Tatsuki Fujimoto: How a Manga Artist Made Both Chainsaw Man and Look Back

Tatsuki Fujimoto was born in 1992. He grew up in Akita Prefecture, in northern Japan, and was working in a 7-Eleven when he started publishing manga on Shueisha’s amateur platform Jump SQ Rising in 2013. His first serialized work, Fire Punch (Shonen Jump+, 2016-2018), is the story of a regeneration-cursed protagonist seeking revenge across a frozen post-apocalyptic landscape. It is, by general agreement, one of the bleakest pieces of mainstream serialized manga published in the last decade.

Then in December 2018, Fujimoto began Chainsaw Man in Weekly Shonen Jump. The first part of Chainsaw Man (the “Public Safety” arc, chapters 1-97) ran in Weekly Shonen Jump through December 2020. The second part (the “School” / “Academy” arc) moved to Shonen Jump+ in July 2022 and continues there as of early 2026.

In between Chainsaw Man’s parts, in 2021 and 2022, Fujimoto published two short manga: Look Back (July 2021, a 143-page single-volume manga about two artists growing up together) and Goodbye Eri (April 2022, a 200-page single-volume manga about a teenage filmmaker who films his dying mother). Both are short emotional dramas. Both are completely different from Chainsaw Man.

This combination — the bleak ultraviolent action serial alongside the short emotional one-shots — is what makes Fujimoto’s work interesting to look at as a body. The two registers are not as separate as they appear.

What Fire Punch was actually doing

Fire Punch is the work that establishes the Fujimoto aesthetic. The setup: in a world covered by perpetual snow, a young man named Agni has a regeneration ability that means burning fire on his body never kills him. A general burns him alive with magical fire that cannot be extinguished. The fire never stops. Agni wanders the snowfield, perpetually burning, seeking revenge.

The premise sounds like a one-line shonen revenge story. Fire Punch is not that. Across its 83 chapters, the manga keeps undercutting the revenge structure with absurdism, sexual violence, family trauma, religious satire, and an extended subplot about a movie director. The protagonist’s revenge mission keeps being delayed or rendered meaningless. By the manga’s final chapters, the original setup has been so thoroughly deconstructed that the work has become about something different from what it started as.

Fire Punch is not a successful work by most reasonable standards. The pacing is uneven. Several arcs end abruptly. The final volume is, by some readers’ accounts, one of the most divisive endings in modern shonen manga. But it’s the work where Fujimoto figured out his interests. He is, as a writer, interested in protagonists whose primary motivation gets undermined by the world they exist in. He is interested in film and filmmaking as metaphors for storytelling. He is interested in extended absurdist subplots that complicate the main plot.

All of these interests come back in Chainsaw Man.

Chainsaw Man Part 1 and what made it work

The Public Safety arc of Chainsaw Man is, in retrospect, the most efficient piece of long-form shonen manga Fujimoto has written. 97 chapters. Tight pacing. A clear three-act structure. A protagonist (Denji) whose stated motivation is to “live a normal life with a girlfriend.” A world full of devils that the manga uses to externalize specific psychological pressures. And a plot that consistently moves forward while accumulating subtext.

What made Chainsaw Man work for a Weekly Shonen Jump audience — and what set it apart from the standard Jump roster of that period — was that the manga is structurally a shonen but tonally a seinen. The fight scenes are kinetic and action-oriented in ways that Jump readers recognize. The protagonist has a power that makes him visually distinctive (the chainsaw transformation is one of the most marketable shonen designs of the late 2010s). The arc structure (training, threshold, final boss) follows Jump conventions.

But the underlying writing is not shonen writing. The protagonist is sexually motivated in ways that shonen manga usually keeps at arm’s length. The villains have psychological depths that resemble seinen character work more than shonen archetypes. Major characters die without prior heroism. The ending of Part 1 is, structurally, more like the end of a Korean film than the end of a Jump arc.

This combination — the shonen frame, the seinen substance — is what made Chainsaw Man matter. It was Jump manga that read like Berserk or 20th Century Boys without losing the kinetic accessibility of shonen.

The Look Back and Goodbye Eri turn

In July 2021, six months after Chainsaw Man Part 1 ended, Fujimoto published Look Back. A 143-page one-shot, originally serialized in Shonen Jump+, about two girls who meet in elementary school over a comic strip and grow up to become professional manga artists. One dies in a real-world tragedy that closely echoes the 2019 Kyoto Animation arson. The other has to come to terms with what their friendship meant.

