Back to School

"Who killed Cock Robin?

I, said the Sparrow ... "

—Yoichi Takato quoting the English nursery rhyme "Who Killed Cock Robin" in "Gokumon Juku Satsujin Jiken"

Among longtime fans, "Gokumon Juku Satsujin Jiken" (Prison Prep School Murder Case) is considered to be one of the best (if not the best) offerings from the Kindaichi series. There are several worthy reasons for this preference—a devilish performance by the sleuth's nemesis, tricks that are simple in their foundation but sophisticated in their execution, the thematic nature of the serial killings and the slow, deliberate build-up to the settings that make each of the events possible. But perhaps, the most significantly unique quality is that this majestic story arc—in a series reputed for repeatedly setting up impossible/quasi-impossible crimes and locked room murders—does not feature a single incident that can be considered (technically) to belong to either of the two categories aforementioned.

The story, the brainchild of the writer–artist duo of Seimaru Amagi and Fumiya Satō, was faithfully adapted as episodes 10–14 of the first season of Kindaichi Shōnen no Jikenbo Returns (2014). After another disastrous performance in his school examinations, Hajime Kindaichi is forced by his 'childhood friend' Miyuki Nanase to come to Gokumon Juku, a prep school as famous for the results it produces as it is notorious for its excessively stringent regulations—the reason why it is also called Hell's Gate Prep School. Right on cue, the cruel machinations of Kindaichi's eternal nemesis, Yoichi Takato, are laid bare early on, when an examinee is killed in the school as soon as Kindaichi and his friends step into its halls to enroll—a crafty piece of business involving something called the magician's select (or the magician's choice). A tense standoff ensues between the mastermind and the detectives when Takato appears before Kindaichi, Nanase, police superintendent Kengo Akechi and police inspector Isamu Kenmochi to dramatically throw down the gauntlet and dare them to prevent his plot from succeeding. It is against this backdrop that Kindaichi and Nanase (with Takato and Akechi, both disguised as teachers, in tow) decide to attend the prep camp that the school is organising in prison-like facilities deep within forested mountains.

The first victim

The importance of the first two, slowly-paced episodes cannot be understated. They lay down the rules by which this game is to be played. The strict and extremely specific rules concerning the diet of the students, their study schedules, the class schedules, the limited paraphernalia of things students can carry with them during the trip and norms governing the conduct of examinations may seem to be excessive and comical, but all of these specifications are used to devastating effect by the perpetrators later on in the story. There's also a fair amount of foreshadowing and clueing in these episodes—for instance, the part which shows a bus travelling in a tunnel under neon light en route to the prep camp location is an important clue that goes on to solve a vital and wonderful bit of misdirection in the last episode. Above all, "Gokumon Juku Satsujin Jiken" shines best when it sets up this atmosphere of extreme unease when you are aware that terrible things are afoot but you don't have the slightest idea what exactly they are. The second episode in particular, where not a single murder happens, excels in creating this heavy, brooding and disconcerting atmosphere of perpetual unease. Against the backdrop of seemingly normal classes in session, a number of students mysteriously vanish, but the viewers aren't exactly shown what happens; instead, the scene simply segues into another ordinary classroom scene where the seeds of some other disturbing occurrence are being laid—all cogs in the wheel of a monstrous plot hatched by the dastardly Takato.

