This Week: Demon Slayer Manga End (Spoilers Ahead)

I’m a big fan of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba by Koyoharu Gotouge and I’ve been collecting the manga series since the anime series won’t continue until this fall. If you don’t know what Demon Slayer is about or only know up to the movie, Mugen Train, Demon Slayer follows Tanjiro Kamado, a kind young man avenging his slain family by the first demon, Muzan Kibutsuji, during Japan’s Taisho Era. After Mugen Train, Tanjiro begins training and doing missions with the Hashira, the strongest demon slayers in the Demon Slayer Corps, and learns more about his paternal history in demon slaying. Alongside Tanjiro is Nezuko, his sister who was turned into a demon during their family’s demon attack, and his two fellow demon slayers, girl-crazy Zenitsu Agatsuma and all-physical Inosuke Hashibira. Though Tanjiro goes around slaying demons, he’s so kind-hearted that he sympathizes with the demons while decapitating them or exposing them to sunlight. Basically, the demons are like vampires and burn to death with sunlight. Even some of the older demons, who are usually great (and somewhat cheating) fighters, learn to evade death by decapitation, so the further the Demon Slayers Corps gets to the upper ranks of demons, the harder it is to kill them.

The manga series is addictive if you’re into the genre and style of the story. (I know not everyone is into Demon Slayer.) I always ended up preordering the next manga as soon as the previous volume finished. “What was going to happen to Tanjiro?” was all I could think while I was reading the manga series. This series definitely didn’t steer clear from some memorable characters dying, sometimes dying in vain, but it definitely made me think that sometimes trivial things are meaningless in life. With any series that focuses on human-eating monsters, I always end up questioning the meaning of life and trying not to feel emotional about favorite characters in case they die.

I read the last manga volume, and it left me feeling…sad. It’s not that I didn’t feel sad during the previous manga volumes or the anime. It’s just that feeling where if you read and finish a book, comic, manga, or graphic novel series and the characters and the story disappears, leaving an emptiness in its place. For me, the manga series ended suddenly with a weird modern closing. I was hoping to see more of the characters’ lives after the Demon Slayer Corps, but the manga didn’t satisfy my desires in that sense. Instead, there was a more round-about way of showing that the characters had gone on to have children. In a strange way, the ending was meant to show how the wishes of the demon slayers came true via reincarnation in the modern world. As much as it was to have a happy ending, because it was set a hundred years later, it was so far away from the beginning of the story that it stopped being about Tanjiro’s experiences but about all the characters’ experiences. I wish they had just showed what happened to Tanjiro, Nezuko, Zenitsu, Inosuke, and the remaining characters during the Taisho Era instead of skipping to our time. In my opinion, only CLAMP can do that successfully because they have another story to tie into it.

Above all, I still think finishing Demon Slayer the manga series is a good thing, especially if you’re wondering what’s going to happen in the end or after the movie.

Get volume 23 of Demon Slayer to read the last volume of the series!