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Junji Ito’s Sensor is the most recent series from the horror manga master, and it comes packing everything an Ito fan would expect.
For English-speaking fans used to reading and re-reading Junji Ito’s greatest hits from years gone by, Sensor is a real treat. Having first released in 2019, it is the most recent of Ito’s works to make it across the Pacific. However, recent doesn’t mean different, as Sensor comes packing all the Junji Ito hallmarks: cosmic terror, haunted women, deadly cults — it’s all here. Any Ito fan will know exactly what to expect, but there’s honestly no better starting point for a reader looking to jump into the horror genre of manga.
Sensor details the travels of a reporter named Wataru Tsuchiyado as he follows the trail of Kyoko Byakuya, a mysterious, golden-haired woman with powerful clairvoyance. Byakuya is the lone survivor of a recent eruption from Mt. Sengoku — a volcano that last erupted 60 years beforehand, wiping out an entire village of psychics. It was this eruption that granted her psychic powers and golden hair, which notably resembles the volcanic glass spewed from the mountain, and made her the target of the maniacal cult leader Kagero Aido.
Aido and his followers’ pursuit of Byakuya is the main throughline of Sensor which, despite its cohesive story, somehow still manages to feel episodic — but that’s not a bad thing. Ito is at his best when he takes many different, seemingly disparate ideas and stitches them together into one horrific whole. It’s what he did to masterful effect in Uzumaki, and he does it again, albeit on a less epic scale page count-wise, here. Byakuya and Tsuchiyado’s various misadventures build up into one terrifying cosmic ordeal as Sensor‘s story progresses, but Ito’s writing style also allows the lesser horror of each event to stand on its own.
The best of these is Chapter 4, “The Battle at Bishagaura.” In it, Tsuchiyado follows Kyoko Byakuya to a village plagued by “suicide bugs,” huge, bulbous, roach-like insects that leap under walking people’s feet, as if they want to be squished. When stepped on, these bugs burst into a disgusting mess of fluid and organs that mysteriously resemble a crushed human. This story only vaguely relates to the others in Sensor, but it’s easy to see why Ito would include it — it’s awful in the best way.
Neither Byakuya nor Tsuchiyado have a particularly large role in the chapter, aside from some welcome insight into Kyoko’s remaining humanity, but the somewhat mundane, gross-out horror of it all is what makes “The Battle at Bishagaura” stand out. Cosmic terror and existential battles between light and darkness are one thing, but have you ever just been around too many gross bugs? Ito’s only trying to creep readers out with this chapter, rather than outright horrify them, and there’s no better way to do that than with a story that could feasibly happen in real life (minus the supernatural part, of course). It’s this subtle shift in intent that makes a chapter that honestly has little to do with anything, one of the most memorable in the book.
Ito lovers will already know exactly what to expect from Sensor: a lot of strange occurrences that build up into one, big, cosmic blowout. Looking at Junji Ito’s body of work, one can definitely get the sense that he truly enjoys telling stories this way, and it shows. Ito makes great use of the flexibility a slow build-up provides, all without detracting from the horror of the bigger picture. It’s something he’s been doing for a long time and the refined ease with which he does it again in Sensor is truly something to admire.
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