a tomboy, and considers herself rather plain. She and Towa complement each other. Where she sees him as fully a man, he sees her as fully a woman. Atsuro is one of Λucifer's two guitarists. As the band's friendliest and most cheerful member, he serves as the comic relief. Atsuro's long-time girlfriend, Yuuka, is actually his stepsister, and he desperately tries to keep their relationship a secret from their parents, the media, and even his bandmates. Their biggest obstacle is that they are registered as siblings, and so face the possibility that they cannot marry. Shinjo never fully explains the legal complications, even in the one-shot in which Atsuro and Yuuka get married in the United States without their parents' blessing. Aine is the first person to find out about Atsuro and Yuuka. She tells Atsuro she will keep their secret, even though the paparazzi see him with Aine and mistakenly report that Atsuro is having an affair with Sakuya's girlfriend. This causes Sakuya and Atsuro to fight, until Yuuka announces to the band that she is in love with Atsuro. The band members, except Sakuya, reveal that they had suspected this all along. By the end, Atsuro and Yuuka make a conscious decision to be together even if their parents object, and to be open about their relationship to the public. Production In her blog, Shinjo noted that though she was the actual creator of Sensual Phrase, she was one of the last to know that the series would be adapted into an anime, and that by the time she knew, Shogakukan had already made the decision to do the series. She was also unaware that there were talks about a film adaptation of the series until two years after the proposal was rejected. When the anime was rerun on AT-X, she learnt of this through the channel's official website. She left Shogakukan in 2007, despite the company's threat to take all of her earlier series, including Sensual Phrase, out of print if she did so. Shinjo contacted a lawyer, and the threat was never carried out. Media Manga Written and illustrated by Mayu Shinjo, Sensual Phrase premiered in Shōjo Comic in 1997, where it was serialized monthly until its conclusion in 2000. The individual chapters were collected and published in 17 tankōbon volumes by Shogakukan from June 1997 through January 2001. An additional volume was released on April