Esper

9Nine — reckoning. That is the reduction of this term, and the shelf it is read from.

What it means

"Esper", from ESP, extrasensory perception, is the term used in Japanese fiction for a person with psychic powers: telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation, precognition or more. The Japanese word is chōnōryokusha, "person with supernatural ability".

In manga

Espers are everywhere in manga. Katsuhiro Otomo's Domu and Akira show psychic children whose power destroys buildings and cities. Mob Psycho 100 follows a boy with enormous psychic power who wants to be ordinary. In Kimagure Orange Road, a family's secret psychic powers drive a romantic comedy.

The appeal

Psychic power can be drawn without costumes or weapons: a look, a gesture and a building crumbles. It also lends itself to stories about adolescence, where a young person's feelings, power and loss of control become the same thing.

Why it matters

The esper is one of manga's most flexible figures, appearing in horror, comedy, romance and action. The psychic boom of 1970s Japan helped popularise it, and it remains a staple of the medium.

The term by its numbers

Esper27total27 → 9

Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 27, which folds down to 9.

What the 9 brings is reckoning. The reference files it as a completion. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 9's sense of a cycle closing and something being released.

The vowels alone reduce to 1, the consonants to 8. Initiative underneath, power on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.

The 9 asks you to work out what survived the ending. The 9 sentimentalises. An ending is not automatically a meaning, and the reference tries not to pretend otherwise. The other entries that reduce to 9 are collected on The Closing.