Go back to EnjoyFire Punch by Tatsuki Fujimoto Review | Enjoy
Written on July 10, 2025 It starts off a very vast place that could on forever, like many stories set in such settings (endless snow, post-apocalyptic, etc.). But it grows and evolves to feel more and more claustrophic over time, and at the end, it feels like multiple things simultaneously: entirely self-sanctioned, undone, and bitterly empty. The protagonist's relationship to his sister is the driving heart of the protagonist, from start to end. Everything unfolds not because they know his sister, but because they know his actions in relation to his sister and the calamity that befell her. The nonsensical ramblings of the transgender major character Togata about film and cinema, the childish, confused, straightforward, mindless, dissonant mind of Agni (the god, the human, the sister's brother), the endless snow that brings in new foes, new friends, and more emptiness in the lull, right before events, and right after. It is a narrative that thrives on its hatred on just letting things sit forever. When things do sit, they are uncomfortable, unnerving, still shots of just pure rambling dialogue, and they never feel like we're sitting. No, we're chained to an electric chair, but narratively, in terms of progression, it betrays itself constantly, enraged at the idea that things will ever make sense, sarcasm, putrid disgust at the idea of fulfillment and a completed arc. The completed character arc is their abrupt termination and disillusioning end, even as they have strived and survived all this time throughout just to reach even a little fake nod, but to be denied even that and to be betrayed and to have their entire soul cut out and put on display to showcase that authorial unsettlement (as experienced to a more digestible and at times traditionally narratively tragic degree in Fujimoto's other work *Chainsaw Man*). It is powerful for that reason.