Demon Slayer: Nezuko Is Still Trying to Become Human Again Today

“After dark, don’t wait for me anymore.”

Fourteen-year-old Nezuko Kamado was an utterly ordinary mountain girl.

Her world was small: waking at five each morning to light the stove and cook for the family, scrubbing the mud-stained clothes her younger siblings had dirtied while playing, and waiting for her charcoal-selling older brother to make his way home through the snow before sunset.

Her biggest worries were that the rice jar was almost empty again, that her mother’s cough just wouldn’t get better, and that little Rokuta had kicked off his blanket again.

Then, one winter night, her brother Tanjiro returned with a warning from Grandpa Saburo, who lived at the foot of the mountain:

“After dark, there are things in the mountains that eat people.”

Nezuko didn’t take him seriously. After all, the sun would rise as usual the next day. The snow would still need shoveling, meals would still need making, and life would go on.

But she didn’t know

Three days later, a man called Muzan Kibutsuji would knock on her family’s door.

Three days later, she would be injected with demon blood while trying to protect her younger siblings.

Three days later, she would become the very kind of “thing” she feared most.

She would never again smell the fragrance of morning porridge, feel the warmth of the fire, or wait in the sunshine for her brother to come home.

And she knew even less

That in the distant future, a golden-haired boy would cry out to her:

“Miss Nezuko! Please marry me! I’ll protect you for the rest of my life, even if you’re a demon!”

“I want to become human again.”

“Not because I’m afraid of sunlight, or because I crave flesh and blood.”

“I just want to cook for my brother one more time, braid Hanako’s hair again, and wait on a winter morning for someone to come home through the snow.”