Yuki Tsukumo in Jujutsu Kaisen: The Special Grade Who Refused to Play Along

Yuki Tsukumo (九十九由基) is one of only four Special Grade jujutsu sorcerers in existence — and the only one who openly refuses missions from Jujutsu High. Yuki is not lazy. Yuki disagrees with the entire system. While Jujutsu High spends its resources fighting curses one at a time, Yuki is researching how to eliminate curses from the world entirely.

Character Profile

Who Is Yuki Tsukumo?

Yuki Tsukumo is a Special Grade sorcerer who walked away from Jujutsu High’s institutional structure and spent her career searching for a permanent solution to cursed spirits — not a temporary one.

Jujutsu High’s approach is reactive. Sorcerers exorcise curses. New curses emerge from human negativity. The cycle repeats. Yuki finds this pointless.

Her research focuses on two possible paths to breaking that cycle — neither of which involves killing non-sorcerers, a distinction she makes explicitly when she meets Suguru Geto in 2007. That conversation inadvertently plants a third option in Geto’s mind: eliminating non-sorcerers entirely. Yuki does not endorse it. But the damage is done.

She was also a former Star Plasma Vessel candidate for Master Tengen — an experience that likely shaped her distrust of jujutsu society’s institutions.

What Does Yuki Tsukumo Look Like?

What Is Yuki’s Personality?

Yuki is confident, unconventional, and completely unbothered by what Jujutsu High thinks of her — a sorcerer who operates on her own terms without apology.

She finds out during the Gojo’s Past Arc that her reputation among Jujutsu High sorcerers is “lazy foreigner who bums around overseas.” She laughs it off immediately.

Yuki is warm with people she chooses to invest in. She finds a young Aoi Todo getting into fights and decides on the spot to train him. That training is brutal enough to scar Todo for life — and also produces one of the strongest Grade 1 sorcerers of his generation. The “what’s your type in women” question that defines Todo’s personality? He picked that up directly from Yuki.

What Are Yuki Tsukumo’s Abilities?

Yuki Tsukumo’s innate technique is Star Rage — the ability to add virtual mass to herself and her shikigami Garuda, amplifying the destructive force of every strike without adding any actual weight to her body.

Star Rage

The core mechanic is simple: Yuki assigns imaginary mass to herself or Garuda. The force of her attacks scales with that assigned mass. Her body does not become heavier or slower — the mass only applies outward, to the impact of her strikes.

The result is hits that punch far above what her physical frame should produce. A single Star Rage-enhanced strike breaks Kenjaku’s bones and punches a hole in a barrier strong enough to contain Tengen.

The technique has limits. Serious injury reduces her ability to build momentum, which weakens strike output. Depleting her cursed energy through Domain Expansion or Reverse Cursed Technique also reduces Star Rage’s potency.

At its absolute ceiling — an amount of mass so extreme it overcomes Yuki’s own immunity to it — the technique generates a black hole. Using it at that level kills her.

Garuda

Yuki’s shikigami takes a serpentine form. Garuda can be assigned virtual mass through Star Rage, turning it into a cursed tool. Yuki uses Garuda as a projectile — rolling it into a ball and launching it — as a whip, or as a coordinated attack partner in close combat.

Reverse Cursed Technique

Yuki can heal herself mid-fight, recovering from near-fatal injuries quickly enough to re-enter combat before an opponent can press the advantage. She uses this during the fight with Kenjaku after his Domain Expansion seriously wounds her.

Domain Expansion

Yuki possesses a Domain Expansion. Its name and specific effect are never revealed in the manga — she opts not to use it against Kenjaku, calculating that their abilities are unfavourably matched for a domain exchange.

Barrier Techniques

Yuki can use Simple Domain as an anti-domain measure. She passed knowledge of this technique to Aoi Todo during his training.

What Happens to Yuki in the Story?

Yuki appears across three arcs — a brief but pivotal conversation with Geto, a late entry into the Shibuya Incident, and a full fight against Kenjaku in the Culling Game that ends with her death.

Gojo’s Past Arc — Chapter 44

Yuki visits Jujutsu High in 2007, ostensibly to meet Gojo. She finds Geto instead and the two have a conversation about eliminating curses at the root. Yuki outlines her two approaches. Geto derives a third. This single exchange contributes to Geto’s eventual ideological collapse — one of the most consequential off-panel conversations in the entire manga.

Shibuya Incident Arc

Yuki arrives at the tail end of the Shibuya chaos and immediately removes Uraume from the equation — blocking Icefall, a technique that had just overpowered a group of sorcerers, with Garuda alone. She stabilises the situation and helps keep key characters alive heading into the Culling Game.

Read the Shibuya sequence starting at Chapter 91.

Culling Game Arc — Chapters 205 onwards

Yuki and Choso guard Master Tengen while the main group enters the colonies. When Kenjaku reaches Tengen, Yuki takes over from an overwhelmed Choso and engages directly.

The fight is one of the manga’s most technically interesting exchanges. Both combatants are reading each other’s techniques in real time — Yuki theorises Kenjaku has a hidden gravity technique, Kenjaku suspects Yuki has a catastrophic trump card. Both are right.

Kenjaku activates his Domain Expansion. Yuki and Tengen attempt a coordinated counter. The calculation is off. Yuki takes severe damage.

She continues fighting. She heals with Reverse Cursed Technique. She drives Kenjaku into a corner with Choso’s help. Kenjaku finds an opening and delivers a fatal blow.

Yuki’s final act is to activate Star Rage at maximum output — generating a black hole aimed at Kenjaku. The attack fails to kill him. Yuki dies.

Read her final fight across Chapter 205 through Chapter 211.

What Does Yuki Represent in the Story?

Yuki is the manga’s argument that the jujutsu system is broken at a structural level — and that the people who see it most clearly are the ones the system marginalises.

Jujutsu High considers Yuki a non-contributor. She takes no missions. She produces no measurable output. By the institution’s own metrics, she is useless.

In practice, Yuki trains one of the strongest sorcerers of the current generation, prevents a catastrophe at Shibuya almost single-handedly, and dies trying to eliminate the person responsible for the Culling Game. The system’s way of measuring value has nothing to do with actual value.

Her conversation with Geto also makes her one of the most quietly consequential characters in the manga. She does not cause Geto’s fall. But she hands him the vocabulary for it.

For more on how cursed energy works in Jujutsu Kaisen and what Yuki’s research was actually targeting, that page covers the foundational mechanics. Explore the full Jujutsu Kaisen character roster and see how Yuki connects to the broader cast.

Read the chapters featuring Yuki’s fight against Kenjaku at Jujutsu kaisen manga Pro.