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If I could describe Yū Yū Hakusho in one word, it would be “seething.” It’s also exciting, violent, funny and thoughtful, but most of all, it’s seething. There’s a vein of resentment that runs through the entire thing, a kind of anger at circumstance that seems to upend whatever satisfying fist-pumping thrills we might get out of the rising power levels and explosive victories. Characters brood and can barely contain their jealousy about one another, while others simply feel trapped in an ever-escalating battle that they can’t seem to escape. It’s as if they’re angry that they’ve been dropped into the shonen battle genre in the first place.
The main character of the series is Yusuke Urameshi, a teenage delinquent that lives to fool around and fight. In fact, if he’s not doing the latter, the glimpses that we get of his life are painstaking in their emotional aloofness. He barely has any relationship with his alcoholic mother, his girlfriend Keiko is constantly annoyed with his actions, and the closest thing he has to a friend is Kuwabara, another teenager that he meets frequently solely to kick the crap out of him.
So, when Yusuke, after his iconic “hit by a car and turned into a ghost” incident, becomes a “Spirit Detective,” it’s the first time that he has latched onto any real purpose. Going around and beating up demons and training allows him to escape all of the chores that are expected of him in regular human society, and that sounds pretty rad to him after his initial hesitation at being attached to anything. Accompanied by Kuwabara and two foes-turned-friends, Hiei and Kurama, Yusuke is given a Get Out Of Commitment free card. He can shun school, his girlfriend and anything else that he wants to because he’s obligated to go shoot finger lasers at outlandish ghouls. It’s not a bad set-up…at first.
For it’s here that Yū Yū Hakusho diverts from the common battle shonen ethos of combat being the purest form of living. Yū Yū Hakusho debuted in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump during the heyday of Dragon Ball, a series dedicated to the idea that combat is the ultimate aspiration. That’s not a diss on it, as the series is often beautiful in its fight choreography, its grandiose action coordination, and its cast of colorful, memorable characters. Dragon Ball is exactly as good as everyone says it is. That said, its core message is that to fight is to be good, and to be good at fighting is to be the best.
As YYH goes along, though, its creator Yoshihiro Togashi complicates this image, with each arc further suggesting that the path to power inevitably warps us in some way. This is most evident in the two arcs that form the middle chunk of the series – the epic Dark Tournament and the gory, angsty Chapter Black. The former is, as you probably guessed, a tournament that sees Team Urameshi take on a cavalcade of demons and fighters, all while building up to a clash between Yusuke and the hulking Younger Toguro.
Toguro is the former friend and rival of Yusuke’s trainer Genkai, but he abandoned their bond in the pursuit of strength, turning into a demon and alienating himself from whatever shreds of humanity a life spent training for battle allowed him. As his strength rises, his physical form morphs and mutates, his muscles becoming a hideous contrast to the bulging bodybuilder aesthetic found in the aforementioned Dragon Ball. It is a painful transformation, rendering any idea of wishful machismo as pure horror.
The fact that the tournament itself is overseen by rich fatcats and businessmen only adds to the idea that these displays of brutal, gold medal masculinity are easily corrupted. Toguro eventually loses against Yusuke, which provides him with an end that he desires. To be killed is the only finishing line he’s able to reconcile with, and on the way to the thousands of years of torture that awaits him in hell, Toguro tells Genkai to make sure that Yusuke doesn’t follow his track.
Yū Yū Hakusho became well-known for reframing itself, forcing us to reconsider everything we’ve seen through a new development or lens of morality. Toguro’s final comments mean that everything to come is doomed. Your mission to be the greatest warrior is a misguided one, and death will be its only stopping point. Second place will never be enough.
It’s this rumination on the typical idea of “getting stronger to fight stronger bad guys” that sets Yū Yū Hakusho apart from many of its peers. Often, we get slaps on the wrist regarding it, such as “It’s bad to fight so hard unless you’re doing it for your friends” or “It’s bad to be so strong unless you’re saving the world.” Yusuke is only motivated to beat Toguro after he thinks Toguro has murdered Kuwabara, but this “I’m doing it for the people I love” motivation ends up feeling hollow just one arc later.
The Chapter Black story sees Yusuke taking on Shinobu Sensui, a former Spirit Detective who’d become disgusted by the entire operation when he recognized the cruelty and vengeance being inflicted on the demons that were supposed to be a kind of blanket “bad guy.” And to that point, most of the series paints demons with all-consuming ugliness. That Sensui is disturbed by their slaughter calls into question all of the victories that the audience has enjoyed to this point. So far we have rooted for Yusuke to annihilate the otherness that are these demons because they seemed pretty bad. And when Toguro lost his humanity, he became a demon, and losing your humanity is bad, right? But are demons bad? Are we inflicting punishment on evildoers or a group of creatures that we don’t understand?