As the main antagonist of the series, Takato's moniker of "The Puppeteer from Hell" is well deserved and closely resembles the criminal organisation Pluto, the main villain of Tantei Gakuen Q (Detective School Q), another series on which Amagi and Satō worked. Takato's role is that of a criminal consultant extraordinaire—manipulating the feelings of impressionable people who are looking to seek revenge, organising intricate criminal plans, providing people with the requisite blueprints and tools for the plan's success and then disposing of any loose links should the plan be thwarted. In this story, the blueprint and tools Takato provides his two co-conspirators are for themed murders (mitate satsujin), the most well-known example of which is probably Agatha Christie's The A. B. C. Murders. In "Gokumon Juku Satsujin Jiken", the murders in the study camp are made to mirror the topics of discussion during classes and examinations. One of the student's is found burnt, thereby replicating a chemistry class lecture on spontaneous combustion; another is found dead in a bamboo thicket, associating itself with a literature class on the Japanese folktale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter; a third student is wrapped up in a double-helix spiral after her death—a throwback to an examination on the topic of DNA which she had completed; the fourth casualty is hanged to death, much like the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons, the subject of another assessment where the student murdered was accused of cheating. And much like The A. B. C. Murders, the purpose of resorting to themed murders is to hide and disguise. But unlike The A. B. C. Murders, where the alphabetical killings were orchestrated to hide the actual target of the whole spree, in "Gokumon Juku Satsujin Jiken", mitate satsujin is used for a far more damning purpose: to shield and hide a vital, glaring flaw in the execution of the perpetrators from prying eyes—something that ultimately costs one of them their life.

The double helix claims a victim

After the sinister build-up in the entirety of the second episode and the first half of the third episode, the body count (a total of eight, if one counts the one in the past and the post-denouement casualty) suddenly ratchets up from the second half of the third episode onwards. The conundrums presented are simple ones—how can so many murders have occurred in the two buildings of the study camp (the Sunlight Mansion and the Moonlight Mansion) at a time when classes and/or lunch hours were in session in both locations separated by miles of forests, a tough-to-navigate road with only a rapidly flowing stream connecting the two? And how come these bodies are surfacing, hours after their death, in such rapid succession? The answers to both questions lead one to marvel at the intricate groundwork laid in the previous episodes and the ample visual foreshadowing employed. There are numerous factors at play here, many of which hark back to the 'rules of the game' introduced before—the architecture of both buildings including the 'sealed-off' portions of one of them and how their floor plans 'fit together like pieces of a puzzle', the complicated but effective scheduling and division of classes and eating/recreation hours in both locations, the true purpose of the extremely limited but 'healthy' food items, the real motive behind limiting the things students can keep during to a bare minimum, two very daring, rope-led nighttime walks through a dense forest that 'mislead' students and teachers alike to a different location only to take them back to where they started after the second walk (after all the mischief has been done) and lastly, an optical phenomena that tricks the people and compliments the misdirection employed during the nighttime walk exceedingly well. What's even more surprising is the number of flaws and holes in this seemingly perfect, multilayered plan that are revealed by Akechi and Kindaichi in the denouement. Going by the variety of tricks employed and the level of deception achieved, too many cooks indeed spoil the broth—just not in the way you would usually expect.

"Gokumon Juku Satsujin Jiken" is not without its share of flaws, however. The sustained focus on the brilliant howdunnit angle results in the motive fading into the background. One of the faults with revealing the motive through flashbacks here is that you will not be able to figure out whodunnit by approaching the case from the motive alone. Even though one gets to know that another student of Gokumon Juku had died in the past, the hints linking it to the present case and the parties concerned are too vague for one to concretely identify the people who were most affected by the past incident. Even the whodunnit reveal leaves something to be desired. One of the students is forcibly made the scapegoat in a unsubtle, heavy-handed way only for them to pointlessly 'commit suicide'. And while one of the actual co-conspirators is revealed through a rigorous chain of logic and deduction, the second culprit is mainly unmasked through a somewhat unsatisfactory method of 'filling the dots' where it is found that one of the victims is revealed to have died unbelievably just before he was able to finish the stroke that would have led him to complete a dying message that would have directly named said culprit. Games of luck and chance in a story of logic and reasoning? Nah, not my cup of tea.

Possessed by Dostoevsky's Demons

"Gokumon Juku Satsujin Jiken" is an amusing case-study for me in some ways. Its sheer brilliance in a few specific aspects threatens to run away with it all, until the flaws surface and weigh it down. Ironically, the genius nature of the plot and the mechanics shines a starker, uglier light on the weaknesses in the execution of the whodunnit and the motive-related revelations, making the comparative imbalance seem more glaring and apparent than it would in a mediocre, by-the-numbers story. None of these drawbacks, however, takes anything away from the majestic and ambitious nature and scope of the groundwork and build-up the story employs, which are, frankly speaking, simply unparalleled.