Episode 108 - Psyren by Toshiaki Iwashiro

**Mat** (0:11)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Manga Tak, the weekly podcast where we read and reflect on the finest risk volumes you money can buy so you can find your next favourite manga. As always, I'm your host, Mat, and this week I'm, of course, joined by one half of the Undisputed Anime podcast, Mr. Sui Sui Day. Hello, Sui, welcome back.

**Tsutsudae** (0:28)
Happy to be here. Always a pleasure to talk about something.

**Mat** (0:31)
I thought you were going to preface that then, something I enjoyed, something I hate. But no, you're not giving the game away. Tight lipped from the off.

**Tsutsudae** (0:39)
I enjoy our conversations, whether or not they're about good things or bad things. I think that it's still a good conversation.

**Mat** (0:46)
This is fair, this is fair. No, what actually happened this week, dear listeners, was I ground up a page of Psyren, the book we were going to talk about today. I said an incantation over it and I was just like, and then Sui appeared and I was like, ah, of course I knew this would summon you.

**Tsutsudae** (1:04)
How did I know that he would have read this?

**Mat** (1:06)
Well, let's be honest, Psyren is a book from the mid 2000s, I would say. It has themes of post apocalypse, like end of the world death gamey stuff. It's got some vibes to it. And I just had a feeling that this would scratch some itches for you, let's just say.

**Tsutsudae** (1:27)
And boy does it.

**Mat** (1:28)
See, dear listener, I've not talked about this other than going, hey, do you want to do Psyren? And you going, yes. And I was just like, I know, I understand.

**Tsutsudae** (1:36)
Like, I think that message came through when I was on holiday and I was like, absolutely, immediately looking for a place to reread the first volume.

**Mat** (1:44)
Fair, this is fair. I'm glad that I can facilitate your needs to Psyren. So how did you find out about this book then? Have you literally been reading this from day one?

**Tsutsudae** (1:54)
Like with a lot of things that I have read over the years, it's been a matter of I have just stumbled upon it.

**Mat** (2:01)
Right.

**Tsutsudae** (2:01)
Because as we've talked about on the show before, we're from the era where you couldn't just easily walk into your local bookstore and they would have shelves upon shelves upon shelves of titles for you to try. Like there would be a small shelf, that's what you get.

**Mat** (2:16)
Yeah.

**Tsutsudae** (2:16)
And on one occasion, I think it might have been the volume two was there.

**Mat** (2:20)
Oh.

**Tsutsudae** (2:21)
And I kind of like had a flick through for, oh, this might be interesting. And then eventually a volume one did become available. I would be completely honest, I only bought volume one and I'm not sure what happened. I think I lent it to someone, never got it back. Can't remember. Yeah. But fortunately, I had a friend who did have them and I was able to read most of the series via them.

**Mat** (2:40)
Okay, fair enough. I think for me, this is an interesting one because it kind of falls into my Manga Dark Ages. This is a time where when Siren came out in English in 2011, A, I was transitioning to moving to Denmark, which admittedly put a lot of my reading and comic book activities on hold for a little while. But when I moved here, I got really into American comics again. And so I was reading a lot of Marvel and DC around this time. And so other than things like Bleach and Naruto, which I'm sure we'll talk about in this conversation anyways, I wasn't really reading a lot of Manga. And then when those series finished, I kind of petered off it entirely for a couple of years. And so Psyren is a book that honestly I hadn't really heard about until I started getting back into Manga and started actively being on Reddit and seeing people not only post pictures of this and then everyone applauding them for having a full set of Psyren, but also just seeing it on lists of top five Manga that never got an anime that should have. And admittedly, some of those on there, ironically, like Black Torch, are now getting those anime.
But given the fact that this book ran for 16 volumes, and I think every single other Shonen Jump title that was running concurrent to this, at least when this first appeared in the magazine that I was looking down, has an anime, it seems like a bit of a glaring blind spot for it to not have one. So I understand.