Look Back is, by general agreement, the best single piece of short-form manga published in the last decade. It is also completely unlike Chainsaw Man. There are no devils, no chainsaws, no action sequences. The manga is paced like a quiet film. The emotional turn at the end depends entirely on the reader’s accumulated understanding of the characters’ history. The art is more restrained than Fujimoto’s serialized work.

Goodbye Eri (April 2022, Goodbye Eri) is the same approach applied to a different premise. A teenager films his dying mother on his phone. The film he edits together becomes a viral hit. He grows up haunted by what he did and didn’t include. The story includes Fujimoto’s recurring themes — filmmaking as metaphor, the gap between what reality is and what art makes of it — but in a contained 200-page format.

The two one-shots, taken together, show what Fujimoto is doing when he doesn’t have to write a serialized shonen. The work is quieter, more emotionally direct, and less structurally peculiar. It is also, paradoxically, where his most ambitious writing lives.

Chainsaw Man Part 2 and the questions it raised

When Chainsaw Man Part 2 began on Shonen Jump+ in July 2022, it didn’t continue where Part 1 ended. The protagonist of Part 2 is Asa Mitaka, a high school student who is killed in the second chapter and then has Yoru, the War Devil, take over her body in a co-protagonist arrangement. Denji, the Part 1 protagonist, appears as a supporting character.

This structural choice — shifting protagonist, shifting setting, shifting tone — has divided readers. Some have argued that Part 2 is operating as a sequel to Part 1 with new character work that builds on the established world. Others have argued that the shift is a creative miscalculation and that Part 2 has not yet earned its protagonist swap.

What’s worth understanding about Part 2, as of early 2026, is that it is mid-arc. The pacing has been slower than Part 1, the chapter count is approaching 200, and the major plot threads have not yet converged into the kind of three-act structure that defined Part 1. Whether Part 2 will end up as structurally satisfying as Part 1 is genuinely uncertain.

The MAPPA anime adaptation of Part 1 ran in October-December 2022 (12 episodes), and the Reze arc film released in late 2025 as the studio’s response to demand for a Part 1 conclusion. The status of further Chainsaw Man anime production beyond the Reze film has not been publicly clarified.

What Fujimoto is doing as a writer

Three things hold across Fujimoto’s catalog and explain the consistent register.

Premise inversion. Each of Fujimoto’s major works starts with a premise that promises a specific genre experience and then systematically undercuts that promise. Fire Punch promises a revenge story and undercuts it. Chainsaw Man Part 1 promises a Jump action serial and undercuts the typical conclusions. Look Back promises a quiet slice-of-life and undercuts it with real-world tragedy. The technique is reliable enough to feel intentional.

Filmmaking as theme. Fire Punch has a major character who is a movie director. Chainsaw Man has multiple film references and a recurring motif of “watching things happen.” Look Back is about two artists, one of whom dies. Goodbye Eri is literally about a teenage filmmaker. Fujimoto is, more than any other current shonen mangaka, interested in the act of making and watching art.

Protagonists with frustrated agency. Fujimoto’s protagonists rarely get what they want. Agni’s revenge is structurally undermined. Denji wants a normal life and never gets one. The Look Back protagonist’s friendship ends in tragedy. Asa Mitaka is killed in chapter 2 of her own story. This is a writer who is uninterested in straightforward triumph.

These elements add up to a specific authorial voice that you can recognize across very different works.

Where Fujimoto sits in 2026

At 33, Fujimoto is in the early-middle phase of what looks likely to be a multi-decade career. The Chainsaw Man Part 2 serialization will, at current pace, conclude in 2027 or 2028. After that, the public expectation — based on Fujimoto’s own scattered interview comments — is that he will return to one-shot work and possibly a new long-form serial in a different register.

What’s worth watching is what Fujimoto does with the cultural capital he has accumulated. He is, after Chainsaw Man and Look Back, one of the most read shonen mangaka in the world. He has not yet shown how he intends to use that position.

The encyclopedia entries for all of Fujimoto’s published manga, with publication history and ratings from MyAnimeList and AniList, are at Chainsaw Man, Fire Punch, Look Back, and Goodbye Eri.

What’s clear, looking at the catalog as a body, is that Fujimoto is a writer who works across registers and that his short-form work is at least as serious as his serialized work. Reading Chainsaw Man without reading Look Back and Goodbye Eri misses what the writer is actually trying to do.