The basic premise of Hyouka is this: the main character is Houtarou Oreki, a high-school freshman who fancies himself an “Energy conversationalist”, which is to say he hates doing anything he sees as “unnecessary”. After a letter from his globe-trotting sister convinces him to join the school’s Classic Lit Club, which would otherwise be empty and fold in all likelihood, he runs into Eru Chitanda, an overwhelmingly cute and overwhelmingly curious girl who will be his first fellow in the Classic Lit Club. Despite his predilection towards sloth, he finds Chitanda impossible to ignore and thus uses his intellect and deductive skill to produce satisfying answers to her baffling questions. The two of them are joined by Oreki’s friend and self-described “database” Satoshi Fukube and Fukube’s tsundere love interest Mayaka Ibara, who provide some help solving whatever mysteries occur to Chitanda and otherwise often introduce more.
This probably sounds like it’s going to be something not unlike Kaguya-sama: Love is War, but Hyouka’s treatment of the mystery genre is much less comedic than you might expect from that. Its characters are complex, its pacing is excellent if deliberate, and its mysteries, while more everyday occurrences and school conundrums rather than the “always murder” fare you get used to in detective fiction, are quite engaging. Those of you who want more spoilers than that, read on, warned of the genre we’re dealing with this week and the fact that I’m going to go into all the solutions.
In general, the show will both have arcs with major mysteries, and component or side-event mysteries that are resolved each episode, with some episodes having only their stand-alone component, particularly in the latter half.
The first major mystery ties into Chitanda’s uncle. Apparently, he was a member of the Classic Lit Club many years ago, and when he spoke about his time in high school, it brought her to tears. Chitanda can’t remember what he said, but is curious as to what moved her so, especially since he was a fairly sweet uncle, and can’t be asked again as he’s been missing for several years and will soon be declared legally dead.
This ends up tying in with more club activities, as the Classic Lit Club must decide what to do for the school culture festival. They find that for the last forty five years, since Chitanda’s uncle was in school, the Classic Lit Club has produced an anthology, titled Hyouka (itself a mystery), for the Culture Festival. When they solve the mystery of the missing back issues, they find that #1 is still AWOL, but that there’s a tantalizing foreward to #2 suggesting that major events happened the previous year, ending in the expulsion of Chitanda’s uncle, but also resulting in the student body (particularly the Classic Lit Club) considering him a hero.
Oreki and the others do their research, and come together to assemble their theories. Oreki, ultimately, reaches a synthesis solution from the lot that seems to be the proper answer, and is later confirmed by an old librarian who was there when it all happened: The school had wanted to cut the cultural festival short, and the students protested heavily. Chitanda’s uncle was fairly deep in the protests, and was presented as the “face” of the objecting students and as their ringleader, even though less charismatic students were actually calling the shots. The protests were ultimately successful, but the incidents resulted in one of the school buildings being accidentally burned down. Though the damages weren’t exactly a case of anyone being at fault, someone had to be punished to keep up appearances, and Chitanda’s uncle took the fall for the other students, being allowed to remain in school only until after the cultural festival he had fought to save, producing Hyouka #1 in that time.
This explains why the other students considered him a hero, why he had deep regrets about his high school career that could move Chitanda to tears (since he was used as a sacrifice and not entirely willingly at that), and ultimately the strange name of the Anthology he created. “Hyouka” means “Ice Cream” which Oreki takes to be a pun using English – “I Scream” – especially given the fact that the cover art used for every volume seems to depict, once the circumstances are known, a fantastic version of the events, with one rabbit locked in battle with a deadly predator while others look on, a final condemnation of the student body that pushed him into the “hero” role and message for his friends to stay strong. The history of the Culture Festival ends up becoming a feature article for the new edition of Hyouka that the current Classic Lit Club is putting together.
Along the way here, Oreki and the Gang investigated why Chitanda was in a locked club room (in episode 1, before the other characters are introduced. The Janitor came by.), rumors of a secret club (planted by Oreki and Fukube to keep Chitanda busy for a day), Why a book from the school library is experiencing a strange borrowing pattern (It’s being used as a model by the Art Club), and how to get the missing anthologies (Blackmail the member of the club camping what used to be the Classic Lit Club Room before it moved to its current one, as he was smoking there and didn’t want a search). That’s pretty busy!
