Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man (17-20)

This review was fast-lane comissioned by @Doby Mick.


Fujimoto started work on Chainsaw Man at age 26. His other major work, Fire Punch, was created over the course of the two previous years. Before and contemporarily with the latter, he wrote and illustrated a number of one-shot mangas that got published in one venue or another. These were later republished in a pair of collection volumes, one including four stories he wrote between ages 17-20, and one covering four more written during the following 6 years. I'll be reading the first of these volumes this week.

He published his first few stories while still in high school, it seems. Definitely strengthens the autobiographical aspects of "Look Back."

Also, even just the cover art demonstrates how much his art style improved between his mid teens and his mid twenties:

The four stories included in this volume are "A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin' in the Schoolyard" (age 17), "Sasaki Stopped a Bullet" and "Love Is Blind" (age 19), and "Shikaku" (age 20).


"A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin' in the Schoolyard" had its English title reworked for the republishing. Presumably, its Japanese title had a comparable bit of wordplay to it that doesn't readily translate. It follows a teenaged monster named Yohei as he wakes up, has breakfast, says good morning and goodbye to his parents, and then heads for school in the company of his hulking, insectoid, and implied to be very attractive by local standards, girlfriend Moemi. Apparently, Yohei is supposed to feed the school chickens before starting class today, and Moemi (whose never gone over to look at them before) accompanies him.

Yohei and Moemi look like this:

The chickens look like this:

As the chickens accept their food and cluck away happily eating it, we're told the background from their perspective. Earth was invaded and settled by an alliance of alien species who all share both an ability to transform into battle morphs DBZ style, and a near-addictive fondness for human flesh. The former trait ensured that humanity's armies were swiftly defeated. The latter ensured that the human species would be declared extinct shortly afterward. The aliens don't like chicken, though, and their ability to distinguish Earth creatures comes down solely to general facial silhouette. So, adult man Yuto and gradeschool girl Ami have survived using the chicken masks that Ami had onhand for a school play she was in the middle of rehearsing when the aliens attacked the city. The aliens have taken over human houses, public transport, schools, etc, and apparently chickens are a local species they enjoy keeping as pets. Yuto and Ami have been living on corn, bread, and Yuto's false promises to young Ami that the aliens will go back where they came from any day now.

It only gets weirder from here.

I guess the batshit isn't something that only came to Fujimoto with age. This feels like three or four different teenagers who each individually have batshit imaginations getting really, really high together and pooling ideas.

The status quo gets shaken up when a transfer student arrives from offworld, and where he comes from chicken is considered just as tasty as human. When he learns about this, Yohei - who had already had doubts about the morality of eating humans, and doesn't want the school pets to likewise be threatened by his civilization's appetites - is troubled by this prospect. He starts reading up a little more on humans and chickens, and is disturbed by the discovery that humans themselves ate chickens as well as other, even more intelligent and self-aware, creatures. His friends assure him that this means the humans deserved what happened to them, but Yohei still isn't convinced. He reads onward, and makes an even more shocking discovery; chickens are supposed to be muuuuuch smaller than the ones in the schoolyard. But, if those aren't really chickens, then that would mean... GASP!

Time runs out. The transfer student arrives, and finds out there are chickens within the near vicinity. Prompting him to do... this:

I can't look at his eyes in the first panel and not laugh.

Well, what proceeds is a very confusing, very over-complicated escape sequence where Yoei tells the "chickens" about the danger and tells him about a rumored enclave of human survivors in hiding in the nearby hills, and then helps them get away from the rampaging monkey-mode-saiyan transfer student. Unfortunately, Yoei is ACAB'd as soon as the authorities learn that there are live humans in town and an alien is helping them escape. Which forces Yuto, the ostensible human adult, to transform into his own monkey-saiyan form to fight off the cops. Ami is horrified when her companion and guardian turns out to be not just an alien, but the same specific alien who ate some of her classmates. They had a brief conversation at that time.

