By Ting Lian
NOTE: This article contains spoilers for both Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 and Jujutsu Kaisen 0. This is written from my own interpretation and musical analysis and may not agree exactly with other sources.
A note on major and minor: Major keys (root–major third–perfect fifth) sound bright, stable, and resolved—the sound of safety or triumph. Minor keys lower the third, producing a darker, unstable sonority heard as tense or sorrowful.
A note on dissonance: Dissonance describes clashing intervals—seconds, sevenths, tritones—that create friction the ear wants resolved. In scoring, it signals threat or psychological rupture.
A note on atonality: Where dissonance still implies a key, atonality abandons a tonal center altogether—no home note, no expected resolution. The ear, denied any anchor, hears the music as unmoored and uncomfortable.
Throughout visual storytelling, music does not merely accompany the story, it architects it in sound. From the very first track, the soundtrack operates as a kind of forensic evidence of a friendship’s collapse, encoding in tempo, key, and motif exact point character and plot relations changes. Japanese composer Yoshimasa Terui’s score for the anime Jujutsu Kaisen exemplifies this practice particularly in the first part of the second season, Hidden Inventory. Terui’s score functions as a second narrative script: through its manipulation of key, tempo, leitmotif, and musical parallels to deliberately extrapolate the tragedy of Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto in sound before the image.
The anime begins not with triumphant fanfare, but with a fragment of the encompassing fate. At a fleeting 89 seconds, the title track “Hidden Inventory” is an incomplete overture. The jazz-tinged cinematic track in G minor is anchored by a mechanical 117 Beats Per Minute (BPM, establishes rhythm and meter) pulse that mimics a ticking clock, ultimately casting a shadow of inevitable doom over the very concept of their ephemeral youth. This track establishes the tone for the initial episodes of the arc, where Gojo and Geto are assigned to escort the Star Plasma Vessel, Riko Amanai. At this stage, they are arrogant teenagers who treat a high-stakes mission with casual filippancy. However the brevity and tragic key of the track betray the characters: the “inventory” of their joyful youth and power is already running out as the track ends with no musical resolution.
This is also where Terui introduces the foundational leitmotifs of the series. Gojo’s motif is built on repetition—a cyclical, unyielding structure that reflects his status as the untouchable “strongest”. Geto’s motif, by contrast, is built on a swing—a pendulum-like, rhythmic instability that reflects his empathetic, evolving nature. He is the one who questions, who feels, and who will ultimately defect from the order. These two motifs lock in a tight professional sync—an invincible binary.
The first crack in the facade arrives with the now iconic “Delirous.” This iconic score shifts to C minor—a dark, oppressive key—and accelerates to a manic 144 BPM, stripping away melodic warmth in favor of aggressive dissonance. Terui engineered “Delirious” as a sonic assault to mirror the shock of Gojo’s first defeat, using a “compulsory” four-on-the-floor kick drum to force an inescapable sense of tension and propulsion into the battle. To create the feeling of being overwhelmed, Terui layered the dotted note rhythms beneath the main beat to form a polyrhythm, making the track’s mid tempo feel disorientingly fast, like 180 BPM. The track’s iconic “beeping” glitch sound was not for viral apparel, but a deliberate choice to represent Toji Fushiguro’s “otherness” , a man who exists outside the rules. Gojo’s leitmotif—his repetition—is violently disrupted. The binary is broken, and the music spirals into chaos, leaving the listener disoriented, mirroring Gojo’s own near-death “delirium.”
“The Taste of a Cursed Spirit” follows after Amanai’s death and forces the listener into Geto’s descent into cynicism. The style abandons melody entirely for atonal, textual horror. Harsh, distorted timbres, and a consistent buzz are designed to make the listener physically uncomfortable. The pulse returns to 117 BPM, the exact same tempo as the opening track. Geto’s motif, now stripped of its swing, is trapped in a temporal cycle, mutating into something grotesque, the literal sensory cost of his salvation.
“Arrogance” is the accompanying soundtrack of the narrative climax notably known by fans as “KFC Breakup Scene” where Gojo confronts Geto, who massacred a village and defected from the order. Both visually and musically, the scene is disarmingly bright and lively. It is daytime, the sun is shining, and ordinary people go about their business in Shinjuku. Geto is not weeping; he smiles calmly, he is liberated. He has finally found an absolute answer: the eradication of the “weak.”
