Aging Devil's Victim

A prominent mole marks the left cheek of this middle-aged Japanese man, whose face also carries noticeable bags beneath gently drooping eyes. He keeps his black hair cropped short and sports thick sideburns to match his heavy brows, while faint laugh lines surface only on a close look. Inside the devil's realm he goes about in a traditional fundoshi, trading it for ordinary modern clothing once he finally gets out.

Before his imprisonment he stood as a model hunter, accomplished at the work, well liked, and respected by his peers, yet privately gnawed at by anxiety over his looks. That vanity pushed him to barter away his aging, and at first he took comfort in believing the devil had singled him out for some grand purpose. Decades of isolation eroded that faith, and Denji's arrival shatters it for good. Eighty-two years alone, with no one near his own age, leave him prone to fits of wailing mania that Yoru reads as a flight from reality, and he has tried to end his life more than once without success. Even so, he stays far clearer-headed than the realm's older captives, since real madness only sets in near the thousand-year mark. He holds firm moral ground as well, fiercely objecting when Denji hacks into the tree-bound victims and insisting their long suffering has earned them mercy.

He first turns up just after Asa stumbles into the Aging Devil's domain, greeting her and recounting how an offhand remark before a mirror bound him to the devil. He warns her that in eighty-two years he has located no exit, that hunger and exhaustion never come, and that suicide simply fails. He cautions her against pressing deeper, where the older and far more broken inhabitants dwell, and mentions a rumor that one person once escaped. As Denji sets his breakout plan in motion, the man swings between lucidity and collapse, at one point branding the young hunter a true devil for carving open the human trees. While Denji, Asa, and Yoshida fight to get free, he watches in disbelief, then channels his bitterness at the devil, dragging it through Pochita's mouth into its own realm so Yoshida can broker their release. Afterward he is shown adjusting to ordinary life, earning his keep on a construction crew. His single contract, made with the Aging Devil, banished him to that world the instant he spoke the wish aloud, and his old hunter's training shows when he single-handedly drags the Primal Fear into captivity.