Every version of Reiji Kirihara’s backstory in Black Torch starts the same way: his father is dead, his family name is ruined, and his older brother died alongside him. Only one of those things turns out to be true.
Shinji Kirihara didn’t die. He’s alive, he’s dangerous, and he’s the reason Reiji joined the Bureau of Espionage in the first place.
The Kirihara family built its reputation on swordsmanship, and Shinji was raised to inherit all of it. As the elder twin, he stood to become head of the clan by completing the Blade Ceremony, a succession ritual that required him to enter a cave holding the cursed sword Yamakaze and wield it without being consumed by its influence.
He failed. Yamakaze took hold of him instead, and Shinji beheaded his own father during the ceremony, slaughtering several others in the process. Reiji watched it happen. Shinji spared him, but only because he judged his twin too weak to be worth killing at the time.
The Sword That Rewrote Shinji
Yamakaze is the entire explanation for who Shinji becomes after the ceremony. Before the sword, he had black hair like Reiji and, by most accounts, a normal relationship with his brother. After it, his hair turned white, and his personality started swinging wildly between cheerful, furious, and murderous within the same conversation.
That instability is the point. Yamakaze doesn’t just grant power, but also erodes the person wielding it, and Shinji’s mood swings are the visible proof that something else is steering him now. He still fights with real skill and real intent, but the boy Reiji grew up with is buried underneath a mononoke’s influence.
Before walking away from the ceremony’s wreckage, Shinji gave Reiji a directive rather than a goodbye. He told his twin to get strong enough to kill him, then left him alive specifically so that day could eventually come.
Related: Black Torch: Who Is Fuyo and Why Does This Mononoke Want to Help Jiro’s Team?
What Shinji’s Return Means for Reiji
The Bureau of Espionage never knew the real story. Most of the organization believes the Kirihara family fell to an ordinary mononoke attack, leaving Reiji to carry his family’s disgrace without being able to correct the record. That secrecy is also what pushes him into Division 2, a corner of the Bureau where nobody digs into his past.
It’s also why Reiji reacts so badly to Jiro Azuma fusing with the mononoke Rago. Watching a teammate willingly bond with the same kind of entity that destroyed his family isn’t an abstract discomfort for him, it’s a direct echo of what Yamakaze did to Shinji.
Shinji resurfaces during a training exercise built around a mononoke named Fuyo, who forces each Black Torch member to confront a personal trial. Reiji’s trial is his brother, and the fight leaves him badly wounded and forced to reckon with exactly how far behind Shinji he still is.
Reiji has spent years pretending he’s fine while quietly falling apart over what happened in that cave. New episodes of Black Torch are streaming weekly on Crunchyroll, and the gap between Reiji’s strength and his brother’s promise isn’t going to stay hidden much longer.