After a one-off episode discussing how a meticulous teacher might have made a certain mistake (he misread a and d in his notes and was teaching to the wrong class’s place) and why that made Chitanda angry (officially unresolved, but probably because he was picking on her classmates since he had gotten ahead of their class’s position) and another visiting a hot springs inn owned by Mayaka’s relatives (which results in something of a ghost story, generated by an attempt to dry a borrowed-without-permission Yukata), we get the next multi-episode arc, concerning an unfinished student film created by one of the main classes.
The film is, what else, a murder mystery. Though the first act (up to the body being discovered) has been filmed, the conclusion has not, and more problematical the scriptwriter has taken ill and so the class has to attempt to deduce what the ending is supposed to be. Fortunately, the writer studied Sherlock Holmes stories (an interest of Fukube) to write her mystery, so it should be a fair play mystery even if it is a classically difficult Locked Room Murder scenario. Also on Oreki’s side is the fact that three class members, including the assistant director, the prop master, and the publicity girl, present their theories on what the ending should be.
The assistant director thinks one of the other characters simply used the window, which is rejected based on evidence of the grass outside the window. The Prop Master cites a different suspect, played by a rock climbing student, who could have rappelled down with a rope that the writer requested but hadn’t yet used. This was rejected based on the fact that the window is shown to be sticky, and couldn’t be opened one-handed while dangling from a rope. He also casts some doubt on his own theory (or does he?) as the writer was apparently a little behind on her prop knowledge despite being very particular, having requested much less fake blood than what was needed to make the scene look convincing. Finally, the publicity manager favors a supernatural killer, conflating the “Mystery” and “Horror” genres, which do overlap (apparently even more given Japanese delineations), but that is at odds with the study of Holmes and detective fiction in particular, rather than Slasher, as well as the lowball order of fake blood that would flagrantly not support a high body count.
Thus, it falls to the Classic Lit Club, and particularly Oreki, to use all the evidence in the film and surrounding its production to determine the true ending. The answer that Oreki comes up with is that an unseen character – the cameraman – was the killer, with the framing of the medium being used to conceal this otherwise obvious resolution from the audience. It fits everything actually shown in the unfinished movie and meets with the approval of their “employer” at the head of the class and – once it’s filmed – almost everyone else as well, earning Oreki the chance to title the completed film as “Blind Spot to All”
A final episode for the arc reveals Oreki had his own blind spots, though, as the prop master’s displeasure is understood to have come from the lack of the rope being used, and Fukube points out that the writer only studied Holmes, while the medium-bending trick is something that would be more familiar to Agatha Christie and thus that an amateur writer wouldn’t have come up with on her own. Oreki realizes he’s been had and confronts the class leader, who reveals that yes, the entire idea was to make up a new ending rather than to discern the real one (after all, the writer wasn’t so sick she couldn’t talk) and that Oreki is right with his second assessment that the writer’s vision had already been botched – in her version, the ‘victim’ wasn’t dead and the near-stabbing was a case of emotional entanglements, since the writer didn’t like stories where people died. Oreki’s ending is probably better, but there’s something sour in knowing that it’s not true, though Chitanda (who also doesn’t really like stories of death) is happy to hear the real if unfilmed solution.
This brings us to the halfway point of Hyouka, and already I would say a plot summary doesn’t do it justice. What this show thrives most on is its characters, and the chemistry between them. Oreki clearly has a major weakness for Chitanda (with at least a couple imagination spots seeing her particularly radiant and beautiful) while Chitanda is somewhat reliant on Oreki and looks up to him despite his lazy attitude. Though Hyouka is not primarily a romance show, I really appreciate how the relationships between the characters are handled. They’re mostly slow-growing, full of small gestures and grace notes that show far more than they tell. Even when romantic drama does take the stage in one or two of the later mysteries, it’s done in a way that’s extremely earnest and down to earth. No one is pointlessly dense, there aren’t idiot misunderstandings for the sake of forced conflict, it’s just a few kids trying to work out their feelings, which are complicated – probably more complicated than any of the cases they take on.