Ami responded to Yuto(?) by asking if that makes it okay to kill and eat aliens too, and that gave him pause. She escaped while he was thinking about this, and was none the wiser when Yuto the Human showed up to help her later that day. He's a more flexible shapeshifter than most it seems. After hearing her question, he just had to know; what IS it like to be prey rather than predator?

He's brought her into the wilderness now, where she's too afraid of him to do anything but run uphill and hope she fines this hidden human enclave.

The comic ends with the alien cop catching up with Yuto, and the latter fighting him again to get Ami more of a head start. Meanwhile, Moemi the bug girl finds the dead body of her ACAB'd boyfriend, and stares at it, realizing that her people never actually did care more about their own than they do about humans, or than humans do about chickens. They'll kill each other with equally little care, thought, or justification.

It doesn't need to be this way, though. After all, during the last however long period of humans being thought hunted to extinction by the insatiable aliens, there were a couple of clucking chickens still kicking in the schoolyard.


I'm surprised by both what seems to have changed about Fujimoto's work between 2010 and 2018, and what seems not to have changed. The vibe I got from Chainsaw Man was "adult emulating high school writing, but being smart about it." Reading this story though, it doesn't seem like there was ever a point where Fujimoto decided to do that. It's more like his actual high school writing just grew progressively more sophisticated and self-aware as he got older, but *somehow* never actually ceased to be high school writing.

A moment that stood out to me as an example of this was Ami asking Yuto what if the tables were turned, and that leading to the "two chickens" title drop at the very end. That kind of so-cliched-and-played-so-bizarrely-that-it-has-to-be-a-joke moment that, nonetheless, manages a degree of unironic emotional power. You can draw a line straight from here to Power realizing the blood she truly thirsted for was friendship. There's barely any difference in tone, level of irony, or degree of earnestness.

There's also the broad theme of kinda-sorta-cannibalism that Chainsaw Man leans heavily on, but the treatment of it here is honestly more akin to Tokyo Ghoul's than it is to Fujimoto's other work. The focus on livestock in particular makes me wonder if Fujimoto is a vegetarian, or if he at least was in his mid-to-late teens.

When it comes to visuals, two things occurred to me during reading. The first is "Look Back's" detail of the artist duo having excellent background and scenery art from the beginning, but needing to put a lot of long, slow, hard work into improving the character art and visual storytelling. Look at this panel:

The classroom is just barely short of Chainsaw Man quality. The characters, not so much. In action panels where backgrounds are deemphasized and (confusing, hard-to-parse) visual storytelling centered around the characters are the whole panel, the comic is at its weakest. So yeah, accurate self-assessment is accurate in this case.

Also, speaking of visuals and Chainsaw Man, this is Yuto in his battle form:

Fujimoto had that character design cooking for a long time.


Next up is "Sasaki Stopped a Bullet," written about two years later.

This one is less weird, less ambitious, and (unfortunately) more typically teenaged. Though to be fair, I think there might be a translation bug making it seem worse than it is. A high school boy named Sasaki has a huge crush on his teacher, Ms. Kawaguchi. She's pretty, and seemingly a good teacher who is generally pleasant for her students to interact with, but the main reason he's so into her is an incident earlier in the schoolyear.

Everyone had to give a little presentation about their career plans and why they chose them, and Sasaki had trouble getting his ready in time. Ms. Kawaguchi met with him after class and coaxed him into explaining what the problem was, and it turns out he was embarrassed of his plans and motives, but also unable to pluck up the heart to lie about them. Sasaki wants to be an astronaut. On one hand, generally silly thing to hear from a high schooler. On the other hand, his deceased father was an astronaut, so perhaps not so silly in this case. The real issue is in the "why," though. His father's life dream was to be the first Japanese person to land on the moon, and this got passed down to Sasaki in a really weird permutation.

Ms. Kawaguchi thought for a moment, and then responded with a strange combination of probability theory and Sagan's dragon. She is a goddess. No one else believes that she's a goddess, but they don't actually *know* that, just like no one *knows* that the ghost of Sasaki's father isn't haunting the moon. She can't prove that she's a goddess, at least not yet, just like Sasaki can't prove his father haunts the moon, at least not yet. However, there is no such thing as a 0% chance. Everything is possible, only the probabilities of some things are sufficiently low that people treat them as 0% for easy bookkeeping.

