comic is making me think along the same lines as Katalepsis of all things. What genre is Chainsaw Man? "Urban fantasy" and "shounen" are obvious, technically correct answers, but I don't think they're actually all that descriptive of its essence. You can't just call it action-comedy when it has this much heavy shit in it. You certainly can't call it a serious drama or horror work, with all the utterly self-aware silliness that permeates every aspect of it. If you changed the work to focus it toward any of those more conventional poles, the end result would probably be a pretty terrible comic. Like Katalepsis, Chainsaw Man is good for the same reason that I've come to think of "genre" as a bad framework for analysing fiction.

Anyway, there's three more chapters in this order, and then plenty more Chainsaw Man later in the queue, so I'm sure we'll find out what Reze's agenda is and just how much harder it's going to make Denji's life soon enough.

I'm also glad we seem to be centering Denji as the protagonist again. I don't dislike Aki, but he was really starting to overstay his welcome as our main POV. Watching Denji try to grow up is easier for me to stay invested in than watching Aki not try to avoid self-destruction.