SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary

Episode 5

There's a true and tested technique in mystery writing where you drop the answer to the entire puzzle right at the story's beginning. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None is my favorite example of it (and probably the cleverest) and it's also true of this week's episode of SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary. I'm not sure if it's a statement on how the original author is no Christie or just that I've gotten used to the logic of the show (or perhaps that I read too many mysteries) but I know that it seemed all too obvious what the solution was the moment the word “pastry” was uttered.

That makes this episode a bit tedious, albeit in the same way that most of them are. It's one thing to be a fair play case but another entirely when the stakes feel so low that discovering the clues doesn't feel important. That's the case here: Kengo calls Kobato to the Newspaper Club to solve the Problem of the Mustard Berliner. (Yes, the same kind of jelly doughnut from JFK's speech in Berlin, although the bit about him mispronouncing the word is apocryphal.) The school paper planned to write about a new German bakery and decided to settle the question of who got the assignment by playing a game: most of the berliners would be filled with jam but one would have mustard in it. Whoever got that one would be stuck with the assignment. The problem is, no one admits to having eaten a mustard doughnut, and this being high school, the theory seems to be that this means no one will be willing to write about the bakery. Kobato goes through a variety of steps, all of which he delights in, which is probably one of the two best moments in the episode. His sly smile when he realizes why Kengo summoned him says more than anything he's verbalized how very much he wants to be himself rather than a boilerplate “ordinary.” (The other notable scene is how the characters react after eating some habanero sauce. The variety of uncomfortable body language is a triumph.)

Unfortunately, the steps Kobato follows are all so expected that there's not a lot to appreciate. With two missing club members (as in, not in the room rather than vanished), it feels elementary that there would have originally been more pastries on the plate. The basket of snacks as a gift for returning surveys is important since the entire case revolves around eating. The red herring of Kobato assuming that Osanai is crying because she was summoned to the Guidance Room again works for about five minutes. Still, if you've been paying any degree of attention to her character, the truth becomes clear long before Kobato reaches it. It's nice that it is a mystery (and a fair play one) more than any episode since the first, but it's also more than a bit underwhelming.

But that's what the aim is for this show, I think. Kobato doesn't need big, flashy cases to solve, he just needs little problems to exercise his mind to make him happy. Maybe that's why his given name, Jogoro, is one letter off from Edogawa Ranpo's great detective, Kogoro. He doesn't need to be a Kogoro Akechi or a Sherlock Holmes, but he does deserve to be Jogoro Kobato. With each case he solves, I hope he comes a little bit closer to that realization.

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SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.