Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is one of the newest offerings from the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine but it’s a title that English-speaking readers are unlikely to be familiar with. VIZ Media did give the series a three week “audition” as part of their “jump start” feature but opted not to serialize the story weekly afterwards. But with an anime adaptation on the way VIZ is hurrying to catch up and introduce new readers to this series.
Set in Taisho Era Japan, Tanjiro belongs to a poor family of charcoal burners who live a quiet life deep in the woods. One morning, after being delayed from returning from the market the night before, he returns home to find his entire family slaughtered by demons, who he had dismissed just the night before as an old superstition. His little sister Nezuko appears to still have some life in her but Tanjiro is soon horrified to discover that she’s become a demon herself. Only a demon might know how to turn Nezuko back and, based on that slim chance, Tanjiro begins to train as a demon slayer so that someday he will be strong enough to demand a demon tell him how to save the only family he has left.
While the second volume of Demon Slayer caught my interest much more than the first volume, there’s no denying that both volumes of this series read easily and quickly and I think that it would also read very well week to week (compared to The Promised Neverland which I previously said I did not think would read as well week to week since events take so long to happen). The overall pace of Demon Slayer so far is very snappy, but part of the reason why the first volume didn’t work very well for me was because nearly the entire volume was set-up.
We get vital exposition on how demons work in this story, but the majority of the volume was taken up by an extended training arc followed by a test mini-arc, and I’ve simply lost my patience for these types of arcs over the years. I still often enjoy these action-heavy arcs when they’re animated (and typically the material passes more quickly in anime episodes than manga chapters) but by and large, “battle manga” (think of series like Naruto or Bleach where the main emphasis of the story is on how “cool” their fights are) has never been my favorite type of story to start with.
Once Tanjiro begins taking on jobs as a new demon slayer in the second volume I found that things really picked up, especially towards the end of the volume where Tanjiro runs into some demons who are very different from the ones we’ve met so far. In this story, demons seem to be a type of fallen human — they are supernatural but not otherworldly. They are far more like the humans they once were than animals but they seem to be without morals or even the empathy one animal might show to another. I was surprised that Demon Slayer so quickly introduced the idea that not all demons are like this and that there is a variation.
Tanjiro’s personality also helps the series out here. He’s still a bit hot-blooded but he feels great compassion and sympathy for both the humans who are hurt by demons and also some sympathy for demons who weren’t born this way.
Koyoharu Gotouge’s artstyle is a bit of an interesting choice but not as daring as I’d wish. Almost everything is either black or white, there’s a lack of both screentones or traditional pen and ink shading, which is odd considering how much of these first two volumes occur at night or in otherwise dimly lit situations. I was honestly a little shocked by how often this lack of shading occurs once I noticed it, Gotouge you need to experiment more with this! I plan to come back for at least the third volume in this series at least and I expect to see some changes to this.