Oh boy here I go watching detective fiction again.
There’s something that I’ve said or at least alluded to in previous reviews that I feel like I need to make clear for new viewers each time I take on a series that treads within the genre: this stuff is hard. I don’t mean on the viewer, I mean for the writer. Done well, mysteries are some of the most engaging media to approach, but they’re also incredibly challenging, whether you try to follow the famous rules of fair play or not.
Beautiful Bones is not, by in large, a “fair play” mystery, but it has a lot in common with the genre, featuring a brilliant detective (whether or not the character actually holds that job title), a more common but more down to earth assistant, and an improbable lot of dead people turning up to be investigated.
The twist this time is that we’re taking from CSI as well as Holmes, and when you know enough about the human body (or at least skeletons), dead men do tell tales.
So, let’s get started with out characters.
First is our Watson character, Shoutarou Tatewaki. He’s a high-school student who has an odd association with our Holmes-type character. Like most good Watson characters, he’s reasonably inoffensive. He’s got a good moral fiber (at least enough to call the cops when cops ought to be called, but on the whole he does seem like a stand-up kind of kid) and is fairly easily bribed with good food outside of that. His job, as Watson’s usually is, is to be ignorant about things and ask questions so that Holmes can answer them for the benefit of the audience.
Then, of course, we have this show’s Holmes – Sakurako Kujou, the osteologist daughter of a famed but unfortunately late forensic examiner, who has at least the majority of dad’s skills, a keen observational eye, and your average brilliant detective’s inclination to not let sleeping murder lie (or really any fascinating mystery’s solution to not be properly aired). She’s significantly Shoutarou’s senior and is said to have a fiancee, though we never meet him.
She also has a deep fascination with bones. She may make skeletal specimens for a living, but she keeps quite the collection for herself, and Shoutarou often has to prevent her from hauling evidence home to add to it.
Aside from this, we get a few recurring side characters. There’s Sakurako’s elderly housekeeper, a girl from Shoutarou’s school who might have a thing for him, his kinda shady-seeming teacher, and a bumbling police officer who are all more or less befriended over the course of the show.
The show tells us what we’re in for right off the bat, as it opens with our leads going digging for bones and turning up something… a little beyond the pale.
Though it turns out that set of remains was a little old to be an active case (at least a hundred years, we’re told. Sakurako still doesn’t get to keep it), she does reveal a suspected double suicide to have been more likely a double homicide en passant, observing the damage to the bodies, the angles of various forces, and so on.
This is where the show’s formula diverges from fair play: in a fair play mystery, we’d be shown all these things, enough to guess, but Beautiful Bones both doesn’t linger too heavily on shots of corpses (you’ll see plenty of skeletons and at least a couple bodies, but those more briefly) and knows to keep things either snappy or grounded in an emotional experience, so Sakurako will usually just skip directly to the summation, reconstructing what happened from her observations more or less as the audience is made aware of them.
That’s neither here nor there. What is perhaps more interesting is that while most cases Sakurako can handle involve a dead body somewhere, there are fewer active homicides than might be expected. In some ways, the show also shares a little with Hyouka in that quite a few of its mysteries, while more grisly than anything in that other show, are still… lower key things that didn’t have to be solved.
For instance, one of the earlier focal cases begins with the discovery of a body that turns out to be the missing grandmother of that girl Shoutarou knows. The police rule her death a suicide, which hits the girl pretty hard. Sakurako, however, reconstructs her life and death to reveal that it was, instead, a complete accident, and that grandma wasn’t put through anything that was too much for her by the family, balming that emotional wound.
I’ll skip over most of these smaller mysteries, whether they involve foul play or not and instead just hit the notes that cover the backbone of the plot. I do spoiler reviews rather than non-spoiler for two main reasons: one is proof of work, so anyone who themselves watches the show knows that I wasn’t just talking out of my behind and did watch more than a few random bits as incautious reviewers sometimes do, and the other was because I need to provide groundwork to talk about interesting topics even if my readers haven’t viewed this particular show. While I’m not the kind of person who is too bothered by spoilers in general (the journey should be at least as good as the destination, and you can’t really “spoil” that by knowing where the path leads), I do feel a little bad when I have to shed light on absolutely everything in a mystery, and this time… I don’t. So know that if Beautiful Bones sounds like you thing that there’s quite a lot of show dedicated to lower deck or one-off plots that I will not be mentioning.
Instead, there are two two-part episodes that touch on what seems to be the main plot, along with the final episode.
