Whatever I was expecting from Kabukichou Sherlock, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it.  Mind you Kabukichou is indeed probably the most unapologetically fetishist place in Tokyo, so I guess a series built around it is going to bring some weirdness to the table.  Sherlock Holmes has been done to death, and anime’s obsession with detective stories has reached preposterous levels – maybe you just need to do something really outlandish to stand out.  If that was the goal, consider it met.

If I’m honest, whatever Kishimoto Taku and director Yoshimura Ai were going for here, it didn’t quite work for me.  More than anything this came off as silly, which pretty much cancelled out any consequence from the murder plot at the center of the premiere.  There’s a Jack the Ripper thing going on, and the setting for much of the premiere is The Pipecat, a hostess (and probably more) club somewhere in the Kabukichou.   The manager of the club is a bearded drag performer named Mrs. Hudson played by Suwabe Junichi, and that’s probably the most normal thing about the episode.

As for Holmes himself (among the many oddities here is that most of the cast seem to have English names), he’s an eccentric played by Konishi Katsuyuki.  Certainly it’s expected that Holmes is going to be eccentric so nothing too shocking there, though the fact that he delivers the solution to a mystery in (bad) rakugo is certainly an unusual stylistic choice.  Watson is a straight-laced doctor who wanders out of his element trying to hire Sherkock for a case (the nature of which we still don’t know), and Holmes has a teenaged Baker St. Irregular named Moriarty who returns the wallet a local urchin stole from Watson (minus the money that was in it).

Maybe you just have to be in the mood for this show and I just wasn’t in it, I don’t know.  Maybe my expectations were unrealistically high after Kishimoto’s last original, 91 Days, a show where all the stylistic flourishes seemed to work (though there he had the luxury of working with Omori Takahiro).  But none of the choices really clicked for me, and the tone seemed rather forced and overly mannered start to finish.  This is an original show with some real talent behind it, so I’m certainly not going to bail on it after one episode.  But either it or I will have to be in a different place next week or it could be a short honeymoon.