Reimi is Unbreakable: Female empowerment in Diamond is Unbreakable

SPOILERS: Discussion of major events in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki is not exactly a conventional shounen manga. The series, which turns 30 this year, tells the multi-generational epic of the Joestar family and the strange – one might even say bizarre – supernatural forces that touch their lives. The first three arcs featured heroes clashing over the fate of humanity in exotic locales such as Egypt and Peru. The fourth arc, Diamond is Unbreakable, breaks from that tone with a suburban horror tale featuring Josuke Higashikata, the product of Joseph Joestar’s extramarital affair, in the sleepy seaside suburb Morioh.

Morioh has had a sudden rash of its citizens developing superpowers known as Stands, which can make ordinary events like a girl developing a crush, going out for lunch, or even pest control terrifying ordeals; when serial killer Yoshikage Kira develops these powers, he becomes nigh-unstoppable. Suburban horror plays on the anxieties of people living in these quiet communities, and as such, they tend to focus on the victimization of women. By making Kira’s first victim, Reimi Sugimoto, an active player in the story through the final act, Araki reverses that victimization and turns into something far more empowering.

The Ghost in the Alley

In her earliest introduction, Reimi calls herself a jibakurei – a yuurei, a kind of Japanese ghost, bound to a specific location until a certain condition is met. As suburban horror, an essential element of Diamond is Unbreakable is making a familiar setting feel strange and unsettling, accomplished not just through the writing but also the art design, with yellow skies, purple vegetation, and green roads. Reimi, on the other hand, trades the traditional wild black hair and long white robes for a pink bob and a pink sundress.

When they first encounter her, Rohan Kishibe uses his Stand Heaven’s Door to read her memories, and unlike most people they’ve met, her memories are that of an ordinary teenage girl – her first period, a boy forcing his tongue in her mouth for her first kiss. Her normalcy feels out of place in a setting that trades on nothing being quite right, down to her cheerful demeanor and penchant for fortune-telling using pocky. Despite her approachable appearance, she is very much a yuurei – she cannot leave her alleyway until her murderer is caught and brought to justice, which introduces the main conflict, the battle against Kira, into the plot.

Reimi, trapped between life and death, exists in a liminal space she cannot exit. She is unable to do anything on her own, yet she draws in anyone who is on a “similar wavelength” to her in an attempt to warn them of the conflict, thus pulling in Josuke’s friends Koichi and Rohan. Her alley next to the convenience store Owson’s, usually hidden, is not a place people merely stumble on – she is making a constant, concerted effort to find someone who can finish what she cannot and protect Morioh from this constant looming menace.

Even at the end of her life, she wasn’t just a victim – at the end of the episode, Koichi and Rohan visit her grave and discover that her final act was to push Rohan out the window when Kira attacked. Rohan says, “There’s something admirable about how that ghost lives… She’s been fighting for fifteen years, alone, for the sake of the living.” The story frames Reimi’s continued existence as tragic, yes, but also heroic. Instead of dwelling on her victimhood, the characters draw inspiration from her determination to stop the villain menacing the town.

Underscoring her continuing importance in the story, she figures prominently in the show’s opening theme song, “Great Days”. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure theme songs feature visuals that heavily foreshadow plot beats from the upcoming arc, so Reimi’s position in the opening indicates her importance to the climax. At the line, “Let the voice of love take you higher,” her finger points upward, and is joined by the fingers of the rest of the cast.

The final image, the one that sets the tone for the upcoming episodes, is her standing in the foreground against a backdrop of a golden gear that says “Justice” and Josuke and his friends’ Stands. She is in an elevated position with her faithful dog Arnold by her side and the rest of the cast surrounding her. Her prominence sends the message that this is her story just as much, if not more, than the living characters, and she refuses to be written out. For the satisfying, uplifting conclusion that the song and its accompanying visuals promise, she must be afforded the opportunity to take charge.

The Horror of the Mundane

As an untraceable serial killer, Yoshikage Kira is the ultimate suburban nightmare. When he developed his own Stand, he was granted the ability to combust anything he wanted. This provided him with an incredibly convenient way to dispose of the bodies of his victims. He keeps a hand to carry around and buy gifts and spoil as his “girlfriend”, and burns up the rest; when the hand begins to ripen, he burns that as well and searches for a new victim.

In the tradition of suburban horror, he tends to select women who act out; the classic “first victim” of slasher films tends to be sexually active couples, and Kira targets spoiled, materialistic women, such as one he overheard complaining that her boyfriend didn’t buy her a sufficiently opulent ring. He picks his victims deliberately and with care, but without a body, they can only be classified as “missing”; in this way, he has murdered dozens of women in fifteen years.

Much of the suburban ethos has to do with creating a safe haven for families, particularly for women and children, and protecting them from outside threats in well-protected homes. However, Kira represents the unthinkable possibility that not only are those women unsafe, but the threat is coming within this supposed haven and is undetectable. His preferred victims are women, but he thinks nothing of going after children – his first on-screen victim is a particularly childlike middle schooler.

