Toshiaki Iwashiro, the creator of PSYREN, discussed where the series came from, how much of the ending he had planned and why he nearly wrote one character out, in an interview published by MANTANWEB on October 18, 2026. It appeared while the TV anime adaptation airs on TOKYO MX and other stations.
The manga ran in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump from 2008 to 2010. According to MANTANWEB, it has been nominated three times in AnimeJapan's voting project ranking manga that readers want to see animated, and it remains popular some 16 years after it ended. The anime's official site gives the broadcast start as October 5, 2026 at 23:00 JST on TOKYO MX, with other stations following; the official English site lists Crunchyroll and IVI.
Asked where the "Call Psyren" system, which uses a red telephone card and a public phone, came from, Iwashiro pointed to real phone boxes. He said he found them unsettling and strangely compelling: one stands all by itself in the middle of town, or on the roadside of an empty lot with nothing around it. If such a phone suddenly rang, he said, he felt he would sense a stranger's fierce will to reach someone, and that made him want to build a story around the idea.
He did not pin down the details of the ending in advance, but recalls settling on the broad final stretch, including the key twins, W.I.S.E and the meteorite material, before he began. On the powers, he said he asked himself what a character could do beyond producing fire, and whether they would stay physically frail, and concluded that organizing psychic abilities into three simple parameters, burst, trance and rise, was what gave them individuality.
Fights in the future world were drawn flashily, like Dragon Ball, while present-day fights centered on the give-and-take of the abilities themselves. Iwashiro said he kept the battle structure in mind so that the fights would not look like wizards simply trading spells, and so that rise remained crucial to winning.
With Ageha Yoshina, Iwashiro said he was unsure the Jump readership of the time would accept the character and was careful not to make him disliked: cheerful, never lecturing from above, staying beside people who are troubled. Readers took to him anyway, which let Iwashiro push the personality further in the second half. He also meant to write Kabuto Kirisaki out partway through, but his editor at the time stopped him outright and he changed his mind.
The weekly schedule shaped the plotting as well. Iwashiro said he realized early that squaring the time-travel logic would make a weekly serial unmanageable for him, so he decided to use the time gimmicks for entertainment and leave the contradictions alone. The hardest part, he said, was avoiding a cancellation that would have scrapped every piece of foreshadowing he had planted.