Chainsaw Man #35-36: "Minor" and "Katana vs. Chainsaw"

Before getting into this pair of chapters, I just want to highlight this volume's cover art:

Really stands out on a shelf, both against the other Chainsaw Man volumes and just in general. The detailing, the colour, the poses, the composition and frame-fitting, it's all just A+.

Anyway, where we left off the raid on Fireteam's safehouse was underway. The gang and some other tame devils we hadn't met before were carving their way through Fireteam's pet zombie horde, and Aki had just come face to face with Sawatari. Sawatari has somehow bent Himeno's old Ghost Devil to her will, so between that and Sawatari's own snek powers Aki has quite a fight on his hands.


Right off the bat, we learn that it's a real shame that Aki ran into Sawatari rather than Katanaman. The new powers he got from the Future Devil aren't all that optimized against Sawatari with her summoning spam, but they'd probably hard-counter Katanaman.

Combat precognition. Sawatari conjures big monsters who cover a lot of area and make wide, sweeping attacks, so split-second future sight is only somewhat helpful against her. Katanaman is all about speed and precision though, which is exactly the powerset that Aki's predictions can no-sell.

I suspect that Public Security might have had Katanaman specifically in mind when they sent Aki to bargain with the Future Devil. Oh well. Maybe there'll be other symbiotes to fight in the near-ish future.

The Ghost Devil ends up overwhelming Aki's precognition via sheer volume of grasping limbs and seizing him. And...I'm not entirely sure what happens next. An explanation is given, but it doesn't seem to account for what we actually see happen. Aki flashes back to that early lunch date with Himeno, when she gave him his first-ever cigarette and persuaded him to smoke it. The chapter title comes from that conversation (which we've already seen in previous flashback episodes), in which she teases him for being a minor and thus not legally permitted to smoke. And then he...either he imagines this, or the Ghost Devil actually puts him down and extends one of its hands toward him with that old cigarette of Himeno's in its palm.

It's explained that Aki knows that the Ghost Devil is eyeless, and therefore needs to sense its victims' fear in order to locate and attack them. Which implies that he's just immersing himself in memories of Himeno to calm his emotions and make himself invisible to the devil, using its own previous relationship with Himeno to help him latch onto the memories while looking at it.

The thing is...the Ghost Devil was physically grabbing Aki before he started doing this. It does have a sense of touch, I'm pretty sure. I don't know how it could have pulled the unconscious Denji's chainsaw-string without that. I can't think of why it would have dropped Aki just because he wasn't feeling fear anymore. Especially given that Sawatari had just spoken the order for it to snap Aki's neck.

So...is the Ghost Devil actually breaking free of Sawatari/the Snake Devil's control and acting out of some old affection for its previous contractor?

Is it a combination of both these things, with it helping Aki remember Himeno so he can more easily suppress his fear and give it more wiggle room to ignore Sawatari's orders?

Yeah, not totally sure what's supposed to be happening here. But whatever it is exactly, the result is the Ghost Devil allowing Aki to go free and then euthanize it without a fight. Leaving him once again facing Sawatari in an empty hallway. She tries to call up the Snake Devil again, but this delay has bought Aki the time for one of his colleagues to come to the rescue. I was expecting it to be Denji and/or Power, but nope, Kobeni!

She just sneaks up behind Sawatari and puts her at knifepoint before she can make the gestures or speak the command words.

I begin to suspect that Kobeni's unnamed devil grants her an invisibility power of some kind. She keeps evading enemies who seem to have a bead on her, and then improbably surprising other enemies. Would also explain why she keeps her powers a secret; invisibility is the sort of thing that loses a lot of effectiveness once people know you have it. Something along those lines, anyway.

Anyway, Sawatari went down a little more easily than expected, though she may still have a trick up her sleeve that'll let her escape. For now, there's a cute little gag as Aki and Kobeni restrain her, and Aki asks Kobeni what made her decide to stay in the unit after all, and Kobeni says "the money lol." Which, I mean, I'm not sure what answer he was looking for besides that one lol.

...hmm. He had that big explosion at Denji early on over Denji being in this for profit rather than passion or duty. He hasn't given Kobeni any shit about this as far as I can tell. Either he's going easy on her because her family pushed her into doing this, he's going easy on her because she's a girl, or he's going easy on her because Denji kicked him in the balls a bunch of times after the last time Aki pulled that shit and he's learned his lesson. Put a pin in that last topic though, we're actually going somewhere with it in a couple of chapters.