Not only does Kira utterly destroy the evidence, but he also is the embodiment of the sentiment, “It’s never the ones you suspect.” He does his best to make himself as unremarkable as possible. He declines to go out with his coworkers and one of them remarks, “…He doesn’t have any passion. He’s not a bad guy, but he just doesn’t stand out very much.” He’s quiet and keeps to himself and doesn’t appear to have any hobbies; there’s no reason to suspect that his sole interest would be murdering and dismembering women.

He claims to want a “quiet life”, the same thing everyone who has elected to live in a suburban community wants, doesn’t seem to be aware that by living out his desires, he is infringing on other people’s right to quiet lives of their own. As a child, his parents, aware of his inclinations, spoiled him and indulged his tendencies, protecting him from the world rather than the other way around. He is the lurking menace, the one no one would ever suspect, the danger coming in from one’s own community.

Let the voice of love take you higher

Diamond is Unbreakable brings Yoshikage Kira to a poetic end in the finale by drawing Reimi back into the story, as promised. The standard climax to a shounen action series like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure involves the protagonist getting in the final blow against the Big Bad; Diamond is Unbreakable does not go that way.

Instead, it revolves around ironic punishment. Kira, seriously wounded, attempts to activate his time-travel powers to go back before his confrontation with Josuke and his friends, and finds himself whole and healthy on an unfamiliar street. He’s convinced he won until he meets Reimi, who says, “It’s finally over, isn’t it? They finally cornered you, Yoshikage Kira.” Although taking his actual life was outside the realm of possibility for her, Reimi can confront Kira in his final moments before moving on.

For fifteen years, Reimi has acted as an unwilling psychopomp, watching and weeping as Kira’s countless victims pass through her alley on their way to the afterlife, too traumatized by their violent deaths to speak. She has been alone in her pain, forced to relive her own death by seeing others who have gone through the same thing, over and over. Now here stands Kira himself, who has experienced a death so violent and traumatic that he doesn’t even remember it. To add insult to injury, he doesn’t even remember murdering her.

She is not here to comfort him, though. She is no longer the peaceful psychopomp, here to usher him into the afterlife. Now she stands in front of him, his first victim, in all her vengeful yuurei glory. She forces him to confront what happened – as he lay bleeding in the street, mortally wounded by a blow from Jotaro’s Stand before he could leap back in time, a female EMT came to rescue him.

He told her his life story and the history of his crimes before licking her hand. The final blow was delivered not by Josuke or one of his friends, but an ambulance backing over his head. The fight between Josuke and Kira was not a personal grudge match; rather, it was about the harm he has done to the community, so it’s fitting that a community resource was what eventually killed him.

It also adds a sense of power and vindication to Reimi’s final confrontation with Kira; his death may have been ultimately accidental by an anonymous person, but she is truly the one who gets to finish him, instead of it being an epilogue, a coda to Josuke or one of his male friends delivering the final blow.The whole thing adds to a fantastically empowering conclusion; despite struggling through years of near-helplessness and victimization, she can face and confront her attacker in a position where she holds the power, wrapping his life of doing harm around and bringing it around full circle.

The layers of irony continue to be added on as Reimi’s dog Arnold, who has waited by her side in limbo, bites off Kira’s hand, and hundreds of hands appear to pull him and his Stand to pieces. Kira, who has stolen women’s hands for years and blown apart many others since he developed his Stand months ago, now faces the same fate. “Where are they going to take me?” he cries out, and Reimi, stone-faced, replies, “Who knows? But I’m sure it’s not somewhere you’ll be able to rest in peace.” Kira gets no peaceful conclusion; he doesn’t deserve it.

Reimi, however, has finally gained passage into the afterlife. Yuurei only cling to the world of living in order to see their desires satisfied; now that Kira has been stopped once and for all, Reimi can move on. As she and Arnold stand next to the Owson’s, finally able to leave their alley, the town’s odd coloration shifts toward warmer, more sunset-like tones. The town’s Stand users come out to wish her a tearful farewell, and Koichi says he feels nervous with her gone. However, her job is done; she has not just been avenged, but has avenged herself. As she ascends, Koichi tells her, “Because of you, this town has been saved.” She replies, “I believed we all saved Morioh together.”

In fiction, suburbs can be characterized as enhancing a sense of isolation, but in Diamond is Unbreakable, it was the sense of community that brought them all together and saved them. Reimi, trapped and alone, had no way to defeat Kira on her own. Instead, Kira’s defeat hinged on the community coming together and believing in a teenage girl. Instead of making the show about a few men rescuing her, the community aspect afforded her the opportunity to see Kira’s reign of terror through from beginning to end.

The show concludes with a monologue from Koichi: “Our town, Morioh, was deeply hurt. The town was hurt by the monster named Yoshikage Kira that this town itself had created.” The dark side of suburban life – insulated and coddled – created Kira, like so many other villains of suburban horror. However, the positive aspects of community and love made it possible to defeat him. Reimi, in her refusal to be a mere victim, inspired her community; in turn, her community made it possible for her to bring her own story to conclusion. Her self-determination, even in the face of victimhood, is truly inspirational and empowering.