The title “Arrogance” derives from Geto’s response to a raging Gojo who “criticizes” him for defecting; “How arrogant,” Geto says. Crucially, the track is an obvious statement of Gojo’s leitmotif, featuring the energetic, jazz-infused piano arrangements that define his overwhelming power. Ironically, “Arrogance” may actually refer to Geto’s own arrogance—the confidence that he alone has the right to decide who lives and who dies. But it is also Gojo’s motif, because Geto believes Gojo, being the strongest, “could do it”—create a world without non-sorcerers. However, Gojo is “arrogant” in face of the falsity of a “just” ideal of protecting the weak even if it comes at the cost of themselves. The harmonic instability—built on borrowed chords like Dm7, introducing a tension beneath the bright surface—describes the fundamental wrongness of the moment.
In a masterstroke of tragic irony, the most beautiful and romantic track on the album plays during the arc’s most violent sequence of Gojo’s second battle with Toji. Positioned at the soundtrack’s midpoint, “If I Am With You” really is the warm, beating heart of the arc. Musically, it is a lush, sweeping piano romance built on a radiant C major foundation—a bright, open key that stands in stark contrast to the G minor opening. The swaying tempo of 81 BPM can be best understood as a half-time feel. This gives the track the vulnerability of a lullaby; meanwhile the dynamic range of a staggering 27.9 dB allows the music to swell from intimate whispers to expansive declarations (Dynamic range in music is the difference in decibels (dB) between the quietest and loudest parts to evoke contrast and emotion).
Having awakened to Reverse Cursed Technique, Gojo returns not as a member of a duo, but as a singular, terrifying god. As he floats in the air, blood streaming down his face, declaring “Throughout heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one,” the music swells with the warm, romantic C major.
The music is not scoring the violence that surrounds it. It is about Gojo’s memory and his realization. The track is deliberately played prior to the fight during the Okinawa montage, when Amanai was still alive ; this parallel evokes the sun, the water, and the fleeting days when Gojo and Geto could simply be teenagers. The title promises eternity together, but it is ultimately conditional: If I Am With You—Gojo is utterly alone in his transcendence. The C major warmth no longer represents their shared present; it represents a past that the characters are leaving behind. In the beginning, Gojo and Geto’s leitmotifs are not just in sync but harmonizing in their euphoria. However the track ends with no musical resolution, leaving the listener incompleted. It creates a space of profound intimacy only to shatter it. Towards the very end of “If I Am With You,” Geto’s swinging motif is entirely absent. Gojo’s repetition has returned, but it has changed into an absolute untouchable loop. He has achieved “Limitless,” but in doing so, he has become isolated from the very person the song is about, effectively ending the song in unfinished isolation.
Immediately following Toji’s death, the soundtrack cuts to “Premature”. With Geto, months after his defection, standing as a cult leader—a leader that seeks to eliminate all non-sorcerers (or “monkeys,” as directly referred to by Geto) in favor of an utopic world without curses. “Premature” contains no melody, no harmony, and no instrumental—-all the things that make music “human”—leaving only the bare mechanical sound of hands striking together. The dynamic swell from -45.3dB RMS to a massive -21.dB RMS is not an orchestral crescendo; it is the sound of Geto’s audience applauding, growing louder and more suffocating. The title “Premature” traces back to Amanai’s early death, the catalyst for Geto’s defection and ultimately Jujutsu Kaisen’s main story. “Premature” is empty; like Amanai’s hollow death and Gojo and Geto’s isolation and state of incompleteness.
Hidden Inventory sets in motion the rest of Jujutsu Kaisen’s main plot and most directly the story of Jujutsu Kaisen 0, where Geto’s fall sets his role as the antagonist and his defeat at Yuta’s hands and subsequent execution by Gojo closes the loop on their fractured connection. The film’s director confirms that Jujutsu Kaisen 0 can be interpreted as the story of Gojo and Geto, with Yuta and Rika serving as a parallel in which “love” becomes a curse. The final track of Jujutsu Kaisen 0 “This Is Pure Love,” also scored by Terui, plays not over Yuta’s victory, but over Gojo’s final scene with Geto. Whereas Hidden Inventory ends in unresolved G minor, “This is Pure Love” is thus the aftermath: the acknowledgment that the bond was always the curse, and that Gojo’s final act is not resolution but a final execution for the only person that ever truly understood him.
The Hidden Inventory score is, in the end, a study in irresolution. It opens in G minor without resolving, breaks its own leitmotifs at the moment of violence, and closes its most beautiful track “If I Am With You” on a C major warmth that belongs to a past already gone. Terui does not score what happens, but what is lost. By the time Gojo declares himself “the honored one,” the harmony has already told us the truth—that power, in this story, is indistinguishable from isolation. The arc’s final silence is not an ending but a resolution the music refuses to give, because the characters never received one either.