Jujutsu Kaisen: Does Kenjaku Care About Yuji? Their Relationship Explained!

The relationship between Yuji Itadori and Kenjaku is very specific and undoubtedly one of the most intriguing ones portrayed in Jujutsu Kaisen, based on the facts we know. The two of them turned out to be related when it was revealed that Kenjaku was Itadori’s mother when she gave birth to him, which made this relationship quite intriguing. Kenjaku has, in the meantime, seemingly been killed, but this doesn’t make the topic of this article any less interesting. As we’ve said, his relationship with his “son” is still interesting, so we will tell you what kind of relationship they had.

Are Kenjaku and Yuji Itadori related?

Remember the fight between Choso and Yuji in Shibuya? The two of them had a very vehement fight, but Choso was able to win, and he got the chance to avenge his brothers by killing Yuji. But, just as he was about to do it, Choso had a vision and stopped, sparing Yuji and leaving the scene. The vision he had heavily suggested that he and Yuji were brothers, but how was that possible? Was he even right? He was! And we are now going to see how!

We are aware that Choso and his brothers were born as a result of the deranged experiments conducted on their mother by Noritoshi Kamo. This was more like torture than anything else, yet Choso and his siblings were the product of these horrible experiments over 150 years ago. In contrast, Yuji Itadori was born fifteen years ago to Jin and Kaori Itadori. What sense does that make then? This is where the situation gets tricky.

Specifically, it turns out that Choso’s father, Noritoshi Kamo, and Yuji’s mother, Kaori Itadori, are the same person. In particular, they were both Kenjaku. More specifically, Kenjaku can implant his brain into any corpse to take control of it. He fully assumes all of that person’s skills and memories when he accomplishes them. He can impersonate them perfectly because he can hide his true identity when he’s within a body. Since Kenjaku was once both Noritoshi Kamo and Kaori Itadori and helped both of them give birth at different times despite their different ages, we can confirm that Choso is Yuji Itadori’s half-brother and that Kenjaku is, thus, Yuji’s parent, which explains how they are related.

Did Kenjaku ever care for Yuji?

Now, this is a very interesting aspect here, as we have to consider several factors when providing you with an answer to this question. First of all, Kenjaku was initially present in Yuji’s life as his mother, Kaori. To be fair, we don’t know too many details about Yuji’s life as a child – we know he was close to his grandfather, but we’ve only seen glimpses of his childhood and his parents – but it doesn’t seem like Kaori was a bad mother to him. We know that Jin, his father, was very loving, but we don’t have too many details about Kaori, although it can be assumed that Kenjaku played the part well.

Does that mean that he loved Itadori at the time? Hardly. We don’t know if Kaori was able to fight off Kenjaku’s control during Yuji’s childhood, but it would be most strange to find out that Kaori’s motherly instincts were transferred to Kenjaku at the time, so we doubt that Kenjaku had any genuine feelings for Yuji at the time; he probably played the part well, just as he played the part of Geto well, but there was nothing genuine there. This is our conclusion based on the fact that Kenjaku already had children while he was Noritoshi Kamo, and he did not care about them at all, despite the fact that they were far more powerful than Yuji was when he was born.

And this covers the initial factors that we have to consider. But, at one point, Kenjaku left Kaori Itadori and took over Geto’s body, which is when his relationship with Yuji becomes interesting. Namely, even in Geto’s body, Kenjaku knew that Yuji was his son, but he did not seem to care too much about the boy. When the Shibuya Incident took place, Yuji was not his primary target – in fact, he cared more about Sukuna and was willing to sacrifice Yuji to awaken Sukuna in case his plan with Gojo failed.

Interestingly enough, Kenjaku was the second main villain in the series, but he did not care too much about Yuji. He did not care about Yuta either, as his only goal was to incapacitate Gojo; even Sukuna was not that important to him and was only a backup plan in case he failed to seal Gojo away in the Prison Realm. So no, we wouldn’t really say that Kenjaku cared for Yuji, ever, at any point in the story.

This is quite interesting since both of them are exceptionally important characters in the series, but seeing what Akutami is doing with the story in the current chapters, we can freely conclude that consistency is not a major factor for him, so it doesn’t surprise us that one of the main villains chose to ignore the protagonist of the series. And that is their relationship in a nutshell.

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