Character · Demon Slayer
Tanjiro Kamado
A charcoal seller's son with a nose sharp enough to smell a lie, and no apparent capacity for hating anyone.
In Otakana the clue reads: Kind-hearted slayer with a checkered haori and a scar
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Demon Slayer
- Letters
- 7 · Easy
Tanjiro Kamado walked down a mountain to sell charcoal and came back to a house full of blood. His family was killed and his sister was turned, which by the standards of this genre is the cue for a revenge arc. He does not take it. He carries Nezuko in a box, hunts a cure, and keeps apologising to the demons he kills while their bodies come apart.
His advantage is his sense of smell. He can read an opponent's intent as an odour, track a demon across a city, and identify the moment a person starts lying, which the series uses for detective work as often as for combat. Water Breathing carries him through the early arcs, and the Hinokami dance his father performed on New Year's mornings turns out to be something considerably older.
The scar on his forehead was a burn before it was anything else. Gotouge ran the manga from 2016 to 2020 in Weekly Shonen Jump, and by the end the collected volumes had sold over 150 million copies. A large part of that is a lead who wins fights by refusing to write anybody off.
Spelling TANJIRO
TANJIRO is seven letters and drops a long vowel on the way into English. The kanji is 炭治郎, ending in the common name element 郎, held long, so TANJIROU or TANJIRŌ is closer to the sound and neither fits. Otakana wants the given name rather than Kamado, which Nezuko also answers to. The first character, 炭, means charcoal.