Jujutsu Kaisen: How Gege Akutami Built the Manga That Currently Dominates Jump

Gege Akutami began serializing "Jujutsu Kaisen" in Weekly Shonen Jump in March 2018. The series follows Yuji Itadori, a high school student who swallows a cursed finger belonging to the most powerful cursed spirit in history in order to save his friends, becomes the vessel for that spirit, and is then condemned to consume the remaining fingers before being executed. The premise establishes the series' tonal register immediately: this is a shonen manga in which the protagonist begins with a death sentence, in which heroism carries costs that the genre usually elides, and in which the power that enables the protagonist to fight also ensures that he cannot be allowed to live.

Akutami has said in interviews that they constructed "Jujutsu Kaisen" with deliberate resistance to the shonen formula's comforts. Where Dragon Ball and its descendants build toward power levels and breakthrough moments that reward the reader's investment, "Jujutsu Kaisen" periodically kills characters that the reader has invested in — without the telegraphing that allows the reader to prepare, without the narrative weight that the deaths would receive if they were intended to be "important deaths." Characters die in the series because people in violent situations die, not because the narrative has decided they have served their purpose.

The series' power system — cursed energy, cursed techniques, domain expansions — is built around the concept of the sure-hit: each master-level technique guarantees that its attacks will land, turning high-level fights into questions of whose guarantee supersedes the other's. The tactical complexity this produces is considerable, and Akutami's ability to generate new variations on the system's logic across hundreds of chapters without the system feeling exhausted is one of the series' technical achievements. The "domain expansion" sequences — intricate sealed spaces in which each fighter's technique is made absolute — have become the series' signature aesthetic, and MAPPA's anime realizations of them established a visual benchmark for shonen action.

The character of Ryomen Sukuna, the cursed spirit whose vessel Yuji becomes, is the series' most interesting creation: a being of absolute power and absolute selfishness who is genuinely amusing rather than simply threatening, whose aesthetic preferences and petty cruelties are characterized with enough specificity that he becomes comprehensible as a sensibility rather than a symbol. The relationship between Sukuna and Yuji — the vessel and the spirit, sharing a body without sharing values — produces some of the series' most unsettling content and some of its funniest.

The series' reception internationally has been shaped substantially by the anime adaptation. MAPPA's production of the first season in 2020 and the "Jujutsu Kaisen 0" film in 2021 were received as among the finest action anime of recent years, with fight choreography that extended the visual language of shonen combat in directions that the manga's static images could suggest but not fully achieve. The second season's "Shibuya Incident" arc — depicting a catastrophic battle in Shibuya with massive civilian casualties — generated the kind of sustained online discussion that only the largest cultural events produce. The series currently shows no sign of concluding, and Akutami no sign of softening.