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  ladyfreyja

  75/100
  Without the Akashic records, what will we do in this world?

  Sensor (センサー) is an horror manga made by Junji Itō, published between 2018 and 2019 in Nemuki+, a shōjo magazine focusing on horror, mystery and fantasy. Initially published under the title Muma no kikō (夢魔の紀行) in the magazine, the manga was finally titled as Sensor as a tankōbon volume, due to some changes of the plot.

  It tells the story of a cult in the mountains of Gunma prefecture, centering on the strange girl called Kyōko Byakuya.

  I generally don't like much Junji Itō's works, but I actually enjoyed that one, despite the presence of some of the author's usual pitfalls.

  Context

  ---

  Junji Itō is one of the famous horror mangaka and is arguably the most well known one outside of Japan. He started his career in 1987 with Tomie, a manga published in Halloween, a shōjo magazine specialized in horror manga. He mostly contributed to Halloween, and then its spin-off, Nemuki(+), after the former being discontinued.

  Fan of both Kazuo Umezz and Shin'ichi Koga, he creates kyōfu manga, a type of horror pioneered by Umezz and portraying the ugliness of human psyche, featuring things like psychological horror and urban legends rather than ghosts, yōkai and such. In addition to that, and this is important for Sensor, Itō is also fan of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his cosmic horror novels.

  

  His works are often centered on the figure of the Yamato Yadeshiko, the "personification of an idealized Japanese woman" for quoting Wikipedia. They are often set in a rural environment and his visual style is famous for featuring twisted human bodies, an element nearly lacking in Sensor.

  In that regard, Sensor is a very canonical Junji Itō's manga: a kyōfu/cosmic horror story, set in the rural Gunma, and with a beautiful young woman as the protagonist.

  Now, like I said in the introduction, the manga changed its name due to some digression of the plot; from what the author explains in the postface of the book, he initially planed to do a work similar to the famous Kazuo Umezz' Orochi, an episodic series where a mysterious girl with some supernatural powers travels all around Japan, witnessing numerous occult phenomenons. But during the first chapter, Kyōko Byakuya's character "became alive on her own" and from that point onward, the story deviated into an obscure cult's plot.

  

  The manga

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  As noted above, I don't really like the few Junji Itō's works that I tried so far: be it Tomie, Uzumaki or Jigokusei Remina, they are, for my taste, far too absurd, stupid and incoherent for me to be taken seriously, and thus they fail in their main purpose: to makes me feel at least somewhat uneasy. Sōichi no noroi nikki, being about shamanic urban legends, was the only welcomed exception.

  

  Ironically, Sensor also mostly failed as an horror manga in my eyes, but for once, I got into the plot quite well and enjoyed it thoroughly:

  Wataru Tsuchiyado is a freelance journalist investigating Kyōko Byakuya, a young woman who survived a volcanic eruption, which destroyed a remote village full of cultists of some weird Christian tradition from the Edo period. This was 60 years ago and Byakuya is still young and beautiful, but is also tracked down by a an anthroposophic cult. This cult pretends to search the access to the Akashic records and its members are creeps who will terrorize the Tōkyō's population.

  This is the good part of the manga, it's full of esoteric and urban legends, with the elements interlocking neatly into each other little by little. I particularly enjoyed the character of Beniko Yamaoka, one of those creepy cultists and the only source of some slight unease for me.
  Fortunately, this is the main part of the manga, and thank to it, the manga as a whole is enjoyable.

  

  But this manga also contains cosmic horror elements: be it the weird Christian cult, the anthroposophic cult, and the strange condition of Kyōko Byakuya, they all originate from some cosmic entities across the stars.
  The influence of Lovecraft is quite obvious here: Lovecraft is one of my reading pillars during my teenage, I greatly enjoy his manga adaptations by Gō Tanabe, but sadly with Sensor, I can't buy it.

  If I try to understand why, I think it would be because everything is so worldly, and the cosmic entities are not menacing in any way nor they are really mysterious.

  Lastly, as Itō is famous for his gore and twisted human bodies, there is only one scene like that in the whole manga. As I have next to no interest for them, it is fine by me, but it might be a letdown to some people.

  Conclusion

  ---

  This short manga (~240 pages) is in my eyes a nice delving into the occult world, with for once, a story that more or less makes sense and is intriguing. But its cosmic horror part flatly fails. Thus, even if the manga is in theory an horror story, for me, it is more a creepy mystery one, and works well like that.

  For people who don't enjoy the absurdity of most Itō's works (like me), you might try this one, maybe.

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