Jujutsu Kaisen vol 1 by Gege Akutami

Itadori isn’t your average high school student - he’s super fast and really strong.  One day, his fellows in the Paranormal Research Club discover a cursed object and awaken a demon. Sorcerers from the Jujutsu Academy try to clean up the mess, but Itadori decides to ingests the object in a move to control the demon. This should have killed him, but instead, he is able to control the demon from within his own body. The Jujutsu reveal that, under normal circumstances, Itadori would be killed to destroy the part of the demon inside him, but they instead seize the opportunity that Itadori might be a perfect vessel for controlling this powerful demon, and they ask him to help retrieve the rest of the cursed items around the world and destroy the demon instead.

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Jujutsu Kaisen is another entry in the genre of demon manga, and one volume is not nearly enough to judge whether it is a worthy entry.  The world building at the beginning of this volume is pretty choppy, and we get these little snippets of disparate stories between Itadori at school and him visiting his dying grandfather in a hospital.  It seems pretty tidy that Itadori is able to pick up and move across the country to attend Jujutsu Academy without saying goodbye to his friends or anything.  However, if the build of storyline from volume two forward becomes a little more steady and developed, this has the potential to be an interesting series in a crowded field of demon stories.  Akutami's illustrations have plenty of creepy demons, but the character designs are very basic with all Jujutsu sorcerers in the same black, full-body zip-up.

VIZ rates this as Teen Plus for fantasy violence, for the amount of blood and scary demons.

Sara's Rating: 8/10
Suitability Rating: Grades 10-12

This review was made possible with a digital reader copy from the publisher through Edelweiss. 

Publisher: VIZ Media
Publication Date: December 3, 2019
ISBN: 9781974710027 (Paperback)

Tags: Rating: 8/10, Suitability: High School, Manga, Demons, School Life, VIZ Media