Bad Chemistry

街中冷えだしてagain, new fallen snow 

君の体温胸にしみるよ

「今日の君と明日を待つ」（Garnet Crow）

 

The city starts to get cold again, new fallen snow

But your warmth envelops me

"Waiting for Tomorrow With The You of Today" (Garnet Crow)

If this year had been normal, I'd have reviewed the Detective Conan film The Scarlet Bullet right about now, as the home video usually releases around this time of the year. The film's been postponed to next year, but I guess today's topic feels a bit like the Conan films.

A worrying growth in crimes that are extremely difficult to detect for conventional police detectives due to the ingenious, but evil of use science and technology has led to the creation of the Scientific Investigation Unit within the Metropolitan Police Department. But even the specialists attached to this unit are not able to bring much light in the case of a serial bomber: two bombs have already gone off in Tokyo, but not even the SIU is able to figure out what the bomb actually is, as they can't find any trace of the material that used as the explosive at any of the crime scenes. Superintendent-General Hoshina of the Metropolitan Police Department decides to resort to a very unusual measure: he calls his own grandson Kyou back from the United States and adds him in an advisory role to the SIC. Kyou is only twelve years old, but a true genius who has gotten multiple university degrees and assisted police investigations over in the States with his knowledge of science. In Japan, Kyou is partnered with... Kugayama Kyou of the SIC. While the two share a name, Kugayama's not at all like young Kyou: Kugayama is the lazy rookie in the SIC, who's usually only answering the phone whenever everyone's out, or simply playing videogames. Young Kyou however quickly shows his worth when one look at the latest bombing scene gives him a clue, and eventually the two Kyou's solve the case. But more mysterious cases that require the brilliant mind of young Kyou await them, and slowly the two also learn of the existence of a criminal mastermind who's been planning these crimes in the 1995-1996 manga KYŌ.

KYŌ was created by the duo Takashige Hiroshi (story) and Minagawa Ryouji (art), who are probably best known as the creators of the action series Spriggan. While Spriggan was serialized in Shonen Sunday (like Detective Conan) however, KYŌ was not serialized alongside that other mystery series with a child-detective in Sunday: KYŌ was serialized in Shougaku Go-nensei ("Fifth Graders") and Shougaku Roku-nensei ("Sixth Graders"), magazines aimed at elementary school students of specific grades (series in these magazines "move up a grade" too whenever a new school year starts, so you don't miss out on series as you grow older). That's perhaps why the series features a brilliant child as the protagonist, and the series' focus on science, for hey, if you study well and choose a career in the exact sciences, you'll be able to solve these crimes yourself too!

Well, not really, unless your name is Yukawa Manabu, for the first thing that came to mind when I read this manga was that the plots here are similar to those of the short stories of Higashino's Galileo series: the criminals in KYŌ all make clever use of very specific applications of scientific phenomena to create impossible crimes. The first bomb case for example is 'impossible' because the police can't find any trace of the explosive at the crime scene and don't even know how a large amount of the explosive could've been brought to each of the scenes unseen, while there are some other minor gems in subsequent stories too. In the second story for example, a man is apparently boiled to death in his own apartment which was locked from the inside, while the third story is about a man who was found frozen in his hotel room. And not just frozen: it was clear the man had been instantly frozen to death as he was still standing! The methods used to create these impossible crimes is also of a rather epic scale when it comes to mystery fiction, using specific machinery or resources to be able to produce the wanted scientific phenomena. Interestingly enough, I had to also think of the Detective Conan films of these last few years. The criminal schemes there have been featuring a lot of explosions as well as significant growth in scale, and in that sense, the stories in KYŌ were a bit like if the Detective Conan film formula would be used for a regular series. 

As a mystery manga, KYŌ's a bit predictable in the sense that often you'll have some vague ideas about how the crime was committed, but ultimately, these impossible crimes all rely on scientific phenomena that you'll probably not think of immediately,  so it's more about the surprise of learning how some natural phenomena could be used for criminal intents, rather than this being a series with the intention of actually challenging the reader with solving the crime themselves. The story set-ups are interesting though (seriously, the concept of a man being frozen instantly is awesome), but the focus is completely on the howdunnit, not on the whodunnit, and the plots also feel a bit repetitive in the sense that each story follows the same formula of young Kyou almost instantly having some idea of what is going on and then the criminal using low-level thugs to scare Kyou off, and then older Kyou trying to get the two of them out of trouble. It's also a bit silly to see what kind of crazy ideas these criminals come up with for relatively small goals (relatively speaking to the actual method), but that's part of the fun!

The series is also very short. It consists of five stories (each comprised of two chapters), and that's it! It's all collected in one volume and while the story does reach a certain conclusion, and it actually manages to portray an overarching story across the limited length involving the mastercriminal the Professor, it definitely feels more like a set-up for something larger. KYŌ is very compact and surprisingly well-planned for such a short series, but this is a case of a series that would've benefitted from more chapters, if the following plots had also become more diverse. As it is now, it doesn't outstay his welcome, but you're kept wondering whether this was really all they could get out of the concept.

But as a single volume release, KYŌ is fairly entertaining material. Compact, to the point and strongly focused on telling its story through the limited number of chapters, while at the same time featuring a few interesting murder situations. Worth a read if you happen to come across the volume.

Original Japanese title(s):  たかしげ宙（原作）皆川亮二（画）『KYŌ』