So, she might be a goddess. It's very, very unlikely, but it still could be. Ditto Sasaki's moon dad. So, she believes what he believes to the same degree that he believes what she believes. Everyone needs to decide for themselves how much that is.

Sasaki completed the assignment. And, from that day forward, he's believed that Ms. Kawaguchi is a goddess. And seemingly one that he wants to start a new imperial lineage with.

Back in the present, class is interrupted by a crazed gunman bursting in the door. Huh, the names had me fooled, I thought this story was set in Japan but I guess it's the United States. It turns out that Sasaki isn't the only one with a really bad crush on Ms. Kawaguchi.

Kawaguchi tearfully tells the lunatic (who she kind of vaguely remembers from her own high school days) to kill her, or do whatever else he wants to her, just as long as he lets the students go unharmed. The gunman decides that killing her might not be necessary in that case, if rape is now an option. And hey, he can always decide to do both if he ends up feeling like it. It's a deal!

Now, here's where my eyebrows started rising. And I'm not sure if this next stretch is a victim of some really, really unfortunate localization, or if 19 year old Tatsuki Fujimoto was just a real creep.

I wondered if maybe this was going to lead to Sasaki realizing he was thinking along the same lines that eventually lead the incel gunman to where he now is. It doesn't, though. The story does nothing but reward and lionize Sasaki from this point onward.

So, there are two possibilities. The first is that Sasaki is horrified by the prospect of Kawaguchi being raped and possibly murdered, and that the translators fucked up really badly and turned "being sexually assaulted" into "having sex." The other is that Sasaki is just having his own deranged Nice Guy jealousy fit over the thought of Kawaguchi getting fucked by anyone besides himself, with her consent being relevant only insofar as it makes the other guy conveniently easy to villify, the story is treating this as genuinely heroic, and 19 year old Fujimoto was a creep.

I want to think it's the first one. The latter is inconsistent with how Fujimoto handles these sorts of things in his later works, so it seems more likely. But then, it's also possible that he was just in a really bad headspace at 19, like many people around that age go through. The latter doesn't reflect too badly on the author as he is now, necessarily, but it does kind of ruin the story.

Anyway. Sasaki stands up from his desk and challenges the gunman. The gunman shoots, and Sasaki - in an incredibly low probability event - catches the bullet in midair. The gunman is at least as shocked as everyone else in the room, which Sasaki manages to leverage into making him stand down, cooperate with the police, and try to improve his own life even though a better future for him seems so improbable right now.

Twenty years later, Sasaki plants a sun-mark flag on the lunar surface. For some fucking reason, he's able to have a voicecall with middle aged Kawaguchi while doing so. Maybe it's another one of those low-probability events.

Okay.


Artistically, there's very obvious improvement from the Kickin' Chickens days. Character art looks much closer to what he can do nowadays. Blocking and direction...hard to say, since most of the story is just Sasaki's inner monologue, but during the action bits that it does have I never got confused like I often was in Kickin' Chickens.

The story is pretty meh. It was the usual gonzo charm, what with the random assailant bursting out of nowhere and the lifelong convictions being put to a loopily literal test, but still. "Boy saves girl he has crush on from convenient threat via implausible means." Meh. Even as a vehicle for exploring the concept of implausibility itself - an otherwise interesting and unusual concept for a story - the choice of plot devices is meh. Even taking the most charitable reading of the "she can't have sex" part.


The next story, "Love is Blind," was written later that same year. This one is shorter and more silly-lighthearted than the previous two, and also an exercise in brevity. A publisher told Fujimoto that he took up 32 pages for material that should only need 16, and so he challenged himself to tell a complete self-contained story in exactly 16 pages.

In the author's note, he says that brevity is still a challenge for him. Which surprises me, with how tight and efficient Chainsaw Man's storytelling is. Then again, Look Back was much more drawn out, so I guess brevity might be something he still has to force himself to do and is happy to not do it when he's art-ing on his own time.

