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Solitary Gourmet's Masayuki Kusumi Launches New Gourmet Manga With Ryō Amei

This year's 19th issue of Square Enix's Young Gangan magazine revealed last Friday that Masayuki Kusumi and Ryō Amei will launch a new manga titled Lunch Banchō Hitomi in the magazine's 21st issue on October 17. The manga centers on the Hitomi Shinōsaka, the so-called "Lunch Banchō" who lets his instinctual "lunch antenna" guide him to good and sweet smelling restaurants for lunch.

Kusumi has authored multiple manga about gourmet cooking and food, but perhaps his best known work is Solitary Gourmet (Kodoku no Gourmet), which he wrote alongside late manga artist Jiro Taniguchi. The pair first serialized the manga from 1994 to 1996 in Fusosha's Monthly Panja magazine (now defunct). Kusumi and Fusosha published the manga's second volume in September 2015. The manga has inspired nine live-action television series as well as several TV specials starring Yutaka Matsushige. A live-action film opened in Japan on January 10.

The manga also inspired a net anime that debuted on Production I.G's "Tate Anime" (Vertical Anime) smartphone app in November 2017.

Fanfare and Ponent Mon plan to release the manga in English. The company had said the manga will "most likely" debut in spring 2021, but the series is now listed on Amazon U.S. as debuting on October 28. Turnaround Publisher Services in the U.K. released the manga on July 17.

Sources: Young Gangan issue 19, Ryō Amei's X/Twitter account