Koyoharu Gotouge’s Demon Slayer began in Weekly Shonen Jump on 15 February 2016 and ended on 18 May 2020 at chapter 207, collected in 23 volumes. Four years and three months is short next to the long-running series it shared a magazine with, and the ending is unusual for the same reason: almost everything set up early is paid off before the book closes.
Tanjiro Kamado, the eldest son of a charcoal-selling family, comes down from the mountain to find his family killed and only his sister Nezuko alive, turned into a demon. He joins the Demon Slayer Corps to find a way to make her human again. The structure rests on three things: a sword system built on breathing forms, a corps with clearly ranked members, and demons who each get a history of their own. Fights end by showing what the defeated demon was before, and the repetition builds feeling without slowing the action down.
The Taisho-era setting does a lot of the work, and the way it looks carried over into the anime and the films, which sent new readers back to the manga years after it finished. Twenty-three volumes is a readable total, and nothing is left waiting for anyone starting now.