Fukube and Mayaka are interesting characters as well, even aside from their odd and ambiguous relationship. Fukube, as was mentioned before, considers himself a “database” – his mind is loaded with tons of trivia. However, as he’s prone to saying, databases don’t draw conclusions on their own, and while he normally seems like a pretty carefree sort of fellow, there are a number of scenes (more as the show goes on) that show that he’s grappling with feelings of inadequacy, both against true experts rather than jacks of all trades in general (for instance, refusing adamantly yet sadly that, despite his knowledge of Holmes inside and out, he can’t stand with ‘real’ Sherlock fans), and especially when next to Oreki in specific, who does all he does while giving the least effort possible. On Mayaka’s side, I called her a tsundere, but this is a show that, however you can apply them, doesn’t really appeal to the stereotypical character types. She’s a Tsundere because she can be sharp tongued and that’s usually directed specifically at Fukube, who it’s also indicated that she likes. We then go and explore (slowly and eventually) what drives her frustration, as well as where in life she feels like she must or can’t bend, where her interests lie and how she responds to being challenged where she cares about it.
And, again, these are all slow-burn arcs. By the end of the show (which, in my opinion, functions well enough as a capstone even though the journeys of the characters and indeed the sadly untranslated source novel series aren’t over) the characters have moved forward, at least somewhat, but… life goes on, and they don’t and don’t have to have hit the ends of their respective roads, nor have they overcome all their issues. There’s a degree to which I’m getting ahead of myself by talking about this now, but it also felt an injustice to let the summary go on too long without mentioning what a superb cast Hyouka has to solve them.
The human element is, in general, something of a focus for Hyouka. One thing that does seem to set it apart from other mystery stories is that most of its cases are less focused on what happened than why it happened. Part of this is due to so many of them being about small events, where there aren’t complicated rabbit holes of facts, false leads, and deliberate misinformation like you’d see in a traditional mystery. That’s not to say the stories can’t get complex, but it’s a different kind of complexity that spends most of its energy considering what other people might be thinking in order to reach the truth. Thus, while you could liken the format to something like Scooby Doo, where four meddling kids solve mysteries, the kind of energy Hyouka brings to the table is entirely different. Whether the “detectives” or their marks, you’re watching this one for the characters, and that demands that the characters be good, complex, and human.
The next major arc is, then the Culture Festival actually arriving. At first, it seems to be less of a matter of mystery and more one of problem solving as Chitanda ended up getting a couple hundred rather than a couple dozen copies of their edition of Hyouka, meaning that selling out is going to be their main goal and a stiff challenge. Oreki, of course, minds the store while everyone else goes about trying to promote the Classic Lit Club. Fukube intends to participate in various events and plug the Classic Lit Club, Chitanda tries talking to people for advice in her own adorably meek way, and Mayaka… Mayaka isn’t in only one club, though; she has her Manga club to worry about, where she finds herself in a philosophical argument with another club member that keeps her from pitching the idea of putting Hyouka copies at their room on consignment.
While Fukube takes on a quiz contest (during which he encounters someone who seems to consider him a rival, as one-sided as that may be), Mayaka’s literary woes lead her to bring up one of the major plot points of the arc: a manga produced for the Culture Festival the previous year called “A Corpse By Evening”, which Mayaka considers to be a true masterpiece and proof that there is such a thing as objective quality or true genius. And, around the school at large, we get the first hints of a real mystery to tackle, as a phantom thief is swiping objects from clubs and leaving telling notes in their place with the format of “The ____ Club has already lost their ____”, where the blanks are the club hit and at least some term for the stolen item.
Oreki is largely allowed to conserve his energy, but he’s not entirely without events as he gets wrapped up in a trading sequence of sorts, starting with a broken pen his sister gave him and, by way of quite a few items including a water gun, ending up with some flour.