That this point coincides with a scene where Yusuke breaks down, crying and pounding his fist at the earth because he’s frustrated with the idea that he’s now locked into a system of progressively higher stakes and stronger enemies, is likely no accident. He has become entangled in the thing that he was trying to escape from in the first place – a responsibility toward the world. To engage with it and its people. It’s almost akin to the “never turn your passion into your day job” mantra. Yusuke found release in the action antics of being a Spirit Detective, but when forced to consider the fact that he’s on an unstoppable trajectory toward an uncertain justice, he breaks down. We are not meant to fight forever.
Of course, there’s later plot reveals that Yusuke is actually half born from a demon’s bloodline, but these feel like icing on the cake after Chapter Black makes it clear that certain choices predestinate us for savagery. In fact, the only character that escapes his cycle is Kuwabara, who notoriously absconds from the group in the last act in order to focus and study. What’s often seen as a kind of narrative letdown is actually a rescue for our beloved boy. He gets no big final fight, but at least there’s a chance that he could be happy one day.
The final saga of Yū Yū Hakusho, the Three Kings storyline, is infamous. It feels incomplete, a fact that even Togashi is willing to admit. Ailed by continuous health problems and a demanding workload, he opted to end the series. Later, he’d apologize to its readers for the decision in an essay that’s hard to read at times. Togashi, like the characters of Yū Yū Hakusho, grapples with the expectations of their chosen forms and the idea that things need to get bigger and better. It makes Kuwabara’s decision all the more relatable, as it seems to mirror Togashi – sometimes you have to quit the thing you love the most. Sometimes you have to save yourself.
After detailing the pasts and underlying tensions that rule the existences of Kurama and Hiei, ones that draw them back into chains of vengeance and loathing, the Demon World tournament begins. Of course, Yusuke enters it – he’s the main character, after all – but the story ends when he’s knocked out. We never see the final bout. We only hear about it when Yusuke comes to. There’s a winner, which means there are beings that are stronger than him. There is no conclusion to Yū Yū Hakusho, at least when it comes to the aspirations of its lead.
Instead, we’re offered something different. Yusuke and his girlfriend Keiko share their first kiss on the beach. Kuwabara and Yusuke wrestle in the water. Kurama, Botan and the rest seem content. It’s blissful, and even Yusuke’s declaration to fight again feels like a weight has been dropped from it. There is peace and the series ends. “FOREVER FORNEVER” shows up on the screen.
Because perhaps there is no fulfilling ending to Yū Yū Hakusho thanks to its construction. There’s no doubt that Togashi opting to preserve his health rather than go on creating a certain manga series is a good idea, but wrapping it up abruptly allows Team Urameshi to escape the expectations of a fictional grind that mirrored Togashi’s own real-world one. The race to be better, to go longer, to end on a higher note – it consumes some manga and anime series just as it consumed the main characters of Yū Yū Hakusho. It’s a situation where a non-finish is the most humane finale one can hope for.
Yū Yū Hakusho seethes. It’s about bitterness and angry drive, the kind that propels you through a hyper-masculine world of tournaments and terror. It’s about Yusuke and his pals’ urge to be better no matter the cost, only to discover that the cost is unavoidable. The undercurrent at the beginning of a teenager that doesn’t know what he wants but knows what he likes (fighting) becomes a raging maelstrom by the end as he watches the only escape he knew erupt into a dark process that would only take more from him.
And then, in the end, it seethes in a different way – with uncertainty. There is no telling what Yusuke will do in the long run. No one-shot or brief return to let us know about what his future holds. Like Toguro at the gates of hell, it turns the whole series into a sort of warning, a foreboding prequel for the rest of Yusuke Urameshi’s life. It sets up his possibilities and ends at the crucial point of deciding which one he’d like to pursue.
That means that there’s also hope. Even in comparison to their scuffles at the beginning of the series, Yusuke and Kuwabara tussling in the waves in the final episode seems lighthearted in a way that no other fight in the series has been, and not just because it’s a funny little bit of roughhousing between two friends. It almost feels like an embrace.
The choice to fight is there and the choice to live is there, too. Both remain for now, but in the end, the one you choose will be the one that sticks. Forever Fornever.
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