The traditional police procedural is one genre where live-action Jdrama holds it own. Hollywood could do a lot worse than license a series like Partners just for the premise and the plots.

Much of the credit goes to Ranpo Edogawa (1894–1965), a tireless promoter of the mystery novel in Japan. His pen name is a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe. Edogawa is best remembered for the Kogoro Akechi and Boy Detectives Club young adult mystery novels, published between 1936 and 1962.

His efforts are widely acknowledged today. The mystery genre is prominent not only on prime-time television and the best-seller lists, but has long been a staple of young adult manga and anime.

Kindaichi Case Files, based on characters created by mystery writer Seishi Yokomizo, has been published by Kodansha since 1992. The ongoing Case Closed (titled Detective Conan in Japanese) was launched by Shogakukan in 1994, with the accompanying anime totaling more than 1140 episodes.

The main character in Case Closed sports the nom de plume of Conan Edogawa, an additional tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle as well. There is no shortage of detectives surnamed Akechi in contemporary Japanese crime fiction.

Speaking of Conan Doyle, Great Britain and Japan share similar cultural elements that make them ideal settings for the cozy mystery. Namely, generally accepted rules of propriety and a veneer of "polite society" easily disrupted (but not deeply damaged) by an otherwise "ordinary" crime. The world need not end in every episode.

Like a returning tide, we expect the greater cultural forces at work to wash away the disruptive elements and reset the stage for next week. So we shrug off the comically high murder rates in Midsomer and Cabot Cove, and the body counts in Kindaichi Case Files and Case Closed that can exceed that of the entire country on a weekly basis.

To be sure, a gun is rarely the murder weapon. But watch out for knives, rope, stairs, and every kind of blunt object! Reality forces Japanese crime writers to get creative, and they embrace all the plausible possibilities. It follows that the geeky appeal of the CSI subgenre has made it a favorite with audiences.

The CSI guy on Partners played a supporting role for twenty-one seasons. Kasoken no Onna ("Woman of the Science Research Institute") is in its twenty-fourth season. Like Crime Scene Talks (seven seasons), the plotting is pretty much by the numbers. But the reason we follow a recipe is because it works.

Viki has a handful of localized live-action police procedurals. For now, though, your best bet for subs or dubs is anime.

Crunchyroll has a boatload of Case Closed episodes. Sticking strictly to the puzzle-solving cozy mystery formula, five of my anime favorites are Holmes of Kyoto, Hyouka, In/Spectre, Beautiful Bones, and Onihei.

Hyouka and Holmes of Kyoto are classic whodunits that closely follow the classic formula, even though the cases often don't involve any actual crimes.

I love the clever English language title for In/Spectre, a supernatural detective series. It can get overly talky, especially in the first season, but Kotoko takes us through her reasoning process step by step. Though she is an often unreliable narrator, manipulating events to produce the outcome she prefers.

In Beautiful Bones, Sakurako Kujo is an even more eccentric osteologist than Temperance "Bones" Brennan, the series that inspired the English title. The Japanese title translates as "A Corpse is Buried Beneath Sakurako's Feet."

Onihei is an action-heavy Edo period police procedural that doesn't flinch from depicting the complete lack of due process rights for suspects at the time.

And although she only appears in a couple of episodes in a series that can't be classified in the genre, the hard-boiled vampire-hunting private eye in Call of the Night is such a great noir character that I'd like to see her get a show of her own.

Related posts

Scene of the crime writer

Labels: crunchyroll, dlibjapan, edogawa, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, mystery, streaming, tubi, viki

Clint Eastwood defined the essence of the role in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. A lone rider with no ties and no dependents and little interest in the human condition, the "Man with No Name" is an unapologetic misanthrope who, despite himself, ends up doing right by his fellow man.

A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More were based on characters created by Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune for the equally iconic chanbara films Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

Manga and anime embraced the trope, often adding a sidekick (a gregarious Watson to his taciturn Sherlock) and spirited girl with a cause or quest of her own. The relationship between the "wandering swordsman" Himura Kenshin and Kaoru Kamiya in Rurouni Kenshin is a case in point.

Such pairings became a staple of the romantic dramedy, perhaps no better exemplified than in Clannad. When we first meet him, Tomoya (Yuichi Nakamura) is a senior in high school. Cynical and aloof (not without his reasons), he proudly wears the label of "class delinquent."

