Manga Review: Jujutsu Kaisen Volume 1 by Gege Akutami
It’s been a strange day for Yuji Itadori. First, the student council threatens to close down the Occult Research club for lack of activity and members. This right after they’d acquired a mysterious object to investigate, too! It turned out that the lack of members is because the track and field coach had secretly changed his membership to that team. He then challenges Yuji to a contest to determine if young Itadori can reject this transfer. Since Yuji has downright superhuman strength and speed, he wins the contest handily.
Yuji then scoots off so he can visit his grandfather in the hospital. The old man offers to tell Yuji about the boy’s absent parents, but Yuji refuses to listen to that. So Grandfather’s dying words instead are about helping others when you can and not driving people away so that you don’t die alone. (It’ll be a few volumes before we get back to what Grandpa’s regretting here.) The body isn’t even cool before Yuji is approached by a stranger.
This boy turns out to be Megumi Fushiguro, a trainee jujutsu sorcerer from Jujutsu High School. It seems that the mysterious object the Occult Research Club acquired is actually a cursed relic, one of the twenty fingers of Ryomen Sukuna. Once the protective seal is removed, it will attract other curses to the school to acquire it. Yuji’s friends are in peril!
While Yuji’s superhuman physical prowess helps Fushiguro not be overwhelmed by the curses (they are physical beings that normal humans cannot see), without special cursed energy, he can’t destroy curses. When the situation turns dire, Yuji decides to swallow the cursed finger so that he will have cursed energy inside him.
It works, but at the cost of awakening the spirit of Ryomen Sukuna inside Yuji. Sukuna is a particularly evil fellow who wants to massacre as many innocent humans as possible. To the curse’s surprise, Yuji is able to take back control of his body with ease. At least, right now. The possibility that Yuji’s control will slip is always present, and the proper thing to do would be to execute him.
But blindfolded teacher Satoru Gojo sees potential in the boy, especially as there are nineteen more fingers to capture. After an unconventional entrance exam, Yuji is allowed to join Jujutsu High as a first year student alongside Fushiguro. Then it’s time to collect the third student in their year, Nobara Kugisaki. She’s coming to Tokyo to escape her stifling small town, and is unimpressed with her new classmates. Nobara does warm up to Yuji after they work together on a case.
The volume ends with our three young jujutsu sorcerers getting in way over their head with a special-grade curse that’s taken over a prison. Not all of them may be making it out alive.
I’ve already seen the first season of the anime, check out my review of that. There’s some heavy foreshadowing in this first volume for events well down the line, while the immediate events are more random-seeming. A somewhat amusing bit is that the Occult Research Club thinks that the rugby team was cursed because there’s a corpse buried beneath the field. In fact, the field just has a tick problem and the rugby team was afflicted with tick-borne disease. But then another layer is pulled back and we find out the field actually does have a curse, which may have attracted the tick infestation.
The use of rookies (but rookies that punch way above their weight) to deal with situations you’d want a fully trained adult to deal with is partially explained as a perpetual shortage of manpower. We’ll find out later on that many/most jujutsu sorcerers come from a handful of families with heavy internal politics that cause them to fight each other as much as the curses.
Good monster design, and some okay fights. (These improve as the series goes on and more unique powers are revealed.) The characters are likable enough to sustain interest so this has turned into a long-runner.
Content note: some nasty looking corpses, standard monster fighting violence. Middle schoolers on up should be able to handle it, though sensitive parents may have more issues.
Overall: A promising beginning. If you’ve seen the anime, you probably will want to read the manga at some point.
