If, like me, you remember the 2012 Kyoto Animation series Hyouka with great fondness as one of the best series they ever did, than this season’s Shoushimin is for you. Based on a series of mystery novels by the same author as the original Hyouka novels, Yonezawa Honobu. Like his other series, this one too features a too smart for his own good protagonist with a dark past, now wanting to be nothing more than ordinary Sadly for Kobato Jogoro, having a rule about not turning down requests from people you barely know even if they drag you into some bizarre investigation and leads you to postpone the plans you already made with your actual friend to buy some exclusive cakes? Not something ordinary people do.
To be honest, that whole first episode annoyed me a lot and Shoushimin really only clicked with its second episode for me. Jogoro’s actions made no sense to me, especially as we barely knew anything about him or Osanai Yuki, the shy girl with whom he formed that pact to become ordinary together. Him leaving her to wait while he goes running at the request of Kengo, somebody he knew from elementary school and only met again when they were all accepted to the same high school frustrated me. It all seemed forced. Jogoro has to be involved in solving the mystery Kengo needed him for, so that they would be delayed long enough to at the end of the episode set in motion a certain chain of events necessary for the larger story. The mystery itself is mundane and uninteresting, slightly artifical. A girl’s purse has been stolen or misplaced and Kengo has dragged Jotoro and some other random class mates in to search for it; Jotoro is reluctant to use his ‘powers’ but in the end solves its disappearance through deduction. In the end it turns out it would’ve mattered: had he and Kengo done nothing, the purse would’ve turned up again the next day.
This sort of Sherlock Holmes like deductive reasoning can be incredibly irritating when it’s clear the author has put his thumb on the scale to make it all work, as was the case here. By contrast, the mystery to be solved in the second episode is even more mundane yet much more interesting. How was Kengo able to make three mugs of good cocoa while only using a small spoon to stir it with but no extra cup to heat the milk up with? That’s what his sister is trying to figure out when Jogoro and Osanai are visiting him. Kengo was very proud of his cocoa making and explained how to make good cocoa, so it wasn’t just a question of slopping the cocoa powder and milk in some cups and microwave them. Resolving how he did it takes up most of the episode’s runtime butunlike the first episode’s mystery, it is all highly entertaining as successive hypotheses are proposed and shot down in turn. Jogoro has to work for his answer. Having him work through his deductions as he’s solving the puzzle, working together with the other two is much more satisfying than him giving the answer after he had already done so as in the first episode.
What the answer is will surprise you, but it is in keeping with somebody psychotic enough to eat his slice of cake with the plastic still on, who begins by taking a bit from the middle. Kengo is not very ordinary either….
The pretentious letterboxing aside, this is a gorgeous series, full of little Shafterian tricks to keep what might have otherwise been slightly dull dialogue scenes snappy and interesting. I do like this sort of series, Hyouka, Bunny Senpai, even Monogatari, with protagonists being dragged into weird situations while pretending they want to be just normal. Shoushimin looks to be a good addition.