Speaking of which, the next chapter! "Katana vs. Chainsaw!"

While the anticlimactic Sawatari fight was going on, Denji and Power are having their own little goofy adventure fighting through more zombies, with Denji futilely trying to get Power to not squander their element of surprise over and over again with each group of enemies.

To be fair to Power, these zombies aren't exactly much of a threat to her and Denji. However, it IS slowing them down and potentially giving the important targets more time to prepare, so Denji is still in the right. He's not the sharpest chainsaw in the shack, but he's also not Power.

Eventually, Denji excuses himself to go keep pursuing the mission objectives while Power bullies the zombies. As luck would have it, he soon finds himself face-to-face with a group of (living) Fireteam members, including Katanaman. Which is bad news, because their previous encounter amounted to "Denji gets distracted by the mooks' bullets which lets Katanaman get a killing blow in."

Strangely though, Katanaman doesn't seem so eager to reprise their previous encounter. For all the advantages he's got, he might be a little nervous about going into battle without Sawatari and her revival hax to back him up. He seems to think that talking Denji into surrendering without a fight by appealing to his shame (lol) and guilt (rofl) for killing the Yakuza men who ruined his entire childhood and young adulthood and tormented him nonstop for years (LMAO) is worth a try. I guess he doesn't lose anything in the attempt, since he didn't have the element of surprise or anything to begin with, but still. Did he honest to god think that this would have any chance of working?

Well, we already knew that Yakuza-kun isn't the sharpest tool in the shed himself (even if his arms and face can get pretty sharp at times). Still, though, the sheer lack of self-awareness here is beyond Denji's own level and dangling down there with Power's. Like, he acknowledged himself that is grandfather killed "only a few" women and children along with a presumably larger number of adult men. How would he have reacted to a next of kin coming for revenge?

On top of the complete absence of mirror neurons, Yakuza-kun is also confirmed to be just plain gullible. Turns out I was right about Sawatari and her backer(s) having taken him for a ride.

His yakuza clan seem to break out "uneducated idiots" as an insult fairly often. Dunno if that's an in-universe quirk, or if it's an English translation of some preexisting Japanese mob cliche (if it's the latter I haven't run into it before, but I also haven't consumed very much yakuza-focused media). Anyway, I doubt this is going to go any better for Katanaman than it did for the bossman when he pulled it on Makima earlier.

Anyway. Katanaman says that he and his companions will surrender peacefully to the police in exchange for Denji's life. He just wants to avenge his grandfather, and they just want to avenge their friends. I very much doubt that they're being sincere in this promise (it's not like Denji would be around to hold them to it after he lets them kill him), and their boobs aren't big enough for Denji to fall for it.

So, initiative is rolled. And this time we get a good look at how Yakuza-kun activates his Katanaman transformation.

Dunno if he was missing that hand before the Katana Kitten moved into his chest cavity or only afterward, but either way it's an "unsheathing" gesture that triggers the transformation as I suspected. And...unfortunately, this is another little action stretch where I have trouble understanding exactly what's going on. Katanaman jumps...over?...the top of the elevator? And his two lackeys just seem to disappear or something, they don't end up participating in the fight at all as far as I can tell (even though the presence of backup gunmen was a major factor in Katanaman's previous victory, so the story failing to address that at all is very weird and feels kinda cheap). Maybe we're supposed to assume that they were shooting Denji while Katanaman jumped around, but it just doesn't have much of an effect on what happens next.

On one hand, getting himself and Denji out of the building and passed the police blockade is a fairly smart move if he wants to kill him and get away with it. On the other hand, he's kinda squandering the numbers advantage as I said before. I dunno, it's a really cool panel though. I completely understand why a stylized higher-detail treatment of it was chosen for the volume cover.

So, while Aki and Kobeni capture Sawatari and the other Section 4 brute squad members finish clearing the building, the Weaponmen go flying out across the street and crashing through the roof of a nearby train station.


Next post will be the last two Chainsaw Man chapters of this commission, in which Denji and Yakuza-kun have their rematch and the (first?) Fireteam arc is resolved.