The modern worker’s condition, summed up by a goofy shounen action manga and anime series about a guy with a chainsaw for a head fighting devils.
Having formed a bond with Pochita, a chainsaw devil, Denji is a freelance Devil Hunter working off his dead father’s debts with the local yakuza. Even when he earns good money taking down a devil, most goes towards paying off that debt and most of the rest is nickeled and dimed away on all sort of ‘fees’. What he’s left with is enough to buy some bread, but not enough to buy jam to put on it. He already sold a kidney, an eye and one of his balls but he knows he will never get out of debt no matter how hard he works. Sooner or later he will die fighting a devil and until then he will never escape the daily grind of working hard to earn just enough to survive on, but never enough to get any pleasure out of life. What dreams he has are embarassingly simple: to have that slice of bread with jam on it and share it with Pochita, flirt with a girl and play videogames with her until they fall asleep hugging together. And even that dream is denied him when the yakuza come knocking late at night to collect him for another job.
It’s hyperbolic to the point of absurdity the situation Denji is in at the start of Chainsaw Man, owning over 38 million yen in debt inherited from his old man. But it speaks to all of us who have been or are in similar circumstances, even without yakuza involvement. Running just to stand still, never getting ahead because rent or debt or some medical scare eats up everything. For so many people this has been the new normal since at least the eighties and now, in a world ravaged by climate change and covid, with inflation raising everything but wages even the middle classes that could have some sense of comfort from their house ownership and investments are starting to feel the pinch. Not what you expect from a manga that originally ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump, not the most progressive mangazine in the world. Yet Denji and his circumstances, as much as the cool fights and interesting villains, is what made Chainsaw Man the most popular manga in the world.
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