Ranpo Edogawa was a Japanese author, primarily active in the Showa era (though debuting a couple years before its proper start), who was somewhat instrumental in taking his inspirations like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe and synthesizing from that a brand of mystery and thriller fiction that was, instead of being purely imitative, a uniquely Japanese take on the genres, particularly Detective fiction.
What does that have to do with Rampo Kitan? Well, the show would like you to believe that, being made in honor of the 50th anniversary of his passing, it is inspired by his work. But all accounts suggest the word “inspired” here is used very loosely, resulting in an odd detective thriller for which this trivia is a minor footnote.
Our first story introduces the characters – a 13-year-old boy, Yoshio Kobayashi, wakes up in his classroom, hacksaw in hand, discovering there the dismembered and arranged corpse of his homeroom teacher
He’s quickly suspected of the killing, though the class rep Souji Hashiba stands up for him (with enough occasional blushes that you might think friendship is not the extent) and the situation is manipulated by the genius teen detective with imperial authority, Kogorou Akechi.
Akechi arranges Kobayashi’s quick release, but this leads to Kobayashi finding his way back to the detective, declaring that this predicament that would drive a normal person half mad is the first thing in life that’s felt fun. Thus, Akechi prepares a “game” by which, if Kobayashi can manipulate the discovery of the true killer, Akechi will accept him as an assistant. This is made more difficult as it comes to light that the murdered homeroom teacher was himself a murderer who turned his victims into “beautiful” furniture, and that prints have Kobayashi ready to be arrested as an accomplice.
One thing I want to mention before going farther is that this show is heavy on artistic technique. Most of it is told from Kobayashi’s point of view. And, in his point of view, most people are nothing more than shadows in faint gradient, even loud and eccentric ones like the replacement homeroom teacher, Hanabishi. Only when someone becomes interesting to Kobayashi is their image filled in. This isn’t a weird budget thing like in Penguindrum, we see full designs for characters that are no more than shadows when we get a scene centered on Hashiba, for instance, and even major characters may start out as shadows to Kobayashi. Rather, I think it’s trying to immerse the viewer in this extremely strange person’s outlook on the world, where almost everything is dull and senseless. Notably, Akechi will later be revealed to see most people as featureless mannequins, and another character see “extras” as skeletons. It’s just part of this show’s weirdness.
Some of my evidence for this, from the first arc, comes as we reveal the real killer. Kobayashi deduces that the home room teacher’s victims were his former lovers, and that Kobayashi himself was slated to be confessed to when the killer struck. Thus, that killer would be a jilted lover being denied a place as the teacher’s next art piece, turning him into one instead and framing the rival. This turns out to be true, as a ruse around the old teacher’s cell phone reveals a girl from the class as the culprit. When she gives her motive rant (how the teacher saved her from suicide and she wanted to be loved and affirmed with a death dedicated to him, which she was going to be denied thanks to the teacher getting eyes for Kobayashi), Kobayashi mentions how, even though they’d been in the same class since grade school, he’d never really “seen” her before.
The deductions and trap for the culprit convince Akechi to take Kobayashi on, and this we can have more of a show with more cases as we get used to this world of gruesome crime and freaky disturbed people.
The next case is a one-episode entry. It begins with a string of kidnapped girls, with the police suspect being a figure known as the Shadow Man. The Shadow Man is an eccentric loon who by default wears a paper bag over his head and who has the ability to “disguise” himself as anyone, at least anyone of adult size, in an instant. You figure that out. Akechi doesn’t want the case, but Kobayashi investigates, quickly being recruited by Shadow Man for a sting operation against the real culprit, who took a girl that Shadow Man was very close to.
The sting gets Kobayashi dressed as a girl (which gets Hashiba blushing even more than usual) to act as a target. And, sure enough, he’s captured and brought to the lair of the kidnapper, a blob of a man trying to create his happy family. Shadow Man follows up, but the correct girl is not among the “family”. Rather, she rejected the kidnapper’s deal which apparently meant instant death by industrial grinder and being mixed into concrete to make a bas relief of herself. Disturbing, yet creative. Shadow Man goes a little berserk, but isn’t much of a fighter. Luckily, Akechi and the cops were called as backup, take the guy down, and free those who can be saved while a broken-hearted Shadow Man slips away.
Thus we move on to the case of a killer called Twenty Faces, a vigilante who kills criminals who “escaped justice” with an eye towards weird poetic deaths. What’s more, Twenty Faces announces and confirms his kills in online videos.
To try to crack the case, Akechi, Hashiba, and Kobayashi visit, what else, a crazy eccentric. This is some weird dominatrix fixer held in a palatial “cell” in Shinjuku, who seems to have a weird thing for Akechi for which she totally drops the imperious demeanor in favor of a masochist act that would be familiar to Darkness.
With her unspecified influence, Akechi is able to get the kidnapper from the previous episode released as bait, revealing Twenty Faces as the friendly cop who had helped out in the first two cases. Or should I say, this incarnation. Apparently there was an original Twenty Faces three years ago, and Akechi doesn’t want to talk about anything that happened back then, giving us our first hint of a meta-plot.
Cementing that it’s not over with his arrest, we get a whole-episode flashback to his past and how he ended up going down a dark road, growing more and more frustrated as criminals were not indicted because their prosecutions wouldn’t be slam dunks, and how they were sent to mental facilities from which they’d be released in short order. It even turns out that the case 2 criminal is very personal, as after breaking out of a psych ward post his second arrest (the one in the show was his third), he went and murdered the cop’s beloved little sister as an act of revenge.
