Ajin and the Loss of Moral Ambiguity

Kei Nagai is a student whose ordinary future disappears when a traffic accident reveals that he cannot die. In Ajin, that makes him valuable to a society willing to imprison and experiment on people like him. His friend Kaito helps him escape. Satō, another Ajin, offers a different response to their treatment: organized resistance that becomes increasingly violent.

Satō is most disturbing before I know quite what to make of him.

He is courteous, patient, almost reassuring. An older man who appears to understand what is happening and can offer protection from it. Then the violence begins, and the manner barely changes.

His pleasantness is not necessarily an act he drops once his intentions are revealed. He can be pleasant and do those things. The two fit together for him more comfortably than they do for us.

Nagai presents a different problem. He is the person we follow, but that does not make him particularly generous. He wants safety, an ordinary future, and control over his circumstances. His interest in other people often depends on how they affect those aims.

Early in Ajin, I found both characters difficult to place. By the end of the anime, their roles were much easier to recognize. I am not sure the clarity was an improvement.

A reason to behave well

Nagai’s self-interest can produce conduct that resembles morality without beginning from concern for others.

A stable society is useful to him. Predictable behavior is useful. Other people not being murdered can be useful. He does not have to love humanity to find its continued functioning preferable to Satō’s entertainment.

That gives the writing something to examine beyond whether he will eventually prove himself a good person.

What happens when cooperation suits him? What happens when it becomes costly? Which attachments survive his attempt to treat them as practical arrangements?

The series initially leaves those questions open. He can make a decision I understand and still be someone I would not trust. His intelligence does not automatically become wisdom, and his detachment does not automatically become strength.

I liked that discomfort. It made following him more interesting than waiting for his better nature to emerge.

The person who does not fit

Kaito matters because his loyalty does not fit comfortably into Nagai’s way of dealing with people.

He helps when helping is dangerous. He remains attached when the attachment is inconvenient. Nagai can rely on him, retreat from him, or try to explain him, but the relationship keeps exceeding its practical use.

I would not reduce that to a lesson in friendship. Nagai’s response is less settled: dependence, irritation, guilt, affection, perhaps curiosity about someone who behaves so differently. He does not need to understand the bond fully for it to affect him.

Nor does one attachment prove that everything else about him is a defense concealing an uncomplicatedly kind person. A person can care deeply about someone and remain selfish elsewhere. The exception makes him more specific.

As Kaito becomes less central to the anime’s conflict, one of the better opportunities to examine Nagai goes with him. There is still a story to resolve, but less pressure on the part of him that cannot solve everything by calculation.

Satō’s appetite

What Nagai wants to make predictable, Satō wants to make stimulating.

His ingenuity is part of the attraction. Immortality could easily become a repetitive advantage: the character gets injured, recovers, and continues. Satō treats it as something to investigate. He discovers possibilities in the rules and uses them with a practical imagination that makes the violence feel newly dangerous.

The spectacle is not just that he survives. It is that surviving changes what he is willing to attempt.

His apparent political purpose also gives the early story a useful uncertainty. The treatment of Ajin is genuinely horrific. Opposing it makes sense. But a legitimate grievance does not tell us what this particular man wants, or what he will do with the people who accept his leadership.

It may matter to him chiefly because of the opportunities it creates.

As his appetite for the game becomes clearer, I become interested in how much of the cause remains. What would satisfy him? Does he want the conflict to end? How far does his interest in the people beside him extend?

Enjoying violence explains something about Satō. It does not have to become the answer to every question about him.

When the roles become familiar

My disappointment with the later anime is that the conflict increasingly feels organized around stopping the villain rather than examining the people involved.

Nagai’s coldness becomes easier to accept as the hardness required to defeat someone worse. Satō’s unpredictability becomes a succession of larger threats. Their differences still drive the action, but the moral arrangement around them settles.

The issue is not that Nagai changes. Affection, responsibility, or remorse could complicate him considerably. It is that the changes increasingly make him easier to support.

A selfish person discovering that he needs others does not have to stop being selfish. He may become more considerate, more dependent, more resentful, or simply better at recognizing what he stands to lose. Those possibilities are worth following. The anime often seems more interested in getting him into position for the confrontation.

The early Ajin had room for Nagai’s desire for a quiet life and Satō’s desire for stimulation to put them in opposition without making either desire morally impressive. Kaito could matter without becoming evidence for Nagai’s redemption.

I still liked the show. Its premise produces excellent tactical situations, and Satō remains memorable even when I find him less interesting. But I wanted more of the motives that made the opposition uneasy in the first place.

By the end, I knew whom I wanted stopped. Earlier, I had also wanted to understand why the other man would choose to stop him. That was the better question.