Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?
~The Detection Club Oath
When the mystery novel was establishing its own inner circle of authoritative figures, there were several rules which the “masters” insisted upon. Knox’s Commandments, as they were so-called, have been clung to not necessarily as immutable absolutes, but rather as a true way to “play fair” with the reading audience, that it is in fact plausible to always present the reader with the chance to solve the mystery by making the game itself adhere to clear standards that should not be infringed. Therein lies a particular kind of glamour for both the story and the audience, that the detective exists beyond any emotional matters other than the sheer fun or love of “the chase” or “the answer,” and that the reader can congratulate themselves on staying on-track with the author or outsmarting their friends who are reading along as well. In this construction, the mystery novel is the greatest ego test as a reader. The consequence, however intentional or unintentional it might be, is that they are ironically free of any consequence. The fiction and the reading experience became so much about “solving the mystery” that the detective assumed a lofty place both in and over the narrative itself. They were so untouchable as both an intellectual figure and an actual person inhabiting the story. The ego is unchecked.
To put it in other terms, the detective is involved, but only insofar as supreme judge in light of the facts. The Oath may have spoken about avoiding “Divine Revelation” and “Act of God,” but the detective as a figure was itself divine.
Yonezawa Honobu clearly loves detection club mysteries, but if Hyouka was any indication, he is not nearly so concerned with the whodunit aspect. That’s not to say that it’s unimportant (each mystery both in it and Shoushimin does have an answer that follows “the rules”), but rather that it’s not the point. Yonezawa loves clawing through the actual DNA and structure of mysteries as a larger phenomenon, understanding their pieces, people, and how they do, do not, and perhaps most significantly, how they SHOULD interact. It’s not for an answer – it’s for a meaning. Hyouka positioned Oreki Houtarou as someone who learns that mysteries occupy the everyday, and however mundane they may be, it’s always worth looking for The Future before it becomes The Past. He optimistically moves from impersonal to personal. Involved.
In that spirit, Shoushimin seasons one and two not only are more than worthy to stand alongside Hyouka as one of anime’s great mystery narratives, but I’d daresay that it’s perhaps an even grander display of Yonezawa’s dissection. In its ever-thicker and ever-thornier knotting, it doesn’t take long to get there. Caught within the aftermath of the kidnapping plot that closed season one, Osanai and Kobato have reached an impasse and gotten themselves involved with others, Urino and Tokiko respectively. Old habits die hard, as each aloof smile from Kobato or Swiss-clockmaker-precise dessert bite from Osanai so indicates. Fires break out, property gets destroyed, and Urino eyes an opportunity to investigate! And all the while, Tokiko tries having some kind of normal relationship with Kobato, but why the hell can’t he stop smiling or be even marginally upset?
Shoushimin season one prided itself on its intensive insularity. Regardless of whatever was happening at any given moment, mystery or otherwise, almost everything concerned its two leads (and occasionally Dojima). With the two leads now apart, the world opens to aerate the closed room, and with it, we see the sense of just who these two people are in reference to others. They do not exist in a vacuum, divorced from the weight of their words and consequences. Characters get mad. One-sided displays of affection are nearly acted upon. There’s a candid phone call about how a friendship is probably ending when the night is over. Shoushimin season two cares about how the detective perceives themselves and their interactions with the universe as actual tangible objects and spaces. It says that if you’re a detective, you are involved simply by existing as a detective (and a human being before that), and like it or not, things are royally going to suck for at least one person—if not more—in the midst, whoever they are. Compared to the days of Knox’s Commandments, the detective is, and causes, a mess, facing consequences for their relentless pursuit of the truth. You found the truth, but what actually happens here? Mysteries have never looked so glamourous with such deliberate lack of glamour.
Being a detective, by necessity, brings friction, which Yonezawa and director Kanbe Mamoru exploit to deliciously tizzying ends. The cast glimpse mysteries with the same kind of innate thrill, but the vibrations in the air chart perpendicular courses. Urino’s full-fledged and unapologetic charge to find the arsonist setting all those fires is stoking not only his own ego, but likewise burning many others he’s coming across. As Dojima says point blank in episode one, “You’re too quick to jump the gun.” And given how irked Urino is that the greenhouse fire is small-scale, he has to follow the trail in the hope that it validates his own effort and time sink. Shouldn’t everyone want to get behind him, to stop such damages? And besides, it’s not as though the fires are his fault since he’s so unconnected.
After all, he’s just the detective!
But for all the supposed non-involvement of The Detectives™, Shoushimin’s visual language pointedly involves them with their detached constructions of reality. There is a certain kind of perverse pleasure in Gifu as a setting: it is physical and with the thickest of tight art direction but, paradoxically, empty. Its spaces, its denizens, and even its denizens’ memories are employed as tools to reconstruct the closed room reality of the mystery, the real world treated itself like toys. Brazenly theatre-driven blocking with abstraction and lighting staging (something that I readily confess an aesthetic weakness for), freezing reality, and observing horror from a distance with a kind of calmness and pristinity too weird to be normal. It is in this realm that Shoushimin, driven by Kanbe’s sheer confidence in its ideas and theming, claims its territory. So long as any of the characters feel some kind of detachment between their hearts / minds and perceptions, they can be at home here. The time there is fleeting though, and eventually, you or somebody else will have to answer for all the tinkering you did there.
In Kanbe’s hands, Yonezawa’s story splays everything in both the macro and the micro, allowing its slew of mysteries and detectives to chart their courses and dirty the sandbox. The fate of Tokiko and Kobato’s relationship may not have the same gravitas as fires sprouting everywhere and the eager beaver gumshoe springing into action, or an incident that happened several years ago seemingly repeating itself. But wherever there is a mystery, there is someone trying to solve it, and it’s only a matter of time before the world itself or its people get effected because of the detective. An arbiter or investigator of justice, ready to point the finger at “the answer,” must by necessity dirty themselves. A popular light novel series once said that the detective was already dead. Shoushimin says that the detective, or ANY detective for that matter, simply existing causes problems.
Just don’t let one of those problems be messing with Osanai, okay?
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