Yuji Itadori

Who is Yuji Itadori?

Yuji is a first-year at Tokyo Jujutsu High. He's in the same class as Megumi Fushiguro and Nobara Kugisaki, and Satoru Gojo is his teacher. He's the only person known to have eaten one of Sukuna's fingers and stayed in control. That makes him both a living prison for the King of Curses and the jujutsu world's best chance to destroy him for good. The higher-ups have sentenced him to death, but the sentence is suspended until he eats all twenty fingers, at which point executing him would kill Sukuna too.

He isn't fighting to be the strongest or to win anyone's approval. He's fighting so that people get to die properly, as people, surrounded by others, instead of being torn apart by curses. That goal gets harder to believe in as the series goes on.

• Sukuna's vessel, the only one who can hold him back.
• Nicknamed the "Tiger of West Middle School" for his athletic reputation back home.
• A natural at Black Flash, which tied Nanami's record of four in a row during the Goodwill Event.
• Can perceive and strike souls after his fights with Mahito.
• Branded a mass murderer after Shibuya for what Sukuna did with his body.

Personality and values

Yuji is warm, open and funny. He makes friends almost instantly, including with people who were ordered to kill him, and he's quick to see the person inside an enemy. He's also blunt: he says what he thinks, cries when people die, and never pretends a loss doesn't hurt.

The value that drives him is "a proper death." His grandfather Wasuke died in a hospital bed with Yuji beside him, and told him to help others and to die surrounded by people. Yuji takes that literally. It's why he refuses to let curses kill people randomly, and why the deaths he can't prevent wound him so badly.

Over the course of the series that idealism is broken and rebuilt. Junpei's death teaches him he can't save everyone. Shibuya teaches him his body can be used to kill thousands. After that, he settles on something sturdier: he is "a cog" in the machine that kills curses, and he'll keep doing that job no matter what he feels. Later still, he grows past even that, into someone who chooses to live and keep helping people, not just to keep fighting until he dies. It's one of the better examples of character development in recent shonen.

Powers and abilities

Natural strength

Before he knows cursed energy exists, Yuji can outrun cars, hurl a shot put far enough to stun his school's track coach, and break things he shouldn't be able to break. He chose the Occult Research Club over every sports club that recruited him because its hours let him visit his grandfather in hospital. His physical baseline is close to the best sorcerers using cursed energy reinforcement, and it only improves as he trains.

Divergent Fist

When Yuji first learns to put cursed energy into his punches, his energy lags a fraction behind his fist, so every hit lands twice: the physical blow, then the cursed energy. To a trained sorcerer it's a beginner's flaw. Yuji turns it into a weapon that confuses opponents expecting a single impact. He moves past it as his control improves.

Black Flash

Black Flash is a spatial distortion that happens when cursed energy hits within a millionth of a second of a physical blow. The impact flashes black and lands with roughly two and a half times normal force. Nobody can do it on purpose, but some people find "the zone" for it more easily than others. Against Hanami during the Goodwill Event, coached by Todo, Yuji lands four in a row, tying Nanami's record. It becomes his signature move, and the story keeps using it to mark the moments he levels up.

Soul perception

Living with Sukuna means Yuji is always aware of another soul in his body. After Mahito touches him, he can sense the shape of souls, and his punches damage Mahito's real body, the soul, which almost nothing else can. That makes him Mahito's natural predator.

Vessel traits

Hosting Sukuna makes him resistant to poison and quick to recover from injuries. It also gives him an odd sort of protection: Sukuna doesn't want his only usable body destroyed. It doesn't give him Sukuna's technique, at least not for most of the series.

Late-series powers

In the final battle Yuji finally shows techniques of his own. Through his blood connection to Choso he can use Blood Manipulation. Having held Sukuna for so long has left Sukuna's slashing technique etched into his body. He also masters reverse cursed technique and a domain expansion of his own. He turns all of it toward a specific goal: forcing Sukuna's soul apart from Megumi's so that his friend can be saved.

Living with Sukuna

Most people who eat a Sukuna finger die or are taken over immediately. Yuji simply... stays himself. Sukuna can talk through a mouth that opens on Yuji's cheek or hand, and can take control when Yuji lets him or is unconscious, but Yuji's will keeps him locked away the rest of the time. Sukuna finds this infuriating.

The Enchain vow

On Yuji's first real mission, the Eishu Juvenile Detention Center, he lets Sukuna out to defeat a special grade curse. Sukuna refuses to give the body back and tears out Yuji's heart to stop him from taking it. Yuji forces control back anyway and dies. In his innate domain, Sukuna offers to revive him in exchange for a binding vow. Whenever Sukuna says "Enchain," he gets one minute of control, during which he can't kill or harm anyone, and Yuji forgets the agreement. Sukuna is clearly planning something. It pays off much later in the Culling Game.

