Character · Chainsaw Man
Denji
His dream is bread with jam on it, and he is prepared to chainsaw a great many devils to get there.
In Otakana the clue reads: Debt-ridden teen who merged with his chainsaw dog
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Chainsaw Man
- Letters
- 5 · Easy
Denji inherits his father's debt to the yakuza and pays it down by selling body parts and hunting small devils with Pochita, a chainsaw devil the size of a dog. He lives in a shed. He has never eaten well, never been treated kindly, and cannot imagine wanting much beyond that. When the yakuza kill him anyway, Pochita takes over as his heart, and the pull cord in his chest starts the engine.
What makes him unusual for a shonen lead is the size of his ambitions. Other heroes want a crown or a title. Denji wants toast, a bath, a girlfriend and a full night of sleep. Tatsuki Fujimoto plays this for comedy and then keeps drawing the line back to the poverty that produced it, so the jokes about jam land very differently by the second volume.
Fujimoto began Chainsaw Man in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2018, ran the first part for eleven volumes, and moved the sequel to the Shonen Jump+ app. MAPPA animated part one in 2022. The design is deliberately ugly: no glowing aura, no stance, a boy with chainsaws where his forearms should be, spraying blood over everything within reach.
Spelling DENJI
DENJI is five letters and the J is the whole battle. The name is written in katakana, so there is no kanji to lean on, and older romanisation systems would render that syllable ZI rather than JI. Nothing in the row repeats and no vowel runs long. Find the J and the word is effectively finished.