The first day of school (one of those halcyon days in early April), he runs into Nagisa and his whole life changes. Not because he falls for her (that takes two dozen episodes) but because she presents him with a problem to solve. Solving the problem is what brings them together.

Hyouka follows a similar formula with equally outstanding results. That includes again casting Yuichi Nakamura in the lead and again pairing him with Daisuke Sakaguchi, who played his sidekick in Clannad.

Unlike Tomoya, Hotaro Oreki has no "troubled past." His goal is to get through high school with the least possible social involvement, expending as little energy as possible. That goal is frustrated when his older sister insists that he join the soon-to-be defunct "Classic Literature Club."

He shows up for the first club meeting to find one other person there, Eru (Elle) Chitanda, scion of one of the wealthiest families in town. The story, though, avoids the "poor little rich girl" meme and instead begins with series of one-off Encylopedia Brown type mysteries.

As it turns out, Hotaro is really good at solving puzzles. This realization prompts Eru to present him with an unresolved family scandal. Along with Satoshi (his childhood friend) and Mayaka (the student librarian), they tackle the curious fate of Eru's uncle.

Her uncle helmed the Classic Literature Club forty years before, until he was expelled from school under questionable circumstances. Hotaro ends up expending a whole lot of energy figuring out why.

Hyouka is the title of the literary anthology the club publishes every year. It becomes the most revealing clue of all. "A dumb joke," Hotaro mutters when he figures it out, and exactly the kind of dumb joke a wronged teenager with a literary bent would come up with.

The author of the series, Honobu Yonezawa, includes an additional twist in the opening and closing credits with his punning alternate titles to the stories, such as "The Niece of Time." I got that one. I had to google "Why Didn't They Ask Eba [Evans]?" to get the Agatha Christie reference.

The ED for the second cour is a delightful tribute to the "cozy" genre that could constitute an episode all on its own.


The ED for the first cour, on the other hand, is simply surreal.


Some episodes are straightforward head-scratchers, even so basic a matter as why a teacher messed up his lesson plan (which begins with a debate of why some people have shorter tempers than others, which leads to discussion of the seven deadly sins, which leads to Eru's version of "greed is good").

And then the film club sets out to make a murder mystery video for their class project. In the middle of the shoot, the girl writing the script quits. So the film club turns to Classic Literature Club to figure out how she intended to finish it, which means solving the mystery she started.

No sooner has he done that but Hotaro finds himself wrestling with issues of artistic integrity and authorial intent. These themes also arise in a surprisingly complex arc in the second cour that begins with a harmless prank and concludes with a meditation about creativity and talent.

These slice-of-life whodunits often involve no crime at all. The real mystery is human nature and why Eru can so easily knock the otherwise cool Hotaro for a loop. Sensing that "the game is afoot," she is bound to exclaim, "Ki ni narimasu!" (I'm curious!) and will not relent. Alas, he cannot resist.


Here Kaname Naito explains the grammar of the expression.


Hyouka gives us Kyoto Animation at its finest, and more stellar work from the talented and productive Yasuhiro Takemoto. His previous directorial projects include Amagi Brilliant Park, Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, and The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Honobu Yonezawa wrote five novels and half a dozen short stores in the "Classic Literature Club" series, which have been adapted to 11 manga volumes, 22 anime episodes (plus an OVA), and a 2017 live-action film.

Hyouka is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, book reviews, japan, kyoani, mystery

In a previous discussion about the Mary Sue trope, I suggested the "cozy romance" as a companion to the "cozy mystery." Well, a series that qualifies as a cozy mystery, a cozy romance, and a Mary Sue that mostly works is Holmes of Kyoto.

Aoi Mashiro is a boy-crazed ditz when we first meet her. But her encounter with Kiyotaka Yagashira at the Yagashira Antique Shop turns her into a cool-headed antiques appraiser.

Eventually. Kiyotaka hires her to dust and sweep and make tea. But she's a fast study. A really fast study. Nevertheless, we see her put in the work. And she's got a great tutor. So she earns it.

Kiyotaka is, of course, young and handsome, the smartest appraiser in Kyoto. He claims that "Holmes" is merely a play on the kanji for "home" in his name, but he and Aoi end up solving a lot of crimes and mysteries.

The series has a Moriarty as well, though he's closer to the "Fiend with Twenty Faces" created by Ranpo Edogawa. Ensho is a defrocked Buddhist priest and frustrated forger who seems mostly obsessed with fooling Kiyotaka.

