Full spoilers for Chainsaw Man Parts 1 and 2, including the finale.
Fujimoto Tatsuki has a consistent position on autobiographical readings of his work: he specifically designs against them. He’s said in interviews that he doesn’t want characters developing lives independent of his control, and that inserting himself into them would be a way of losing that control.
Then chapter 232 was published. A music journalist who had interviewed Fujimoto for a major publication posted that the final pages matched the ending of his interview almost exactly.
“原体験そのものを描いていたのかな” — was he drawing his own original experience?
The parallel he was pointing to is specific. It involves Spirited Away.
The Spirited Away interview
In 2023, Fujimoto gave a 10,000-character interview to Shueisha Online about Studio Ghibli. The interview’s central story is the moment he saw Spirited Away as a child — standing in a packed theater, watching from a standing position because there were no seats.
He described this as a formative moment. A before-and-after in his relationship with story and image.
What made Spirited Away specifically resonant for Fujimoto was the texture of Chihiro’s situation. A child dropped into a world with completely different rules, who has to survive by finding ways to work within those rules, who doesn’t fully understand what’s happening but keeps going.
The film ends not with a triumphant restoration of everything that was lost, but with a Chihiro who has changed and a world that’s moved on. Some things are recovered. Some aren’t.
Denji’s arc in Chainsaw Man rhymes with this in ways that are probably not accidental.
What the finale revealed
Chapter 232 presents a world in which Pochita has erased himself — eaten the concept of Chainsaw Man out of existence — and Denji wakes into something like the circumstances of Chapter 1, but improved. The zombie devil is there. Power arrives. Nayuta guides him toward Public Safety. Asa’s cockerel is saved from the tragedy of Part 2’s opening.
One reading of this ending, circulating in Japanese online communities immediately after publication, connected the whole series to Fujimoto’s own biography.
“チェンソーマンのこの結末見ると、やっぱこれデンジを自身に見立てたタツキの意志の現れだったんじゃないかなと思う。漫画家として大成したけど色んな読切書いたり初連載で打ち切りに恐えながらもがいてた時の方が幸せだったんかなって勝手に解釈してる” — seeing this ending, I can’t help thinking this was Tatsuki projecting himself onto Denji. He made it as a manga artist, but I keep thinking maybe he was happier when he was struggling with short stories and terrified of cancellation.
That’s a reader’s interpretation. But it’s a serious one, and it connects to the Spirited Away parallel in a meaningful way.
The Ghibli logic in the finale
Spirited Away ends with Chihiro returned to the human world, her parents restored. What she gained in the spirit world — the relationships, the growth, the version of herself that survived there — isn’t fully visible in the final minutes. The film trusts the audience to understand that something happened, even if the markers of it are quiet.
Chapter 232 works similarly. Denji in the new world doesn’t remember Parts 1 and 2. The weight of everything that happened isn’t carried forward explicitly.
But the details are better. The cockerel lives. Power is there. Nayuta, not Makima, is the one steering him.
Japanese readers picking up the Ghibli connection have noted that this is structurally the same gesture as the Spirited Away ending: things are different, things are better, what was lost is not recovered but something is preserved. The heart of it holds even if the specific memories don’t.
Fujimoto has stated that Denji is not him. His former assistant has said, in a separate interview, that Denji does seem like Fujimoto. The journalist who talked to Fujimoto directly for an hour looked at the final pages and felt the interview staring back.
The artist who stood in a packed theater watching a film about a child who survived a world she didn’t understand — and who later made a series about a boy who survived worlds he didn’t understand — ended that series with something that looks, from the outside, like the same emotional gesture.
The interview is from 2023. It’s worth reading alongside chapter 232.
The Fujimoto interview referenced in this article: Fujimoto Tatsuki on Studio Ghibli — Shueisha Online (Japanese)
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