Anyway, the story. Student council president Hayasaka wants to ask councillor Yuri out. Despite being a comically stern, almost military-like, student governor whose underlings literally salute him and acknowledge his orders with "SIR, YES SIR!" he has trouble expressing his emotions. He decides he WILL ask her out this afternoon though, and he won't let anything distract him.

When he tells her today would be a nice day to walk home together, he doesn't let the rainstorm that just started distract him. As he leads her out into the pouring rain, another councillor comes up and reminds Hayasaka that he has a meeting in five minutes. He doesn't let that distract him either. As Hayasaka and Yuri struggle through the pouring rain, a mugger comes at them with a knife. Yuri, apparently a quick-thinking type, tells the mugger their school doesn't let them have wallets on them. Hayasaki, who just wants to get rid of the distraction and try to finish getting his confession of love out, hands over his school uniform jacket and tells the mugger to try and sell it or something. Then, just as he despairs of ever managing to say the words, an alien materializes next to them and says that they're about to Hitchhiker's Guide an interstellar freeway where Earth's orbital path currently is. The humans have barely build anything here, and they've only got a small handful of people on the planet, so everyone assumed they won't mind, but they do need to be informed.

Hayasaka tries to tell the harbinger of extinction that he'll get back to him in a moment, but Yuri freaks out enough that he finally snaps out of it. Realizing that the world is about to end, he musters the desperation he needed to tell Yuri how he feels about her, so they won't die with the words unspoken.

The alien gets weirded out and decides it would be awkward to bother the humans during this "declaration of mutual love" ritual. They also don't know how long this will go on for, so maybe they should just take the path of least resistance and adjust the freeway plans a few hundred thousand kilometres to the side for this stretch. Hayasaka saves the world, and Yuri clutches his arm and tells him how cute she always thought his one-track mind was.

The mugger even gives Hayasaka's coat back and buys him a soda for saving the world. The end.


The character art continues to improve, even though in this case the backgrounds themselves actually look a bit rougher. Maybe the artist hurried more than usual as part of the personal challenge, saving time as well as pagecount. This one also is...almost like a distillation of Fujimoto's work as a whole, only missing the violence and gore. The kind of weird humor, the kind of "AND THEN THIS OTHER THING HAPPENS" pacing that somehow keeps the story moving instead of interrupting or railroading it, the boy-meets-girl internal angst, it's almost the whole gamut.

The little detail of the alien spokesman and the pilot of their spaceship apparently being a married couple is almost the cherry on the cake for this one. Both in reflecting the romantic plot they interrupted, and in just being extremely, extremely Fujimoto. Like, I'm thinking of the Bat+Leech devil situation here in particular.

Plus, despite the tone of this story being much lighter than usual, these monster designs are still just so very characteristic of him.

This almost feels like one of the stories Fujino would write in her 4-panel junior high comics.

...come to think of it, the random violent maniac storming into the school in the last story also seems to foreshadow "Look Back." Maybe the real life arson incident just brought that old mental scenario back for Fujimoto.


Last up in the 17-20 volume is "Shikaku." The longest of the lot, this is the tale of a bubbly, airheaded psychopath (premonitions of Power, I think) who could never make sense of what things everyone else considered wrong and what things they didn't. Starting when she was a small child, and her parents were ever more frustrated and horrified with her behavior.

Her parents told her hitting was wrong, but then they hit her when she does other wrong things she can never keep track of. It's wrong to not forgive someone when they earnestly apologize, but they never forgive her when she apologizes. Her life is lonely and bleak, but she retains a cheery demeanour despite it all.

Twenty years later the girl goes by "Shikaku," and is a notoriously reckless and violent assassin. She'll kill anyone you want for the equivalent of around $60,000, and usually leave a lot of collateral damage. Her patron today is a classic (albeit strangely young-looking) Mr. Johnson who is impressed at the eyeballs she collected from his own security guards on her way up to the penthouse. The guards were leering at her, and leering at uninterested women is wrong, so gouging one eye out apiece is good, right? The Johnson - Yugeru, we soon learn - shrugs disinterestedly at that, not caring either way, and tells her he'll give her ten times her usual rate if she can take out this mark. Himself.