Fukube gets the Classic Lit Club involved in the Cooking Club’s competition, which requires the help of Chitanda and Mayaka, since it’s three-person teams. Mayaka takes the last turn, as she has Manga Club obligations, and ends up being perilously late. Additionally, Chitanda used almost all the ingredients, leaving Mayaka almost nothing to cook with, just oil, a couple bits not good enough for other people, and whatever by the rules of the contest she could scrounge from campus in the couple minutes she has left. This brings in Oreki with the save, shouting from the window and delivering his bag of flour via three-floor drop so that Mayaka can make kakiage and save the Classic Lit Club’s contest entry… but not before finding that the Cooking Club has already lost their Ladle.
As the Culture Festival continues, rumors of the phantom thief begin to be the talk of the campus, with a realization that clubs are being targeted in Japanese alphabetical order, and that the item stolen matches the club’s name in initial letter, leading to great speculation over what will be hit next, and the Classic Lit Club getting involved as cracking the case live will surely give them the publicity to sell out of their anthology.
Oreki continues the trading sequence with a little something from Mayaka for the flour, and ends up in possession of a copy of A Corpse By Evening (Mayaka having been unable to find hers earlier). He ends up reading it and being utterly engrossed, but perhaps more relevant than the evidently amazing content is the afterword, in which the authors, unnamed, promise a new release the following year, teasing it as “The Kudryavka Sequence” and a take on a great work of Agatha Christie, which brings to mind The A.B.C. Murders, especially in light of the alphabetical thievery going around and the fact that no such Manga released.
Add in the fact that the criminal has signed their notes with a name that can be recognized as meaning “ten letters” and it looks as though the Classic Lit Club may be the tenth and final target as well as some of the chief investigators. After failed attempts to head the thief off, including one in which a letter was skipped, a trap is set at the Classic Lit Club and huge numbers of students attend, hoping to catch the thief in action, but after an exceptionally dramatic finish in which the target item (proofed manuscripts) mysteriously catch fire and the loss note appears from one of the Hyouka copies, the culprit escapes free and clear… but the Classic Lit Club sells out (or close enough) anyway. Fukube, though, seems bothered by these events.
The truth of the matter appears to be that Fukube ended up a fly on the wall as Oreki learned the truth of the whole sordid affair… and arranged its conclusion. It begins with the authors of A Corpse By Evening, who worked together on it despite the main writer having never been interested in Manga before and the main artist (now the student council president) not having much interest in doing it more than on a lark. That they produced something truly amazing is evident (and was a deep blow for one of Mayaka’s manga club friends that a complete amateur could effortlessly do better than someone who had been trying their best), but the teased successor, The Kudryavka Sequence, never came to be, largely due to the now Student Council President’s continued indifference and the writer transferring away.
The culprit is the third and final person behind A Corpse By Evening, now the vice-president of the Student Council. Frustrated that his best friend would ignore his own talents, he arranged the caper to send a message, using the skipped letter to say that the Student Council President could still find The Kudryavka Sequence. However, it seemes that the President never read the manuscript, into which their partner evidently poured her heart after doing A Corpse By Evening, and thus only Oreki put the story together. After this was outed, the two of them then conspired on the ending, using sodium metal from the science club and one of the water pistols from earlier to burn the manuscripts, with Oreki acting as an accomplice to create a scene that would be sensational enough sell anthologies (including the Student Council Vice President buying a stack of Hyouka copies along with Oreki’s assistance).
On the whole, the main theme of the Culture Festival arc, though not obvious until it really starts playing out, is the dynamic between gifted individuals and avid ones. The vice-president of the student council saw something truly beautiful fail to come into being because one of the people with the talent necessary for its creation (the vice-president himself being something of an artist, but not on the same level) didn’t care to use their incredible gift. Mayaka’s friend, on the other hand, tasted bitterness in that, while something of a manga author herself (and behind Mayaka’s second favorite) and putting lots of hard work into her craft, she couldn’t measure up to someone with natural talent. Mayaka herself, who regards her efforts as lesser even than her friend’s, was also brought to tears when she came to understood what it meant to be outshone. And Fukube, who was working avidly to crack the case on his own and thought he was doing well, discovered that he had been effortlessly beaten to the punch by Oreki’s deductions, leading him to reflect in sorrow that perhaps a database shouldn’t even try to make conclusions.
