Demon Slayer Vol. 5: To Hell
- ISBN
- 9781974700561
- Publisher
- Viz Media
- English release
- Pages
- 192
- Chapters
- 35–43
- Anime
- Season 1: Tanjiro Kamado, Unwavering Resolve Arc ep. 1–26
The second half of Mt. Natagumo, and no use to anyone without the first. Chapters 35 to 43 open with the three swordsmen separated on the mountain, each of them losing, and two Hashira on the way. Nothing in it stands alone: it needs Vol. 4 in front of it, and the pair read far better as eighteen chapters together than they can have done across four months of a weekly magazine. Chapter 40 is titled 'Hinokami', and so is episode 19 of season 1. A reader who wants to set the page beside the screen and see what each medium did with the same material should do it at that chapter. A viewer has otherwise seen everything here and starts at Vol. 7. Viz lists it in print at $11.99.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Zenitsu kills the brother spider and is poisoned, and Shinobu saves him. Giyu kills the Father once Inosuke is beaten. Tanjiro finds the real Kizuki, Rui, who has assembled the spider demons into a family by force and now wants Nezuko for it. In chapter 39, 'Life Passing Before One's Eyes', Tanjiro remembers his frail father dancing the Hinokami Kagura; in chapter 40 he turns the dance into a sword form and takes Rui's head, with Nezuko's blood art behind the blade. Then the book does the thing that makes it worth arguing about. The beheading does not work. Rui survives, the siblings are finished, and Giyu arrives and kills him. What reads as the hero's victory is, on the page, a defeat that a stronger man tidies up, and the series is better for it: it fixes the distance between Tanjiro and a Hashira, which the story then takes most of its length to close. Rui dies recovering the memory of parents he believed had not loved him. It is the first of the sympathetic demon deaths the series returns to through Akaza's in Vol. 18, where this site's line from him is a man telling his dead that he is home.
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