#all depends on how intentional Gege is being haha

[cosmicscreech135]

Sukuna Curse Thoughts

UGH THIS GUY! Dusted off my history degree to go digging on jstor with all the delicious illusions Gege is giving us, and the awesome translation notes from this Twitter user

The food allusions in particular where really nagging at me. I’m not an expert on Japanese history, so it was really interesting to me that Sukuna, a man from a medieval period would cook, at all, especially when he had a chef in uraume already. In many cultures food is specifically a feminine domain (ha), so to have not just a man, but a viscous bloodthirsty man be a chef was really weird to me, so much so that his domain expansion, Malevolent Shrine, was also an allusion to ancient kitchen/cook houses.

UNTIL! I found some great articles about the aristocratic pastime of fish cutting, which honestly explained everything. In Japan, the capital in the Heian period was so far inland that transporting fresh fish was very difficult, so it was a very expensive food that only the very wealthy could afford.

So some noblemen made it their art to cut fish, sometimes for an audience sometimes just for themselves but the art was in the specific way they cut and prepared the fish. And as a practice it was a comparable hobby/pursuit to painting, poetry, etc. a similar word was closer “carving” the fish, very elegant.

Which ALSO RELATES to heian period thoughts around food at the time. That Food was different from the source. All sources of food, fish, rice, boar, everything was kind of vulgar or even disgusting. Impure! But to make it into proper food the process of cooking, the boiling, cutting, salting, whatever was needed for the meal would elevate the source into proper and purified food. It’s unclear how intentional this culture was at the time, did average people thing they were conducting a ritual for dinner every night? Unclear! But for nobles that made a whole art out of it? Developed methods of precise and beautiful fish carving that were beautiful in itself? That screams ritual to me, even if the man in question saw it more as an aesthetic hobby.

Which brings me back to Ryomen Sukuna. He only actually appears in one line of a chronicle (that I could find anyway), and it mentions he had a habit of terrorizing townsfolk and often disobeyed the Emperor. To me, this indicates a noble who had a responsibility to the emperor, possibly a warlord, but I think a man of noble origin.

And to me it also brings a tasty implication to his curse technique. I think his form of battle is a ritual in itself, but specifically cooking. In the most recent chapters he directly calls Gojo a mere fish, implying that he thinks of most of his enemies as fish, disgusting natural forms that he can transform with his techniques into proper food, using cleave and cut. It makes every battle a ritual performance, art! And it sort of implies uraume isn’t just his chef, but perhaps more of a sou chef, handling any cooking sukuna does not want to do, anything that isn’t part of his art.

Honestly gives a lot of The Menu vibes, and I love it