It’s a very bittersweet ending for what’s otherwise a fun, upbeat, and active arc in this show. There’s more loud and colorful stuff going on this time around, and it’s a little more fantastic (though ultimately still grounded when the curtain is pulled back and you come to understand how the thefts were arranged and carried out) than most of the fare in Hyouka as a whole. This is the time where the show feels like it’s indulging in a traditional whodunit, but the ending ultimately brings it both down to earth and back around to character and motivation. When it comes to the stakes and investment in the story, identifying the thief is ultimately a non-issue compared to understanding what he, Mayaka, her friend, and Fukube are going through being associated with talented people. We have fun and sell a lot of anthologies along the way, but there’s something powerful and earnest in that rather depressed finish.
The last five episodes of the show are all essentially one-offs. In one, the Classic Lit Club puzzles over why one of their middle school teachers once stopped a class to be enchanted by a helicopter (he was an amateur mountaineer, and some of his fellows had been trapped in the wilderness in need of search and rescue that hadn’t been able to fly owing the weather). In another, Oreki tries to make up a plausable but wrong answer to Chitanda puzzling over a bizarre PA announcement, in order to prove that he’s not really all that, but gets into it and manages to put together a story that turns out to be more or less true from just a couple sentences and a lot of context. On New Year’s, the gang visit a shrine, but Oreki and Chitanda end up locked in a shed, and have to try to send signals that Mayaka or Fukube will recognize to call for rescue, since Chitanda doesn’t want the embarrassment of shouting for help and being found in that kind of position, since all the workers at the shrine know her and would gossip (After a few failed attempts, Oreki sends Fukube, via tossing an item to be picked up and given to the lost and found, a message from a historical drama they both watched and gets the rescue).
The penultimate episode takes place on Valentine’s, and has its main case be the disappearance of the chocolate that Mayaka wanted to give to Fukube, but had to leave in the club room for him because of scheduling. It’s a big deal, because Mayaka gave that chocolate her all, making it straight from cocoa beans after a mess with Fukube the previous year, and Chitanda feels responsible since it vanished while under her care. The investigation seems to be reaching dead ends and hot tempers until Oreki names the culprit (a girl from the astronomy club, who must have snagged it in the window where Chitanda had to be out) and promises to resolve the matter, recover the chocolate, and give it to Fukube, leading to everyone heading home, Fukube and Oreki along the same way for a while.
Now, they had an encounter the day before in which it was revealed that Hyouka apparently takes place in the Muv Luv Extra universe and that Oreki had awareness of Fukube being in a strange and melancholy mood, as the two of them stopped at an arcade to play Valger-on and Fukube was very much not playing like himself, giving up and going with the flow of a loss rather than acting the part of the competitive gamer he used to be and fighting to the bitter end. The notes of despair and resignation, despite Fukube’s unfading smile, seemed to be something that would stick with Oreki, and strongly recall the end of the Culture Festival.
That comes to a head here as Oreki asks Fukube for his bag and then, after shaking it and hearing the crinkle of plastic and broken chocolate pieces, hands it back and declares his promise fulfilled. The big question, of course, is why.
It turns out that while Fukube and Mayaka have appeared to the audience to be something of a couple, they’re not exactly “official” — Mayaka confessed her feelings in their last year of middle school, and Fukube didn’t give her a proper answer. The reason for that seems to stem from his feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. In essence, it’s both that Fukube thinks the world of Mayaka and doesn’t see himself of being worthy of her, and the potentially more interesting matter – he’s afraid he’d become obsessive, and deeply doesn’t want to let his worst traits consume any chance at a relationship the two of them might have.
The talk between Oreki and Fukube on the topic is both long and, for two characters that had been fairly good friends despite there sometimes being distance between them, kind of hostile. Oreki, essentially, calls on Fukube to think about how he’s hurting Mayaka by not reckoning with her properly and to consider that this time Chitanda got caught in the crossfire, and was nearly inconsolable, thinking that she’d let Mayaka’s chocolate meant to convey precious feelings be stolen when really this was just another step in the odd relationship that is our second pair.