At the end of it all, the cop declares his confession has earned him a death sentence but, while resigned to his own fate, declares – or warns – that Twenty Faces won’t die. And indeed, we see the truth of it as the creeper is taken out by Shadow Man, wearing the Twenty Faces mask.
After a comedy interlude episode, we follow this up more by learning that in a month and change since the cop’s arrest, there have been thirteen more Twenty Faces. And #14 (fourth of the new month) is a big one, taunting the police regarding the bizarre locked-room murder of a CEO and artist who were at the head of a megaproject run by a hellishly abusive company. At first, Akechi investigates on his own, but sure enough Kobayashi and Hashiba end up involved.
Before embarking properly we do, a mere eight episodes in, get a reasoning for that “Game of Laplace” subtitle, as Akechi flashes back to a friend of his who wanted to use chaos theory to create a mathematical yet real Laplace’s Demon (The all-knowing thought experiment being that could predict the future by knowing the present perfectly). Actually, we mostly get on to that, as the latest Twenty Faces confesses fairly easily.
Instead, we get Akechi’s account of his time with his friend, Namikochi, who became the original Twenty Faces as the conclusion to his equation on how to shape society – apparently kicking the whole thing off by self-immolation. The entire thing feels a little like somebody crossed the idea of Moriarty being a professor (or in this case prodigal student) of Mathematics with V for Vendetta.
Akechi is, because of this, dedicated to hunting down every Twenty Faces and putting an end to the phenomenon based on that flawed super equation he helped create. Kobayashi and Hashiba help out with tryign to understand the equation, eventually causing Akechi to realize he wasn’t getting results because he was omitting himself as a variable. This leads to a confrontation with another Twenty Faces, who proves to be just the opening act for the reveal, that Namikochi is alive and still driving the Twenty Faces phenomenon forward.
Namikochi kidnaps Kobayashi for the express purpose of providing him with exposition about how this all began, going through his backstory as a bully magnet with abusive parents, leading ultimately to both his relationship with Akechi and his use of the incomplete formula to murder his bullies, teacher, and parents with untraceable butterfly effects before faking his death. His big ask is here at the end, with skull-masked mobs rioting in the streets in the name of Twenty Faces, is for Kobayashi to be part of a mass suicide human sacrifice that will somehow solidify Twenty Faces as some kind of natural law.
Kobayashi… kind of just goes along with this. This leads to our final episode as Akechi (and Hashiba) rush to meet Namikochi’s theatrical challenge, ending in a standoff where both he and Kobayashi plan to jump, either death catalyzing Twenty Faces. However, with Hashiba present, team hero is able to save both… momentarily. Kobayashi takes his talking to, but Namikochi lets go and falls to make Twenty Faces a “legend”.
From there, we get quick ending where the Twenty Faces phenomenon spread wildly… but ultimately seems to burn out as a fad as of six months later. Namikochi’s body was never found, and Kobayashi and Hashiba continue to work with Akechi as new cases come to the great detective. The End.
Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace is an interesting piece that’s pretty far on style over substance, but without ending up lacking in substance. At its core, it has some decent if very quickly executed murder mysteries, and while the whole “formula” angle of the Twenty Faces arc is a little goofy if you think too much about it, the idea of using mythmaking to shape society, even artificially, is something that’s pretty legitimate to address. I compared it to V for Vendetta when the idea was introduced, and the final episode especially really plays up similarities to at least the film version of that work, especially when the hordes of masked citizens start turning out for the maniacal terrorist, all seeming to take up the identity.
The style, though, is overwhelming. A little like Penguindrum, Serial Experiments Lain, or… frankly quite a few SHAFT productions, you’re being showing non-literal imagery almost constantly, and much of it is tended to be heavily symbolic. I’ve already talked about how the isolated characters see people as faceless humanoid entities of various sorts, but there’s more and it’s constant. I’m not sure what this show is doing in confrontation scenes with absurdly heavily colored lights, but it’s determined to do it.
I think it would work better, though, if it were restricted to directorial style. There are a couple extremely zany characters – the imprisoned fixer, Shadow Man, and the medical examiner to name a few – who stretch the idea that this is supposed to take place in a familiar world and that the images are just distorted to make an emotional impression and connection to the characters. These figures aren’t even cordoned off into their own moments. Shadow Man’s magical disguises are clearly canon, as events are often predicated on his ability to even quickly change between radically different appearances with unmistakable likeness. The Fixer is mostly only seen in her weird cell, but her BDSM gimp slave beefcakes show up to get Akechi through a Twenty Faces crowd in the end, and the Medical Examiner who pops up to give high energy reports on the state of discovered bodies turns Twenty Faces with the same energy and we’re supposed to take her deadly seriously.
Aside from these bizarre breaches of tone, the imagery here worked about as well as it worked in Mekakucity Actors – better than Penguindrum, but not as well as something like Bakemonogatari or Lain. With them, it makes the show something of a head trip where you pair logical deduction and simple mysteries with over-the-top cartoon elements like an unintentional case of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It’s much more memorable for this than for the quick-fire mysteries or “been done” meta-plot, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
Throw in heavy but unrealized BL overtones and some impressively twisted incidents and you have the schizophrenic viewing experience that is Rampo Kitan.
As far as an actual grade I will err on the generous side and give Rampo Kitan a B-. It is a perfectly watchable show, and it does serve up elements in both its plot and its visuals that are memorable and good. The first two episodes in particular, dealing with the Human Chair case, are fairly strong overall and don’t suffer as much from disconnects as the later bits. Sure, the Medical Examiner appears, and the new teacher is a bit of a clown (though that seems to be in character), but it reads pretty much as a straight mystery, and one that has stakes for our central character. If you’re curious, give those episodes a watch and decide if you want to go on knowing it gets a little weaker from there.