Along the way, of course, Aoi and Kiyotaka develop feelings for each other. But by externalizing the conflicts and taking the usual "complications" out of the relationship, the "cozy" romance can mature at a slow slow burn.

Aoi is still in high school, to start with. In any case, I'm not interested in a Mary Sue who is forever torn between cowboy Billy and billionaire Bob. Nobody plucks petals off a daisy while intoning, "She loves me, she loves me not."

The art and animation isn't as polished as Snow White with the Red Hair. But if you're looking for cozy mysteries and a very gently simmering romance, this dive into the world of Kyoto antiquing nicely fits the bill.

Holmes of Kyoto is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, crunchyroll, edogawa, mystery, thinking about writing

Nippon published a concise and informative retrospective of Ranpo Edogawa's literary career by Kimie Itakura, featuring an interview with Takumi Ishikawa, professor of modern literature and culture at Rikkyo University. My translation of The Bronze Devil gets a brief mention.

Labels: bronze devil, edogawa, japanese, mystery, thinking about writing, translations

Illustration by Kyosai Kawanabe.

In chapter 5 of The Space Alien, Kitamura-san describes a piece of mind-reading alien technology as a "magic mirror."

At first glance, it looked like a round silver metal tray. When I brought my face closer to it, I did not see my reflection as in a typical mirror, but a reflection of my mind. The thoughts of the person holding the mirror are displayed like a photograph on the surface of the silver plate. In short, a movie of the mind.

This "magic mirror" bears a strong resemblance to the jouharikyou (浄玻璃鏡) in Buddhist mythology, commonly translated as "Enma's Mirror of Judgment" or the "Mirror of Karma."

Enma (閻魔), commonly known outside Japan as "Yama," is the Ruler of Hell. Enma is a wrathful god who judges the dead. But unlike Saint Peter, he stands at the gates of Hell, where he decides which of the six paths in the eternal cycle of death and rebirth (samsara) the recently deceased will take.

One of the tools Enma uses when passing judgment is a mirror. Wrote the poet Kobayashi Issa (courtesy David Lanoue, edited for syllable count), perhaps referring to Issa's habit of "stealing" flowers from the gardens of his neighbors,

In Enma's mirror
shines back a reflection of
the plum blossom thief

This "magic mirror" reflects the deeds and true nature of those who stand before Enma, such that they cannot deny the verdict he hands down.

Labels: edogawa, japanese culture, mystery, space alien, translations

Given a title like Beautiful Bones, you might jump to the conclusion that this light novel and anime series shares much in common with Bones, the police procedural starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz.

And you'd be right.

Those obvious assumptions are obviously intended. This a good example of "localizing" an anime or light novel title rather than literally translating the original. The actual title of the light novel series is "A Corpse is Buried Under Sakurako's Feet" (「櫻子さんの足下には死体が埋まっている」).

Long light novel titles have become trendy of late, which can give overseas publishers fits.

Like Deschanel's Temperance "Bones" Brennan, Sakurako Kujo is a socially maladroit osteologist with a penchant for stumbling across dead bodies. She isn't a famous author but comes from old money and lives in the (Gothic) family mansion with an elderly housekeeper and the menagerie of animal skeletons she reconstructs as her hobby.

She's more eccentric than Temperance Brennan, closer in personality to House and Holmes on the brilliant antisocial obsessive detective scale. Her Watson (or Wilson) is Shotaro Tatewaki, a high school student who does his best to keep her more manic proclivities in check.

Being a kid ("shonen"), he can only do so much. I can't help wondering how the series would play out if Sakurako were paired with Boreanaz's Agent Booth, someone with the strong personality and physical presence to root her more firmly in the real world.

But there's nothing wrong with this version either. Shotaro is a competent kid. Well, he has to be, given who he hangs out with. The result is, like House, Sakurako ends up with more room to be her own brilliantly semi-unbalanced self.

As voiced by Shizuka Ito, Sakurako often reminds me of Jolene Blalock's T'Pol on Enterprise, constantly having to put up with humans and their annoying illogical emotions.

Of course, when you create a smart detective, you have to create smart crimes for her to solve. That means the detective has to be smarter than the criminal, and the screenwriter has to be smarter than them both.

Making the smart detective a scientist gives them (the detective and the writer) access to a pool of deductible facts that is both technically complex and accessible through research (or hire a consultant). Shiori Ota, author of the novels, has clearly done one or the other or both.

