Look Back

Tatsuki Fujimoto was born in 1994 in Niigata Prefecture and has described himself as having been obsessed with films from a young age — Western cinema in particular, including the work of David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, and various Hollywood genre directors whose influence can be felt in the visual grammar of his work. He began publishing manga while still a teenager, his early work appearing in self-published form before his professional debut with Ice Cream Man in 2012. He was twenty-two when his first serialized work, Fire Punch, launched in 2016.

Fire Punch, a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy set in a frozen world, introduced many of the qualities that would define Fujimoto's work: a relentless structural inventiveness, a willingness to destroy and rebuild the reader's understanding of what the story is at multiple points, a tendency to pursue his thematic concerns to uncomfortable extremes, and a black humour that operates alongside genuine horror without cancelling either. It is an imperfect work — Fujimoto has said so himself — but it is unmistakably the work of a singular voice.

Chainsaw Man, which began in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 2018, is his masterwork to date. Denji is a teenager crushed by debt, killing devils for a yakuza organization in exchange for food, when he is betrayed and killed. His devil companion — Pochita, who takes the form of a chainsaw — merges with him, resurrecting him as a hybrid human-devil with chainsaws that can emerge from his body. He is recruited into a government organization that hunts devils. The series sounds, from this description, like a conventional dark-action property. It is not. Fujimoto uses the setup to pursue questions about desire, numbness, and the desperate poverty of a person whose childhood contained no comfort, with a directness and emotional rawness that struck readers as something genuinely new. The series' second part, published on Shonen Jump+, has continued to take wild structural risks that generate intense discussion.

His short works — particularly Look Back (2021), about the friendship between two aspiring manga artists, and Goodbye, Eri (2022) — have been described by critics and fellow creators as among the finest short manga ever produced. They demonstrate a command of the form's visual storytelling possibilities — the use of the page turn, the density of panels, the relationship between image and negative space — that suggests a creator who has thought deeply about what manga can do that no other medium can. Fujimoto is, by common critical consensus, one of the most important voices in contemporary manga.