The Men Without Faces

"Sushi, kamikaze, fujiyama, nipponichi.."

"Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!" 

Yep, two Conan reviews in succession!

Earlier this week, I reviewed the newest Detective Conan film Fallen Angel of the Highway. The Detective Conan films always release in the second/third week of April, just before the holiday season Golden Week starts there, making it an annual event. Which is why the publisher also times the release of a new volume of the comic in the same week the manga releases, and author Aoyama Goushou also tries to include stories with the main characters of that year's film in that volume. This all requires some timing with serialization and book releases, which is why... apparently it's been a YEAR since the last Detective Conan volume was released. Of course, the times we had a new volume every three, four months are long gone, but I had completely forgotten the most recent volume until last week had in fact been volume 107, which was released along-side the April 2025 film One-Eyed Flashback. Fortunately, volume 107 didn't end with half-way a case, so Detective Conan 108 opens with a brand-new story: An Encounter With the Past. Conan and the Detective Boys run into FBI agent Andre Camel, who after the events of volume 100 was forced to change his identity.  The man now known as "Andou Rekiya" jogs frequently, and just as he and the children are talking, they hear a shot from a nearby apartment building, followed by a knife thrown out of a window. They all hurry to the flat in question, where they find a man already knocking on the door. However, there's no answer and they eventually have to find the landlord to open the door for them. Inside they find the inhabitant of the flat dead, having apparently shot herself through the head with a pistol. It appears she had relations with three male hosts, who had all been called to her flat at that time. At first sight, it appears the woman committed suicide and wanted to have that image haunt the three men in her life, but Conan and Camel soon find indications that suggest the woman had hit her head fatally first, and that the gunshot was used to mask her wound. Furthermore, sushi chef Wakita appears with a sushi delivery made for two persons, suggesting the victim had in fact only invited one of her male friends here, who would be the likely suspect for the murder. But if it was murder, what about the gunshot Conan and the children heard and the knife being thrown out of the flat which was locked from the inside?

This is a pretty run-of-the-mill impossible crime in Detective Conan, where author Aoyama strings a few simple tricks together to create a seemingly impossible situation. The individual parts are usually not that memorable, and even taken everything together, every aspect of the impossible crime feels a bit too seperate from the rest with little synergy, so it's hard to really think of this as a great locked room mystery simply based on its mechanical features. The story is made more interesting with the underlying storyline, which is having Camel run into Wakita, who was revealed in previous volumes to be a disguised Rum, second-in-command of the Black Organization.  The reason why Camel has to hide his true identity is because he and Rum recognize each other, but now the two men happen to gather in the same flat, and they both immediately sense danger. So while Conan, the police and Camel are trying to solve the murder, Rum/Wakita is also trying to determine what the connection is between Camel and Conan, making it more difficult for Conan to solve the case the way he always does.

This story connects directly to Where The Chaos Ends: the police investigation ends and all the witnesses are free to go their own way. Wakita/Rum commands his underlings to kidnap Camel, but just before that happens, Camel is stopped by another resident of the apartment building. Camel is mistaken to be a friend of one of the residents there, who is playing very loud music. The neighbors on both sides happen to be game streamers and the loud music is interrupting their livestreams, so they want Camel to tell the man to stop. It happens Camel and the man in question just quarreled once in front of the building, but they go up to the flat, but there's no answer despite their knocking. The landlord opens the door again, but finds it locked with the door chain. Camel and Conan spot the man hanging in the back of the room, so Camel breaks the chain and rushes to the man, but it's too late: the man apparently hung himself from a pull-up bar. Hints scattered around the flat however make Conan and Camel suspect the man was murdered inside a locked room, and by one of his two neighbors nonetheless, but both claim to have an alibi as they were live-streaming games and interacting with their viewers.

This is just hilarious. So there's a locked room-murder in a flat, Conan solves it, the police is just ready to leave and then ANOTHER locked-room murder happens in another flat in the same building, with the landlord being asked to unlock the door both times? This is insane!

