Sensor

Product Information

I would be remiss to not bring up your recent win at the Eisner Awards for Best Writer/Artist. It’s quite monumental because the award has never been given to a mangaka, and in the western comics industry the Eisners are a huge deal. Do you read many North American or European comics? Hazra, Adriana (November 29, 2021). "Daruchan, Ship of Theseus, 4 More Manga Nominated for Best Comic at Angoulême 2022". Anime News Network . Retrieved December 22, 2021.

Speelman, Tom (August 17, 2021). "Junji Ito does Lovecraft better than Lovecraft in Sensor". Polygon . Retrieved December 22, 2021. As with many of Itō’s books, Sensor has an episodic narrative. The previous book, Remina, had a much stronger narrative throughline, and one could argue that Sensor would have benefited from that. Itō himself admits that he had originally intended to write a travelogue of sorts, at first with Kyoko as the protagonist, but later changing his mind. Travelogue of the Succubus, as it was originally titled, refused to be contained by his “rough structure”. As such, chapters like ‘Angel Hair’, ‘Battle at Bishagaura’ and ‘Traffic Mirror’ could easily survive as standalones, with ‘Battle…’ being arguably the strongest chapter in the book. In this sense, the book’s structure falters. While the imagery and story remain compelling, the middle chapters struggle to justify their existence in the overarching narrative. However, they are not unwelcome additions to Kyoko’s story, and the book’s denouement lands powerfully despite them. Heroic Bystander: Wataro at first runs after Kyoko to interview her for a news story. When a cult kidnaps them both and ties her to a cross, however, Wataro seeks the first opportunity to untie her and pull her out from the church as it starts burning. He spends the rest of the story seeking her out, convinced she's in some kind of horrible danger. Interrupted Suicide: Invoked. The teahouse owners and staff keep an eye on people in the town with the suicide bugs, noting any that stand over the cliff. If someone is there too long, they take them to the inn and treat them to tea. I had to write a thousand words for this afterword, so I went on and on there about things that didn't really need to be said."

Reviews

Bandaged Face: Kagero Aido is the lone survivor of his cult, but has been disfigured by the Akashic records crushing him, and wears bandages over his face when he's seen again. Junji Ito is probably the most prolific creator of horror comics in the world. Sure, he took a few years off Horror during the mid-2000s to create some funny autobiographical cat manga, but once his cat passed on, he returned to the genre that made his name and has been even more prolific than ever. Sensor is his longest story for a while, a serialized story that features divergence from the main plot to allow for more weirdness in the tangents—themes of Gnosticism and Lovecraftian cosmic horror loom larger than ever. To Ito, the universe is filled with malevolent forces out to get us, and there are more than enough people who want to help them. Ito's slightly retrograde gender politics are at play here: the woman becomes a kind of cosmic Madonna symbolizing feminine mercy in contrast to another woman who stalks the reporter as a symbol of Ito's – and Japanese men's – fear of aggressive female sexuality. It's also the first Junji Ito work I've read, where the ending has a tiny spark of hope in it, which was nice, actually.

In his afterword, Ito talked of how the characters frequently refused to behave how he wanted them to and followed their own paths, which resulted in a sprawling, unpredictable story full of turns even he didn't expect. He just had to put them on paper. He credits his editor with helping him wrestle the story into something that held together and reached a logical, satisfying ending. This highlights the importance of manga editors in helping creators shape their stories into something readable. Ito may feel Sensor is his failed attempt to find an answer to why the universe exists, but the journey is as grotesque, insane, and horrific as ever, and that's what we read him for.If that sounds like a lot of groundwork for a single story to cover (and one less than 10 chapters at that), it is. And some of the threads don’t always pay off — the ultimate human villain of the story is more plot point than fleshed-out character — but this is still Ito making his trademark big swings and mostly hitting it out of the park. In terms of what’s published in the United States, you’re one of the more prolific manga creators out there. These days your schedule is three books a year, and while some of that is reprinted material, it’s still quite a lot. When [fellow mangaka] Naoki Urasawa interviewed you for his show Manben one of the first things he noticed is that compared to many of your contemporaries you actually draw quite slowly and meticulously. Considering that approach to your craft paired with your significant publication schedule, what’s your workload like and how do you manage it?

Junji Ito: "And from there Sensor discusses suicidal bugs that carry the souls of the remorseful dead, stalkers, cults, and time-travelling Jesus in Japan. All this and more is awaiting the reader in the collected series SENSOR!"Why did you think eating a certain food would make your teacher mad at you?” Brown asked. “I didn’t eat ochazuke very often in the morning,” Ito replied, “and it just happened that the morning I did, I got in trouble with my teacher. That happened once and it turned into a jinx.” Junji Ito: "And then the senses of the hypnotist's son become engorged and grow to gigantic size because they have to be larger to take in all of the girl's truth and wisdom! So his eyeballs grow out of his head and his ear-drums spill out of his ears and his tongue gets too big for his mouth and his nervous system explodes out of his body and becomes a celestial constellation." It’s never been a better time to be Junji Ito. After a sporadic release of his work across many Western publishers in the 2000s manga bubble, the bulk of his catalogue — which, unusually for manga, largely consists of short stories and the occasional longer serial — is now readily available in fancy deluxe hardcovers from VIZ Media’s Signature imprint.