Oreki’s words do seem to get through to Fukube, though, as he’s forced to introspect about his actions and reluctance, and face what he really wants. We see him give Mayaka a call when he gets home, and the obvious deduction is that he probably accepted her affection, and possibly confessed the depths of his own feelings along with his self-doubt that caused the hesitation.
The final episode is, on the surface, a simpler one. Chitanda is called to serve a role in a special shrine parade, and asks Oreki to be her umbrella-carrier as an emergency favor. Some local maintenance means the parade is forced to take a different route, but other than that it goes off without a hitch (and with Oreki stunned by Chitanda’s beauty when she’s done up in doll-like traditional makeup. The mystery is what caused the disruption, since it’s evident that there was some degree of “foul” play (and I use the word loosely), pinned down as a visiting photographer wanting to redirect the parade to get a shot of the done-up girls beneath a fine old sakura tree in bloom, truly a rare and beautiful sight. After puzzling this out with Chitanda while leaving the site, she talks some about her hope for the future, how she wants to help the farming town she’s from (where they are at the moment) be revitalized in the future. She’s hopeful that she can learn the science of agriculture to help deliver better crops, but despairs a little that she’s no good at the business side of things.
At this point, we get one of the show’s few but present “imagine” sequences, and one of the more subtle. The lighting grows more dramatic, and Oreki takes the moment to offer to help her with her dream, taking up the business side of things himself – effectively a very powerful offer that underscores just how much he’s ended up enchanted by her despite his best efforts.
In real time, though, Oreki didn’t get that far, managing to only utter the first non-indicative bit of a sentence. He snaps out of his momentary dream and gets cold feet, mentioning the weather instead. A breeze blows through and scatters some cherry blossoms for an even more beautiful view of Chitanda than the imaginary one, and it’s pretty obvious that even if he didn’t say anything right there, she’s still got Oreki hooked meaning that their potential romance, like the one between Fukube and Mayaka, ends on a technically ambiguous but very hopeful note. This is also how the show as a whole chooses to end, a sweet finish to some of the bitterness that might be lingering from the end of the Culture Festival.
Hyouka is an excellent show. The characters are deep and complex, the pacing is deliberate but strong, the mysteries are compelling despite the stakes ranging from low to downright nothing in objective terms, the art is gorgeous and the stories are memorable. It works as a slow-burn romance since the way the members of the Classic Lit Club relate to one another gets so much time to build and evolve in an organic way. It works as something of a school slice-of-life, hitting many of the high school setting’s most important notes like Valentines angst and Culture Festival goofiness. And it works as detective fiction, obedient to the idea of a “fair play” mystery in that all the clues are natural and present but the cases are difficult enough that the viewer is unlikely but not unable to arrive at the conclusion before the “detective” (Oreki, in this case). It’s rare to get something that operates on so many levels.
As for faults, I have trouble finding any. Romance nuts (which I can be among at times) might have trouble with the fact that neither primary couple is officially sewn up, but their arcs are done so well that I just sort of accept it given that Hyouka is adapted from an ongoing series of novels. Certainly, it’s not going to scratch an action/drama sort of itch, but shows should be the best they can be within their sphere; no one particular element is necessary. I suppose someone could call the pacing slow? But with one or more new sub-cases introduced and solved every episode alongside the larger-scope main cases, it’s not as though the show doesn’t keep the hits coming, so I really can’t sustain that as a complaint – I’d even say (and did say) that it’s a strength more than anything.
In the end, Hyouka is so well put-together and executed that I have no choice but to award it an A+. This is bizarre for me, as Hyouka is most remarkable in its flawlessness, which I normally prioritize significantly lower than reach or ambition… but then, its reach and ambition aren’t exactly lacking: Hyouka invites comparison, even competition, with both the Sherlock Holmes stories and the mysteries of Agatha Christie, a collection that includes some of the best-known characters by some of the most-read authors of all time. It’s not a sweeping epic, but it is an illustrious stage to dare to stand on. Hyouka feels more humble than other shows that earn top marks, but it’s by no means lesser; I’d highly recommend checking it out.