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The seventh episode of Jujutsu Kaisen season 3 starts with a confusing shot. The camera slowly zooms in on a figure lying in bed, surrounded by a pitch-black void. A young woman with dark, messy hair opens her eyes and speaks to Kenjaku, who explains that she’s inside the barrier for one of the colonies that’s part of the Culling Game. She politely asks him not to do this in her neighborhood, and he even laughs. In the space between dream and reality, Kenjaku offers her the chance to wake up outside the barrier, and they walk hand-in-hand to get there.
It’s a whole two minutes before she snaps awake to someone shouting her name: Sasaki. If you don’t remember who that is at first, you’re not alone. It’s been more than 50 episodes since we last saw this minor character in the Jujutsu Kaisen series premiere, so she’s easy to forget. Given a lot of what’s happening in the current arc of the show, going back to rewatch the start of the series right now feels hugely rewarding, even if it’s just to get reacquainted with Sasaki.
Who is Sasaki in Jujutsu Kaisen?
As Kenjaku and Sasaki walk together in the latest episode, he says, “Thank you for being friends with my son.” But then she’s woken up by her classmate, Iguchi. A moment later, a thought bubble pops up over her head: “My glasses are missing…” When Iguchi points at the barrier in the distance, he asks, “What’s your opinion on that as an occult club member?” That’s when Sasaki realizes that Kenjaku was talking about Yuji Itadori — and when we finally realize that she’s Yuji’s friend from the start of the series.
Setsuko Sasaki and Takeshi Iguchi were Yuji’s classmates at Sugisawa Third Municipal High School. Because Sasaki doesn’t have her glasses on in season 3, she’s that much harder to recognize. Together, the three of them were the only members of the school’s occult club. Though she had a small role, Sasaki is actually hugely important in retrospect. She’s the one who unwraps the seal on the Ryomen Sukuna’s finger, causing hell to break loose. She’s also the very first of many people Yuji saves on his journey.
In episode 1, the three occult club members had a theory that some kind of supernatural activity was making rugby players sick. The Student Council President, however, claimed it was just ticks. Yet then in the very next scene, Megumi Fushiguro sees a Grade 2 curse on that very field and wonders if there are dead bodies buried there.
When Megumi first explains how curses form, pooling around concentrated negative emotion in places like schools and hospitals, Sugisawa High suddenly feels less like a random setting and more like a pressure point.
This basic principle resonates with something Kenjaku says to Sasaki in the new episode. “There’s an old execution site not far from here,” he explains. “That serves as the center of the barrier. It covers a five- or six-kilometer radius. I went through great pains to create this barrier, so I can’t impose restrictions that are too unreasonable.” Earlier this season, Tengen claimed Kenjaku was the second-best barrier technique user, yet even Kenjaku has his limits and can’t just create these Culling Game zones anywhere. Their epicenters have to be sites with highly concentrated pools of negative energy; the older the better. And who knows ancient murder sites better than a thousand-year-old villain? It sounds at least possible that the center of this Culling Game colony could be that rugby field at Yuji’s old school, or at least someplace close to it.
That might also help explain why Sukuna’s finger was used there as a protective talisman to begin with. If that area was cursed enough to serve as the epicenter for a Culling Game barrier, then maybe it would need a cursed object strong enough to serve as a protective talisman. The series never really explains who put Sukuna’s finger at Yuji’s school or why anybody would even risk using such a dangerous object as a talisman, but in a July 2024 interview held at the Jujutsu Kaisen Exhibition at Shibuya, series creator Gege Akutami hinted that it was Kenjaku all along.
“As for Itadori, there were some aspects that inevitably had to be addressed, like why a special grade cursed object was at his school, so I thought at its worst, I had to make it so the logical conclusion of ‘it was all Kenjaku’s plan’ could hold water,” he said. While this isn’t explicit confirmation, it implies that making Yuji Sukuna’s vessel was always part of Kenjaku’s plan.
Yuji Itadori was never an accident
If the location wasn’t random, then neither was the boy at its center. Now that we’re in the Culling Game all these years later and know more about Yuji’s lineage, it also makes the death of Yuji’s grandfather, Wasuke Itadori, in the series premiere feel more impactful. The old man constantly badgers Yuji to be more social and spend time in his school club (“When you die, you should be surrounded by people. Don’t end up like me.”) On his deathbed, he also tries to tell Yuji something about his parents: “I’ve got some things I want to say before I reach the end,” he says. “It’s about your parents, and I want you to understand—” But Yuji cuts him off.
Season 3’s second episode includes a bombshell flashback that showed Yuji as a baby and Wasuke pleading with Yuji’s father, Jin, to “stay away from that woman” or he’ll die. That’s when Yuji’s mother, Kaori, walks in with the same scar across her skull as Kenjaku. Wasuke knew Kaori had died — and that something else had taken her place. He tried to warn his son, and later Yuji, but neither would listen. Did he know about curses? Or could he just tell something was amiss? Either way, it feels oddly sinister to hear Kenjaku refer to Yuji as his son with a hint of affection when he talks to Sasaki.
Yuji did listen to his grandpa’s other advice: “You’re a strong kid, so try to help others. Save the people you can, even if it’s only those closest to you. It’s okay if you lose your way, and don’t worry about whether they’ll thank you or not. Just save as many as you can, even if you could only save one.”
Throughout the series, Yuji has been obsessed with having a “proper death” and saving as many people as possible because of this. Even before he gets the power boost from eating Sukuna’s finger, his grandfather’s words spur him to act. Sasaki and Iguchi are the first people that Yuji ever saves, so seeing both of them at this point in the story helps to put his journey into perspective.
Yuji’s philosophy has evolved. He’s jaded after what Sukuna did in Shibuya with his body, so when Kinji Hakari asks about his “passion” during their confrontation in episode 5 of this season, Yuji refers to himself as “a cog in the machine that sorcerers need to keep exorcising curses.” Which explains why he spent so much time with Choso relentlessly destroying curses after the end of season 2 up until the start of season 3.
Despite everything Kenjaku engineered — Sukuna’s finger, the Culling Game, even Yuji’s birth — the one thing he still can’t fully control is what Yuji chooses to do. Back in episode 1, Yuji didn’t eat Sukuna’s finger because it was part of some thousand-year-old scheme. He did it because his friends were in danger. Sasaki was the first person he saved. She’s still here. And whether he thinks of himself as a cog or not, that moment wasn’t calculated. It was human. Rewatching the premiere now, that might be the most radical thing about it.
