Tatsuki Fujimoto: Before Chainsaw Man 17-21
Sometimes great talents emerge fully-formed from the start. Most times it takes them a little while to show what they’re really capable of. In Tatsuki Fujimoto’s case, the latter is what’s true here. Republished in the wake of his monstrous success with “Chainsaw Man,” these early stories show an artist who’s still trying to find his voice and style. While nothing here is on the level of what Fujimoto would go on to create, they do show someone who was getting better with each new manga he made.
A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin’ in the Schoolyard: It’s the future and humanity has nearly been wiped out by invading aliens. This is because the aliens think we’re delicious and they’re very bad at keeping us around as livestock. What they are good at keeping around as livestock are chickens as one school has a couple that the alien Yohei dutifully feeds every day. However, the two chickens at his school look a bit different than the kind of chickens you and I are used to. Not that it matters too much as a new transfer student has just arrived who loves to eat chickens even more than humans.
The aliens as humans gimmick in this story is cute, and the burly, large-mandibled, tsundere schoolgirl alien who greets Yohei at the beginning is genuinely funny. What we get in the rest of the story is mildly surprising with a couple twists that don’t land as solidly as they should. None of this is helped by art which is decidedly rough, which itself is unsurprising given that it’s Fujimoto’s first published manga. If nothing else, this shows that the writer’s appreciation of downbeat stories where things go badly for his characters (right up until the end) has been part of his style since the very start.
Sasaki Stopped a Bullet: Sasaki has a problem. Whenever he’s around his teacher, Kawaguchi, his chest aches and his heart beats faster. He’s convinced that there can be only one explanation for this: That she’s a god. She confessed this fact when he told her about his dream to become an astronaut to find out if his dad had died and gone to the moon and told him that it wasn’t impossible because there wasn’t a zero percent chance of it. So Sasaki tries to spend every minute he can basking in her divine radiance. It’s also why he was in the classroom when one of her former classmates bursts in with a gun and demands to have sex with her.
An interest in sex and a love of taking big creative swings are on display in this story, more of the latter than the former in this case. While this is Fujimoto’s admitted favorite of the stories collected here, it didn’t grab me in the same way. I may appreciate the idea that no situation can ever be called a “zero percent” one, what we get here challenges my suspension of disbelief rather than my appreciation of magical realism. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what this story was trying to do, it just serves up concepts that the mangaka would go on to execute better in subsequent works.
Love is Blind: Ibuki is about to graduate high school. There’s just one more thing he has to do before he does. The most important thing. Which is to confess his love to fellow student council member Yuri! It’s something he has to do no matter what obstacles pop up in his path. Be they teachers, inclement weather, or the imminent destruction of the Earth itself!
There is exactly one joke in this story. Fortunately for us it’s a good one that Fujimoto successfully builds upon over the course of its 31-page length. The jump from the penultimate setup to the final one may be a bit extreme, but I think that actually makes things work better. As does Ibuki’s dead-serious demeanor throughout the story as it really helps you believe that he would consider his confession the most important thing to him at this very moment over everything else. The final punchline is also a much better example of the mangaka taking a big narrative risk and actually connecting with it than the previous story.
Shikaku: The title character is a deeply disturbed little girl who grows up to be a world-class assassin. She’s so good at her job that an extremely rich man hires her to kill a specific target: Himself. He’s tired of being alive and figures that having the best assassin in the world is the fastest way to fix that.
I’m leaving out a lot here because the less you know going into “Shikaku,” the better. This was my favorite story in the volume because it takes some elements that shouldn’t work well together – extreme violence, murder, social awkwardness, first love – and spins an enjoyably weird tale out of them. Yes, we would get flashier examples of violence and social awkwardness in what would come later from Fujimoto, but you can see his style coming into focus with what’s on display here.
It should also be noted that the mangaka made this story while in the throes of a 102-degree fever. He did it as an experiment to see what his feverish mind would come up with. I’d say that it was a success, which makes me more curious about the unpublished work he did while having gastritis also mentioned here.
While I can’t say that “Before Chainsaw man 17-21” is worth reading for everyone, it’s definitely worth picking up if you’re as big of a fan of Fujimoto as I am. All of the stories here are clearly the work of a creator still trying to find his distinct style and voice, and I really don’t know how interested I’d be in any of them if it weren’t for my appreciation of his later works. What’s here is still interesting enough from a historical and creative perspective on the mangaka, while I’m also very curious to see if the upward trend in quality continues through “Before Chainsaw Man 22-26.”