Today marks the finale with the broadcast of the Season 1 finale chainsaw man Tuesday of the year. Though our squad of dirtbag main characters has been through a lot in the series’ 12 short episodes, none of them have suffered as much as Kobeni Higashiyama.
chainsaw man is the story of Denji, a hapless teenager who until a few weeks ago thought he was going to die without ever touching a breast. For now, he has merged with the Chainsaw Devil and was used under threat of death by the Japanese government to fight other devils. Denji is a main character and although many terrible things have happened to him, it seems that he will learn from it.
Kobeni Higashiyama is not a main character. She’s a Fel Hunter alongside Denji, but she doesn’t have his Chainsaw Devil powers – at least none that she can share or use right now. In fact, she doesn’t seem to have any powers at all. Kobeni spends most of her time screaming and crying when confronted with the ultraviolence Denji has become accustomed to. If Denji’s journey is discovering what modern life is about, Kobeni’s life is a slapstick routine. She’s already caught in the rat race. She doesn’t want to be there, but she has no choice. Her parents told her she needed to earn money to send her brother to college and that she had a choice of becoming a devil hunter or a sex worker.
Although I feel sorry for Kobeni and the endless stream of misery she experiences when I have her around chainsaw man is like having a character from a Coen brothers movie in my stylish hyper violent anime. She’s a bit like Brad Pitt’s character in Burn after reading, by having no idea what’s going on and being constantly in great danger, or like Barton Fink, by mostly making the wrong decisions and constantly being inexplicably wet with sweat, tears, or a mixture of both. Unlike her fellow fel hunters, she can’t even keep her cool when faced with the uncanny horrors she’s tasked with battling. She reacts like any normal jerk; scream, cry and beg for mercy.
For me, the strangest thing about Kobeni’s suffering is that she isn’t even allowed to die. For whatever reason, Kobeni stays alive while her colleagues drop like flies around her. By the end of this season, almost every Felhunter Kobeni knows has been killed. But not Kobeni. Though she craves death’s sweet embrace, she instead has the privilege of waltzing to the final confrontation of the season and gets blood splattered on her face for her trouble. When fellow Devil Hunter Aki asks her why she’s still doing this job, she replies that bonuses are coming soon.
What Denji learns over time chainsaw man is the commonplace of the modern world. Things that seemed magical, almost mythological to him before he became a devil hunter, like touching breasts and hanging out with girls, turn out to be not as life-changing as he thought. But while Denji is on a journey of self-realization, most of us watching are like Kobeni. Nothing special happens to us. The universe does not bend to drive our personal development. We just have to do all our shitty jobs until they kill us or we get our bonuses. Kobeni may be more skilled with a knife at the end of the season than at the beginning, but no great fate awaits her. With her luck she will never die.