Without bothering to ask why, or (to her comical chagrin a moment later) who she's supposed to collect the payment from then, she obliges. Only, being stabbed in the head doesn't work on him. Neither does having his skull disintegrated with the shotgun she then pulls out of her ass.

Yugeru is an ancient vampire who has grown weary of immortality and wishes to die, but he's become to powerful for anything - sunlight, stakes, lava, bombs, he's tried it all - to kill him. He heard that Shikaku was a brilliant and inventive expert at killing people, so he figured she can manage it if anyone can. So far though, all she's done is cause him a little bit more unnecessary pain.

Heh, she could have saved them both some trouble if she just waited for him to explain before striking.

Anyway, Yugeru is disturbed by having caused unnecessary pain to someone who didn't do anything wrong themselves (lmao). She also, in hearing about Yugeru's loneliness and alienation, begins to empathize with him in a way she's never done with anyone before. Her heart aches. Her breathing comes fast and short.

In her next visit to Yugeru's office (she has to kill those four security guards who she half-blinded in her last visit. Hey, they started it this time!), after regretfully informing him that she hasn't figured out how to kill him yet, she asks him why her heart is aching and her breath is short. He tells her to go ask a doctor, how should he fucking know. Hopefully after her medical leave she'll be able to think of a way to kill him.

She leaves, wondering aloud if going to the hospital is still safe for her what with how notorious she's recently gotten. An hour later, there's a local news update about notorious hitwoman Shikaku going to a public hospital and getting herself identified like the moron she is. A camera gets her on video (and also on audio, apparently) as the police storm the building, and she looks right into it and addresses Yugeru in case he's watching (he is, of course). The doctor managed to complete the examination before the police arrived, and apparently she was diagnosed with being in love. I didn't know doctors could test for that, but Japanese hospitals are pretty high tech, so maybe over there they can. Anyway, even as bullets literally fly passed her head and rip off bits of skin, she has a very important message for him.

And, that amuses Yugeru more than anything has in at least the last four hundred years. And he manages to even feel a pang of guilt at unintentionally sending her on this very stupid path.

So, Yugeru rushes over there and, in a gratuitously violent and gory onscreen rampage that's much more like the Fujimoto we all know, rescues Shikaku. She's on the brink of death when he finds her, but vampires have a handy way of undoing that.

He thinks she still has stuff to live for, and now he thinks that he does as well, in the form of herself. Cue second, even gorier, rampage as he carries her back out of the hospital so she can complete the turning process.

Two hundred years later, in a more futuristic-looking office building, the two are still living happily together.

Her dumb and/or violent shenanigans are enough to keep him amused and engaged for at least a couple more centuries, and she's finally found someone who accepts her even if he might not 100% understand her. The end.


On top of the art style being markedly more mature, with characters and scenery coming much, much closer to parity and the chaotic action scenes being easier to follow, this story is also the first time we see anything approaching subtlety in the storytelling. Like the way Yugeru's immortality and deathwish was telegraphed before the actual reveal: how could he be so young? How can he be so blase about his employees being maimed by a personal guest in broad daylight? Oh, that's how! The characters don't ask these questions themselves in internal monologues, either; the story trusts the audience to notice the oddities on their own.

This isn't exceptional for storytelling in general, obviously, but it's a big step forward in Fujimoto's storytelling looking at his overreliance on text explanations in the last three shorts. There are other details like this throughout, but Yugeru's introduction is the most illustrative example.

On the other hand, the thematic core of "Shikaku" is a little more muddled and harder to identify than most of the previous three. But, according to the author's note, he wrote Shikaku while suffering from a high fever and trying to figure out what kind of comic he'd end up with in those conditions. So, given the quality this story has even with that handicap, the lack of consistent vision and theme is unsurprising and easily forgivable.

At this point, the author is much, much closer in both writing and drawing ability to the man who wrote Chainsaw Man than he is to the kid who wrote Kickin' Chickens. Volume Two of this collection, presumably, makes the rest of the transition equally visible.