Where’s Sherlock effing Holmes when you need him?

I have a couple of primary thoughts in reflecting on the second episode of Shoushimin Series. First, would I be patient enough to give this series any runway if I didn’t have the Hyouka experience to draw on? And second, would I have given Hyouka any runway if the visuals hadn’t been so sumptuously gorgeous? It’s been over a decade since Hyouka (fuck me, really?), and I haven’t done a full rewatch so my memories are imprecise. But I know (and I think you can tell from my write-ups) that I was fairly close to dropping it after a couple of episodes. Of course that was during the busiest season in LiA history, so context does matter.

This much I can say – you won’t get an episode that more exemplifies the Yonezawa Honobu experience than this one. It was as trivial a mystery as you could ever want – “how did the DB classmate make oishii cocoa without dirtying any dishes?”. The one that actually mattered – the theft of Osanai’s bicycle and fatal attack on her tarts – gets only the briefest of mentions. It was certainly irritating to hear that she got blamed by the school for having her bike stolen, but only because it was a reminder that victim shaming is endemic in Japanese culture. That has its roots in Bushido. If a samurai was assassinated (or wounded in an attempt) he was considered at fault for letting it happen. That’s why you saw famous people issuing public apologies for contracting COVID-19.

I have to say up front that I’m not a fan of Kengo so far. He just comes across as pushy and obnoxious. And Osanai’s meek persona is pretty cliche across the board. If there’s a fourth wheel a-la Hyouka it’s not obvious (Kengo’s sister seems unlikely to be that important), so that leaves a lot on the shoulders of Kobato to carry the story. This whole “trying to be ordinary” thing seems to be a riff on the eponymous Japanese adage “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down”. And judging by his conversation with Kengo it probably comes down to the younger Kobato being arrogant about being the smartest guy in the room, and showily solving mysteries of the sort we saw this week.

That all sounds pretty negative I guess, but in the end I did find myself getting more wrapped up in this trifling affair than I had any right to be. That’s Yonezawa too – he makes you play the game on his terms, and often manages to make it interesting. The fact that the whole thing wasn’t some challenge thrown down by Kengo but simply that he was too lazy to wash any dishes was pretty funny. That sort of appeal has a limited shelf life – if I’d never started caring about the characters in Hyouka it wouldn’t have worked. But hey, Shoushimin Series only has ten episodes to play with it can scrape by on surface appeal in a way Hyouka wouldn’t have been able to.