Chainsaw Man #37-38: "Train, Head, Chainsaw" and "Easy Revenge"

These two chapters end the Fireteam crisis with overall much less disruption to the status quo than it seemed like there would be. Makima is still in charge; she has more official power behind the scenes now, but as far as Denji and Aki are concerned that doesn't really make much difference. Himeno is the only semi-major character to have died for real. Aki has a shorter lifespan limit now, but he already had a short one before this, so it's just a difference of degree.

On the other hand, we did learn a lot of new things from the events, about both the setting at large and specific characters. And, chapter 38 ends with a payoff that will presumably serve to catalyse the next major event.


"Train, Head, Chainsaw" is a short one, consisting mostly of Denji's duel with Katanaman aboard the train car they happened to crash through the ceiling of. Thanks to well-established public safety protocols, alarms sound and doors open pretty much immediately after their arrival, so the train car is quickly empty of civilians, which simplifies things.

Though there's still one moment where - without any words being spoken at all - Denji immediately and irrefutably puts the lie to Yakuza-kun's pretentions of moral superiority. Not that this required much work or anything, but still. There's one last civilian who hasn't managed to get out yet before Katanaman makes his initial attack, and Denji uses his own body to shield her from potential harm, allowing her another moment to flee which she promptly takes advantage of.

Neither of the symbiotes say anything about what just happened, but there's not really anything that needs to be said. Anyway, Denji has definitely learned his lesson after the whole "throwing a car that still has someone inside of it" incident, so that's good.

It turns out that that isn't the only experience that Denji has learned a lesson from, either.

After Katanaman uses his superior speed to cut off both of Denji's arms and tells him that he really should just stop fighting and apologize for killing his grandfather in exchange for a quick death, Denji does something actually smart. Like, not just smart for Denji. Actual, no-shit smart. He tells Katanaman that he can still fight with the chainsaw on his face, so even without hands he can keep going. And, knowing that Yakuza-kun is still going to try to keep him alive for more gloating and grandstanding, so this next strike probably won't be lethal just yet, Denji allows him to make another swift attack and sunder his face-chainsaw.

By saying what he did, Denji made his opponent fixate on his "one remaining blade." Van Vodka taught him how to use deception and exploit an opponent's wishful thinking. And, having been a weapon-devil symbiote for longer than Yakuza-kun, Denji has learned a few quirks of this state of being that his opposite never quite had a chance to discover.

This would have been more satisfying if the leg-chainsaws had already been established. Say, in what seemed like a throwaway gag or silly moment a volume or two back about Denji needing new shoes after experimenting with his powers or something. Granted, it's been a long enough time since I read the first couple volumes that I might just be forgetting such a moment that actually did happen, in which case it's on me.

Anyway. It's a nice reminder that while Denji isn't an exceptionally smart person by any stretch of the imagination, he isn't actually *stupid* either. Just extremely sheltered, ignorant, and unsocialized. Teach him how to be cunning, and he can put it into practice in short order. Additionally, this serves as an extra corollary to whatever dumb point Katanaman was trying to make about who the real monster is. Yakuza-kun sees this state of being as a tool to inflict violence and get revenge. Denji sees it as a new lease on life to be explored and treasured, and thus is able to use it in non-obvious ways that Katanaman never thought of.

"Easy Revenge" starts with Denji having regenerated his arms (presumably by licking up some of Katanaman's blood) and - after securely restraining him to make sure he can't do the "unsheathing" gesture with his false hand - revived the bisected Katanaman as well. Heh, I didn't think there was enough of him left intact for regeneration to happen, but apparently there was. Symbiotes are tough.

Denji flips things around on Yakuza-kun and asks him if he wants to apologize for killing Himeno. Denji wasn't as close to her as Yakuza-kun was with his grandfather, obviously, but in Denji's words "it's your fault there's one less attractive woman in the world." Eh...I think Denji is being a little guarded about his real feelings here, as he did seem to enjoy Himeno's company as well as her looks, but I wouldn't expect him to wear his heart on his sleeve with this asshole lol. Anyway, to no one's surprise, Katanaman is completely remorseless and prideful, laughing at Denji's expectations of an apology with zero apparent self-awareness.

Consequently, when Aki makes his way over to the scene in advance of the SWAT team, Denji invites him to take turns seeing who can kick Yakuza-kun in the balls the hardest. Aki insists that that's not what their job is, it isn't what Himeno would want him to do in her name. Denji counters that Yakuza-kun is a real douchebag, though, and Aki is unable to refute that inescapable logic.

Normally, protagonists doing stuff like this disgusts me. In this case it works, for a complicated intersection of reasons.

...

First of all, Yakuza-kun is indeed a douchebag of the absolute highest order. He's the kind of baddy you really love to hate. The fact that he has a healing factor also softens things in the Watsonian sense, but that's probably of lesser importance.

Second, it isn't coming out of nowhere and making me go "what the fuck, guys?" Denji has an established history of ball-kicking, with Aki himself having been the one first seen on the receiving end. We're not expected to think that Denji and Aki are particularly heroic individuals, or even decent people. They both have pretty intense personal reasons to hate Yakuza-kun and want him to suffer.