Shibuya

In Shibuya, curses feed the unconscious Yuji a large batch of Sukuna's fingers at once, and Sukuna takes over completely. He fights Jogo for fun and kills him, destroys the shikigami Mahoraga that Megumi summoned as a last resort, and flattens part of the city. Yuji is awake for all of it, watching through his own eyes as his body kills enormous numbers of people. Afterwards, the death count is his to carry.

Two philosophies

The series stages Yuji and Sukuna as opposites. Yuji believes people matter because of the connections between them. Sukuna believes only strength and his own appetites matter, and treats suffering as entertainment. Sukuna spends much of the story trying to break Yuji's spirit, and the final arc is, among other things, about whether he can.

Yuji's story, arc by arc

Sendai and the finger

Yuji is a high schooler in Sendai, raised by his grandfather after his parents vanished from his life. On the night Wasuke dies, Megumi Fushiguro comes looking for a special grade cursed object the Occult Club has found. It's a finger of Sukuna. When the club's seniors break its seal and curses swarm the school, Yuji swallows the finger to gain the power to save them.

Death sentence and Tokyo

Gojo arrives, tests Yuji by letting Sukuna out for ten seconds, and is impressed when Yuji takes control back. He persuades the higher-ups to suspend the execution. Yuji enrolls in Tokyo, meets Nobara, and is sent with his classmates to the Detention Center, where he dies for the first time. He's revived, hidden by Gojo, and trained in secret. Part of that training involves watching films for hours while holding a cursed doll that punches him if his energy wavers.

Junpei and Mahito

Investigating deaths at a cinema, Yuji befriends Junpei Yoshino, a bullied boy whom Mahito is quietly manipulating. Yuji almost brings him back, and then Mahito transforms Junpei in front of him. It's Yuji's first true failure and the start of his rivalry with Mahito, which he fights alongside Nanami.

The Goodwill Event and the Death Paintings

Yuji reveals he's alive at the Kyoto exchange event, where the Kyoto students have orders to kill him. Instead, Aoi Todo declares him his best friend and teaches him to fight properly, and the two take on Hanami together. Soon after, Yuji and Nobara fight Eso and Kechizu, two of Choso's brothers. It's the first time Yuji kills beings who are partly human, and he's shaken by it.

The Shibuya Incident

Shibuya is where the story breaks him. He fights Choso and is beaten unconscious; Choso spares him after a sudden flood of memories of Yuji as his brother. Then Sukuna takes over. Yuji wakes in a wrecked city in time to see Mahito kill Nanami and strike Nobara. He's on the edge of giving up when Todo arrives to fight beside him. The final battle with Mahito ends with Yuji calling himself a cog and Mahito fleeing, until Kenjaku absorbs Mahito himself.

The Culling Game

Sentenced to death again, Yuji goes with Megumi into the Culling Game. Yuta, sent as his executioner, fakes his death instead. In a colony he meets Hiromi Higuruma, whose domain puts him on trial for Shibuya. Yuji doesn't dispute his guilt. The trial ends in an unexpected alliance rather than an execution. The arc ends with Sukuna using the Enchain vow to move into Megumi's body.

The final arc

After Gojo's death in Shinjuku, Yuji and the remaining sorcerers fight Sukuna in relay. Yuji's family secrets come out: his mother's body was occupied by Kenjaku when he was born, and there is a link between his father's line and Sukuna himself. That connection helps explain why Yuji could hold Sukuna at all. He survives Sukuna's attacks over and over, lands Black Flash after Black Flash, and uses his new techniques and domain to separate Sukuna from Megumi. Nobara returns to deliver a decisive blow. At the end Yuji offers Sukuna a strange mercy, the chance to keep existing with him, and Sukuna refuses. Megumi is saved, and Yuji lives. The last chapter brings back the trio as they were at the start.

Relationships

Trivia

• The name. "Itadori" (虎杖) is Japanese knotweed, a famously hard-to-kill plant, and its first kanji means "tiger."
• His type. When Todo asks what kind of woman he likes, Yuji names Jennifer Lawrence, and Todo instantly decides they're best friends.
• Movie training. Gojo makes him keep his cursed energy steady while watching films, so he's seen a lot of them.
• Occult Club. He picked it over the sports clubs because it left him time for hospital visits.
• Protagonist type. He's often compared with other kind-hearted shonen leads like Tanjiro Kamado, and with the much rougher Denji from Chainsaw Man, whose story ran in Jump around the same time.

Why Yuji matters

Jujutsu Kaisen is a series about death, and Yuji is the character who refuses to let it be meaningless. He carries the guilt of Shibuya without being destroyed by it and without excusing himself. And he ends the series by offering mercy to the being who took everything from him. It's not a power fantasy. It's the story of a boy who keeps choosing to be decent in a world that gives him every reason not to.

He also shows how Akutami writes a protagonist differently from the usual shonen ladder. Yuji isn't the strongest, isn't the chosen one in the normal sense, and for most of the story doesn't even have a technique. What he has is the ability to take hits, physical and emotional, and stand back up. For the rest of the cast, return to the Jujutsu Kaisen character guide.