The Symbolic Meaning of ‘Oni’ in “Demon Slayer”: Focused on Story Balance Model

Abstract

The “Demon Slayer” series, including the original manga and anime, has become extremely popular around the world and is one of the most important Japanese contents to emerge since the 2010s. Among them, the manga “Demon Slayer” is the original content of the “Demon Slayer” series and has a high research value as it reveals the theme of the series in the most complete way. This paper aims to analyze the storytelling of “Demon Slayer” to reveal the socio-cultural implications of the work. The narrative uniqueness of the “Demon Slayer” lies in the ‘Oni’ that appears in the series. In the beginning, ‘Oni’ is depicted as an absolute evil that the protagonist must defeat, but as the work progresses, its character changes in a multilayered manner. The specificity of ‘Oni’ has a great influence on the narrative of the “Demon Slayer”, which is ultimately connected to the thematic consciousness of the work. However, in the current Korean literature, ‘Oni’ has not received much attention compared to its importance. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the storytelling of the work by focusing on ‘Oni’. As a methodology for analyzing storytelling, I used Ahn's ‘Story Balance Model’. The story balance model is suitable for analyzing “Demon Slayer” centered on the ‘Oni’ in the following ways. First, unlike traditional narrative analysis methodologies that focus on events or scenes, this methodology analyzes the narrative of a work by focusing on characters. Second, the work is analyzed through the eyes of a villain rather than a protagonist. The significance of this study is that it analyzes the work by focusing on the ‘Oni’, which have not received much attention in previous studies on “Demon Slayer”, and that it extends the story balance model to a developmental antagonistic narrative with a long story time.