Third, and most importantly, Katanaman's entire "thing" so far has basically been a parody of the evil-but-honourable shonen enemy archetype. He's got a mirror of the main character's powerset, he shares some broad-strokes backstory elements, and he tries to challenge the hero's ideals and self-image as well as his combat ability. The thing is, Katanaman's own sense of "honour" is skin-deep at best, his parallels with Denji make him more of a Chainsawman-wannabe than a dark mirror, and his vendetta against the hero not only a) is based on a total lie, but also b) is undermined by the fact that his grandfather was a totally vile piece of shit who Denji would have been 100% justified in murdering. So, he's here doing the dark mirror schtick, but he hasn't put in any of the groundwork and doesn't have any of the character required for the role. He thinks he's a deep, meaningful antagonist to Denji who can make him face his reckoning, but he's wrong. He's spent this whole arc haunting Denji's inner self with absolutely nothing.

I might be reading a little too much into things, but this feels really meta to me. Like the author has seen one too many badly executed "not so different you and I" shonen baddies (many of them men with katanas), and now he's built an effigy of the lot of them just so he can stomp on its nutsack. And, I mean, that is exactly my kind of spiteful, so I can't bring myself to judge.

...

The Angel Devil is a bit distressed at the sounds the captive is making until the SWAT team makes it over to rescue the perp from Denji and Aki and arrest him, though. Dawww.

Anyway, two more bits of denouement fill out this chapter. First, tracking Fireteam to its origins (whether it actually is the Gun Devil, or just an imposter as I earlier suspected might be the case) has proven impossible. Yakuza-kun and the other mobsters taken alive only know what Sawatari told them, and Sawatari seems to have had a cyanide pill clause worked into her arrangement with the Snake Devil.

They weren't even able to get her to the station.

Background investigation reveals her to have been a civilian devil-hunter who went off the grid some time ago, so there's no obvious leads there either. Or, well, probably. We only learn about this detail via a debriefing Makima gives to her bosses in Kyoto, and your guess as to whether she's telling them the truth is as good as mine.

The other post-battle revelation though, also courtesy of Makima's debriefing, might bring them to the same place regardless. Whether or not Sawatari actually was an agent of Gunny's, her people had a lot of his bullet casings stashed in that safehouse. Enough of them to bring Section 4's collection to critical mass.

Again, according to Makima. Any or every part of this might be a complete fabrication, depending on what exactly her angle really is. Anyway, this will presumably be the catalyst for bringing us into the next arc.

Our final couple of pages are devoted to Denji having an ominous dream in the wake of their victory. Pochita, trapped behind a steel door in what looks like a surreal parody of Public Security's devil-imprisoning facility (wait...Denji's never been inside that building, has he? That means that Pochita HAS been in there, since that mental image must be coming from somewhere. The Chainsaw Devil used to be one of the state's diabolical battle-thralls? Interesting). He tries to talk to Pochita through the door, begging him to open it so he can pet him again, but the latter warns against this.

Don't know what to make of this. It almost seems to suggest that something is waiting to ambush Pochita if he so much as appears in Denji's dreamspace. Weird.

Well, one thing that this sequence does make clear is that Denji really still is mourning Pochita, even though he isn't dead. For years and years, Pochita was his only friend and companion. The only warm body he could touch. The only one who would look happy to see him, who would play with him and share his meagre meals with him. Denji might know Pochita is alive and well inside his chest cavity, but he can never see him or pet him or play with him, so as far as Denji's lived experience goes he might as well be dead.

Maybe that's why Denji is so emotionally distant, on top of the people around him not being all that easy to like. He's still silently grieving for his chainsawdog. The tragedy being that if he could only form real friendships, he'd be so much closer to living up to his promise to Pochita in the first place.

Last little reveal in the chapter is that Power drank too much blood and took too little damage when fighting the zombie horde, and now she's starting to metamorphose back into her proper Blood Devil self. Makima has to drag her away for another one of her occasional draining sessions, to keep her from getting even more unruly than she already is.

Guess that answers my question about how you go back from fiend to devil, and it was a simpler answer than I'd been expecting. I still wonder how much (if at all) smarter Power would be if they allowed her to revert. And how much (if at all) more hostile she'd become even after learning about friendship courtesy of Meowy.

Where even is Meowy, again? Haven't seen them in a while.


Anyway, that's the end of the Fireteam crisis plotline. I really was expecting Sawatari to stick around after this, but I guess not heh.

The Aki-centricness of this plotline was an interesting change of pace. However, I do kind of miss Denji as the surrealistic fool-hero of this Kafkaesque world. If the next arc is going to be about hunting the Gun Devil, then I imagine the comic will keep being about Aki for at least a little longer (since he cares a hell of a lot more about killing that thing than Denji does), but hopefully it'll find a way to balance it.

As for these last ten issues, well.

Probably a high point of Chainsaw Man on the whole, even if I wished there was just a little less Aki and a little more Denji. There's so damned much going on here, themes, characters, plot. I feel like I should have some kind of summary statement to make looking back, but unfortunately - while a lot of interesting ground gets covered in these issues - it's mostly very dispersed ground. There's not really a punchy takeaway I can talk about (or at least, if there is one, then it went over my head). In the meantime, I think I've covered each topic within the Fireteam arc as well as I'm going to in the reviews themselves, so I'll just call it here for now.

Until the next Chainsaw Man commission!