‘One Piece’ Reveals an Emotional Reiju, Sanji Moment

One Piece‘s Whole Cake Island arc opened up Sanji’s past and explored his tragic upbringing with his abusive family. One of the more emotional reveals is when Reiju helped her brother escape and had to tearfully bid him goodbye as kids.

The latest episode revisits this powerfully emotional moment as Reiju has to bid goodbye to her brother once more, and has to come to terms with letting him go once more.

Episode 873 of the series sees Reiju, Ichiji, Niji, and Yonji come back to Cacao Island just in time to help Sanji escape with Luffy. Each of them provided one strong attack after another, and seemed to show a begrudging respect for their brother. It’s a complete 180 from how they treated him as kids, but it’s much different from Reiju who flashes back to when she helped him escape their home.

She’s happy that Sanji has found someone he has formed a strong bond with in Luffy, and tells Sanji to never let him go. It’s here she flashes back to her tearful pleas for Sanji to escape, and her promise that he’ll meet kind people some day. She remembers telling him about their mother, and how he has a spark of humanity within him. With tears in her eyes, she pushes him away just as she did when they were kids.

Bidding Sanji goodbye, but without saying more than that, she flies back to her other brothers who are still fighting the Charlotte Family on Cacao Island. Sanji thanks her and heads toward the Sunny, but Reiju can’t help but cry as she flies through fire and ash to get back to the battle ground.

Reiju was one of the key introductions in the Whole Cake Island arc as Sanji came to grips with his Vinsmoke Family past, and she was one of the main reasons he’s been able to live the life he’s currently living. It’s a bittersweet moment between the two, for sure.

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.