What is the main plot? Well, we’ve got Holmes and Watson, so how about Moriarty?
The screenshot above comes from the end of the first of those two-part episodes. The main mystery of the arc concerns a man who claims to be cursed, and soon to die because of it. We go through several layers, with some arsenic-based paint and a hereditary weak heart being brought up, but in the nick of time the gang realizes that things don’t quite add up, and that the “curse victim” is, in fact, suicidal.
They manage to save his life, and convince the guy (a day trader who lost everything in a bubble burst, and was trying to off himself while still providing his wife and infant child life insurance money.) to soldier on, there’s another figure in the story who Sakurako never meets – an “art dealer” who gave a lot of suspiciously fatal advice about the arsenic painting, and who the suicidal man seems to be in active touch with regarding his plans.
In this case, the audience is actually let in on more than Sakurako, who is left only hypothesizing the existence of a person who, while keeping his own hands clean, induces others to commit suicide or possibly even murder.
After some intervening episodes, we get the second two-parter, concerning a pair of missing girls who had been good friends until the third of their unit went missing. Shoutarou, Sakurako, and the teacher track down one of the girls, and through winning her trust manage to find the other, who seems to have failed to commit suicide.
The sordid tale comes out, of how the depressed third girl tried to draw them into a suicide pact back when they were in school, and ended up being the only one who died. Both the living girls have encountered an artist called Hanabusa, who seemed very adept at manipulating them and who cuts for the audience confirm is the same person as the supposed art dealer from before – not that Sakurako doesn’t suspect, given one of the paintings the suicidal man had used one of the girls here as a model.
When they dig up the dead girl, Sakurako also finds she wasn’t the first – the sphenoid bone is missing, the calling card of the “Sphenoider” that her father never manged to prove was real, the man who would lead others to their deaths and then claim that one little bone as a trophy. But now, Sakurako has evidence, and a name.
There’s also some heavy motif work going on, that’s woven throughout the show as a whole. The sphenoid bone is mentioned as early as the first episode, and is said to be shaped like a butterfly. The butterfly. The Lethe Diana butterfly appears several times as well, being said to be drawn to rotting corpses more than flowers, and it also appears in Hanabusa’s art and effects, with him even directly referencing it when (in a flashback Sakurako does not become party to the content of) carving scarification of butterfly wings into the back of one of the lost, lonely girls.
Thus, we have our mastermind, a mysterious butterfly obsessed artist who uses peoples’ fears and regrets to push them to death, and who claims their sphenoid bone as a trophy.
Pity it’s the penultimate episode.
Yeah, we never really go versus the Sphenoider. We’ve saved three people from his clutches (more or less. The two girls are still messed up and possibly on the hook for crimes.), but a confrontation is not in the cards. Instead the last episode’s main conflict is Sakurako trying to push Shoutarou away since she fears the both of them are in Hanabusa’s sights. And, to be fair, Shoutarou has been injured. Resolving this is interspersed with a flashback to how they met and their first “case” together, ending as Shoutarou resolves to help Sakurako with what comes next no matter what.
It’s fairly graceful for trying to tie a bow on something that is flagrantly unfinished, but the show still loses some points for that. I almost feel like it would have been more satisfying stopping an episode earlier.
There are other things that aren’t addressed as well, particularly around Sakurako herself. She repeatedly visits someone in the hospital, and at least once calls out the name “Sotaro”, which seems to give her pause regarding saying Shoutarou’s name, due to their similarity. She’s clearly got a lot of baggage, but we never see her unpack it. Clearly, that comes later.
I will say, I enjoyed Beautiful Bones quite a bit. I may be trying to be sparse with the details, but the average cases across a majority of the episodes are still quite engaging, and Sakurako’s summations are always detailed and twisted enough to be a lot of fun. Sure, I’m being led through the solution rather than solving it myself, but there’s a time and place for everything including “fair play” mystery, and this just isn’t fair play’s time or place.
The real detraction from enjoyment is that lack of closure or, in a sense, progress. I think if we properly faced Hanabusa, or if we really found out what was driving Sakurako, I would give the show a significantly higher grade, especially if it went on long enough to do both… but I have to grade what’s here, not what’s probably lurking in the seventeen novels in the series, a number that is certainly greater than what we see here.
As it stands though, I’m still going to offer Beautiful Bones a B+. It knows what it is, detective fiction focused on showing the audience the intricacies of brilliance rather than on creating a game for the audience, and it wears that extremely well. If you’re at all interested, check it out. I may have covered the skeleton here, but there’s more than enough meat left to dig into.