The result is a well-structured set of mysteries that mostly play fair—we are privy to the same information as Shotaro. Each mystery concludes in one or two episodes. An unresolved arc involving a Moriarty-type figure runs through the series, but never overwhelms the individual episodes.

The anime ran for only one cour, so the unresolved arc remains unresolved, though the villain's identity and motives are revealed in the penultimate episode. But it does not end on a cliffhanger, and the light novels series is still active, with fourteen volumes now in print. So a second cour may be in the offing.

One other unique thing about Beautiful Bones is that the series takes place in Hokkaido, where the author grew up. It makes for a nice change of setting and provides for the kind of wide-open spaces (and much more driving) than you'll experience in Tokyo.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, language, mystery, thinking about writing, translations

Here's some great material for a Bones or CSI episode.

Sokushinbutsu (即身仏) were Buddhist monks who starved themselves to death in a way that resulted in their mummification. After exercising and dieting for 1000 days to burn off body fat, and drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the urushi tree (from which lacquer is made) for 1000 more days to "preserve" the rest, the self-mummifying monk would

place himself inside a stone tomb, ringing a bell once each day. When the bell failed to ring, the other monks would seal the tomb, wait another 1000 days, and then open it up to find out whether the monk had mummified.

Over the past 1200 years, less than two-dozen sokushinbutsu have been officially documented, the most recent in 1903. It is not advocated or practiced by any Buddhist sect and is banned in Japan.

But it has been done on TV, specifically on Partners, TV Asahi's long-running police procedural. The lead detective, Ukyo Sugishita (Yutaka Mizutani), is an amusing combination of Jeremy Brett's dapper Holmes and the dogged inquisitiveness of Peter Falk's Columbo.


I didn't know anything about sokushinbutsu until seeing that episode. But, of course, Detective Sugishita does.

His latest partner, Toru Kai (Hiroki Narimiya), goes mushroom hunting on his day off. The next thing he knows, he's in the hospital with a bad concusion and temporary amnesia. Sugishita zeroes in on the last thing his partners remembers hearing: a ringing bell.

As it turns out, he'd stumbled across a sokushinbutsu tomb. Hearing the bell, he knew the occupant was still alive. But before he could report this unusual crime-in-progress, the son and grandsons of the devout (and deranged) old man konked him on the head.

They get arrested for the head konking. But Sugishita is left with a literal habeas corpus problem: Kai can't remember where in the forest the tomb was and nobody in the family is talking. All one of the granddaughters will say is, "Come back in 1000 days."

Labels: buddhism, japan, japanese culture, japanese tv, mystery, religion

As can be surmised from the title, the titular character is a dog. Nothing unusual there for a children's cartoon. And then you realize that everybody's a dog.

Now, Disney and Warner Bros. have been anthropomorphizing animated animals for a century. But characters like Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are presented as caricatures of human beings. That is, nothing in the world they occupy explains their existence. They're mutant creatures who happen to live like (and often alongside) human beings, along with other inexplicably sentient pigs, dogs, and rodents.

Okay, they're just cartoons, and I've got no aesthetic bone to pick with Disney or Warner Bros. on this account. My point is that, in contrast to every other bunch of anthropomorphic cartoon animals, the world of Sherlock Hound is delightfully consistent. All sentient creatures are canines (dogs, wolves, foxes, coyotes, jackals), as if somewhere back in the mists of evolutionary time, mankind's common ancestor belonged to the species Canidae.

This is a children's program, so this backstory pretty much goes without mention (except as a running gag whenever they visit a museum). But if you're simply going to replace all the humans with bipedal, doggy-looking characters, what's the point? Well, they're really cute. And the "casting" is quite clever: Holmes is appropriately a fox. Moriarty is a Little Red Riding Hood-eating breed of wolf. Watson is a Scottish Terrier. And Inspector Lestrade, naturally, is a British bulldog.

Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed six of the first two-dozen episodes, and the series strongly reflects his influence. Miyazaki's Holmes is less Conan Doyle than Jules Verne, and the mysteries he tackles are less brain teasers than cinematic Rube Goldberg machines, something Miyazaki does very well. For a more cerebral animated Holmes, I recommend Case Closed, whose boy detective, Conan, does justice to the name.

Crunchyroll is currently streaming the series.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, miyazaki, mystery