It's a murder in the same building... and mystery-wise, it's also very similar to the first story, with the murderer stringing variations of a few relatively simple, often-seen tricks to accomplish the locked room. While the idea of live-streams acting as an alibi is interesting, I feel too little is done with it, with little of the potential offered by this concept explored in depth. Had this story been written ten years ago, I am sure Aoyama would have managed to explore the game-live-stream-as-part-of-a-mystery concept in more depth, but with health and scheduling issues, it seems Aoyama for the last few years have relied on much simpler mystery plots, instead focusing more on the character relationship developments needed to advance the overall storyline. Here we have the same deal, as it turns out the assistant-teacher of the class of Conan and the Detective Boys, Wakasa has also arrived at the scene, bringing her in close contact with sushi chef Wakita/Rum. As revealed in earlier volumes, Wakasa too is actually Asaka, a former bodyguard in disguise, and she has a beef with Rum: her run-in with Wakita immediately confirms her suspicions about his true identity, while he too finally manages to confirm for himself who Wakasa truly is. Thus the reader is treated to a battle being played beneath the water surface, as Rum has identified both Asaka and Camel, and they have identified him: how are they going to get out of this situation? The story ends with a somewhat odd solution chapter, where Conan confirms for himself that Wakita is Rum in disguise: while this was already explicitly revealed to the reader, we now learn how Conan managed to figure that out based on the hints that have been laid throughout the series every since the character of Wakita was introduced in the series. It feels a but superfluous, because the reader already knew this fact, but I do like some of the hints.

The Secret Hidden in the Photograph at first seems disconnected from the previous storyline and starts with Ran, Sonoko, Conan and Sera Masumi visiting a hotel for high tea. Just as Sera parks her motorcycle at the hotel, a sleazy man praises her motorcycle and asks if they ever met. Ran and Sonoko immediately suspect the man's hitting on Sera, but both Sera and the man truly seem to have some recollection of each other, but they are not sure from what. At the hotel, Sonoko and Ran notices a famous actor and an influential politician are also present, though "incognito". Conan deduces that the man who spoke to Sera is in fact a journalist. Sera realizes she saw him at the hotel bombing case she was involved in: the journalist had taken a picture of the crowd, including Sera and her "little sister" Mary. Sera needs "convince" the journalist to delete the picture so she rushes to his hotel room, just as he returns with his girlfriend following him. He says he forgot his phone so he pops in the room, with all the others waiting outside, but when he doesn't reappear even after ten minutes, they peek inside, only to find the journalist with his head bashed in, with no other person in the hotel room! The actor and politician also appear at the door because of the ruckus, and it is soon revealed both men were being blackmailed by the journalist with compromising pictures, giving both men a motive for the murder, but if either of them did it, how did they escape the room while Sera and the others were waiting outside the door?

Again a story where the underlying plot, the threat of having the crowd picture that also includes Mary and Sera being published, is more interesting than the actual mystery: the solution to the locked-room mystery includes trite elements that we haven't seen used with such little originality in this series since the very first volumes. Meanwhile, the "first half" of what the culprit did to pull off this crime hinges on him counting on something the victim would do that seems very unreliable. Explaining what the culprit did in the most simple terms also results in a very silly sentence that you wouldn't expect to be used as in a mystery story: not that it is a very sure way to actually achieve what the murderer wanted though... 

The volume ends with the first chapter of Memories of a Ring, in which Ran, her father and Conan are relaxing at a hotel with hot springs which by sheer coincidence is also visited by Kanagawa Prefectural Police Mobile Unit squad leader Hagiwara Chihaya and her friend, and also by Inspector Yokomizo (Chihaya and Yokomizo being the focal characters of the film Fallen Angel of the Highway). There's also a group of women there, who used to be in the same school club. When one of them looses her ring, the others help looking for it, but then one of the friends is found murdered. Unfortunately, fans who read the collected volumes will have to wait until autumn, as that's when volume 109 is scheduled. Oh well, at least it's not 2027...

Detective Conan volume 108 sadly enough doesn't manage to break the mold of the stories of the last few years: with Aoyama not being able to publish weekly chapters consistently anymore, most of the stories end up being forced to include some element that is connected to the greater storyline just to keep things going, and evident from the quality of the more recent years, Aoyama has trouble juggling that with cool short mystery stories with original or memorable tricks. While I am interested in seeing how the greater mystery unfolds with all these cool characters, I can't deny I really miss having stories I vividly remember because of what cool tricks they used, or because it had a great whodunnit plot. I'll always be reading this series and be there when it ends, but I can't deny I really miss the better mystery stories of yore.

Original Japanese title(s):  青山剛昌『名探偵コナン』第108巻