A mysterious young woman with golden hair becomes the focus of a cult and a reporter. But what is her connection to the volcanic countryside she can’t seem to escape?
Despite having all the usual features of a Junji Ito book - weird horror, weirder women, body horror, and some bonkers imagery only Ito could draw - Sensor is the least interested I’ve been reading any of his work.
The story is a jumbled mess of half-baked ideas. There’s this girl who arbitrarily gets chosen by the universe or something, undergoes a transformation, gets kidnapped by a cult, there’s some suicidal giant bugs, a hypnotherapist who meets a sticky end, the cult try to see everything through adjusting all the traffic mirrors in the country, and, to top it all off, there’s a time-travel finale!
Ito’s afterword (that he says he had to write - this entire book feels like he’s just filling space/meeting his obligations, rather than doing something he really wants) is quite revealing. He mentions that he started with a rough structure and then abandoned it to basically freestyle the rest of the book. And it shows! It’s almost like he knows it’s a shambles and he’s apologising for how it turned out - “this is really the result of the bus driving away before everyone is on board.”
Junji Ito’s comics have become really popular these last few years so demand might’ve caused him to rush projects like this. His publisher needs new product - hurry hurry hurry! - so he can’t spend enough time planning his stories and so you get books like this. That said, I don’t know for sure if that’s the case, I’m just speculating, so I’m probably wrong. Maybe he approaches all of his books the same way and Sensor just didn’t come out as well as the others?
Because generally Ito’s stories branch off into strange, unexpected directions - except they’re usually more interesting than this. Kyoko Byakuya, the mysterious girl, wasn’t an interesting figure - like all the characters, she’s one-dimensional and dull - and the volcano-centric stories did nothing for me. Not these strands of lava that are dubbed “angel hairs”, or what happened to early Christians in the past, or the bizarre suicide bugs digression - none of it.
A lot of it was so absurd, it was almost like a South Park parody. The unkillable cult leader who uses meditation as if it were like NORAD’s DEFCON countdown, the insane plan to crash cars into every traffic mirror in the country, covering them with the angel hairs, to create a spy network for… reasons?? One scene involves giant brains crushing everyone that looked so silly, it was like the giant foot coming down at the end of the Monty Python opener!
Maybe Ito was going for a Lovecraftian cosmic horror-type book with Sensor, and in a way he accomplished it because this story is as boring and vaguely stupid as Lovecraft’s cosmic horror stories were. Still, of all Ito’s books I’ve read so far, Sensor is the worst one: a childishly-plotted, incoherent, forgettable and pointless story that failed to entertain or scare in the slightest.
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