My central complaint about Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace—though it may sound petty—is that it's filed as a mystery show. Certainly adapting the works of famed mystery writer Edogawa Rampo into an anime, centering on recurring characters from his works such as the Sherlock Holmes-inspired detective Akechi and his young assistant Kobayashi as they solve difficult crimes, would all suggest that it is indeed a mystery show. But apply any criterion for the mystery genre, and it all falls apart. By keeping the clues hidden off-screen we are never given the tools to solve any of the mysteries, and often we are not even introduced to the killer before the reveal occurs. Likewise, we get no motive for the crime until the killer is unmasked, whereupon they pull an explanation out of thin air with no prior establishment. And worst of all, by creating a villain who continually resurfaces no matter how many times they are defeated, Rampo Kitan gradually raises the stakes of the crimes and ultimately renders Akechi and Kobayashi’s work useless, as them solving murder after murder does little more than give a sense of posthumous retribution.
The recurring villain, a figure behind a skeleton masked referred to as Twenty Faces, was originally a singular mysterious figure who eluded Akechi’s pursuit, but in Rampo Kitan they are a mantle donned by ordinary people who enact vigilante justice on criminals who have eluded punishment. The first time we see a Twenty Faces murder, it is solved in a matter of minutes, and the backstory, while shedding light on the nature of the Twenty Faces figure, is also both a bit far-fetched and extremely contrived. This trend continues as every successive figure fits the trend of social reject, subject of parental and peer abuse, and brilliantly misunderstood. In terms of substance their stories are paper thin, and have little to no semblance of the real psychology behind abuse and isolation. All we get is trope after trope trying to make us feel sympathetic.
Likewise, Akechi and Kobayashi are adapted from Rampo’s original figures to both be teenagers, a move meant to associate closer with the show’s target audience but which ultimately pigeonholes their personalities into a single fixed role. Akechi is a child prodigy who solves cases in a flash, downs coffee and medication continuously, and doesn’t associate well with people due to his intelligence. Kobayashi is naïve, bright, and cheerful, but finds the world boring and gets excited seeing gore and macabre murder mysteries. The former fits the role of the misfit teenager while the latter is just a highly disturbed, implausible child. While Kobayashi’s penchant for disguising as a young girl to catch criminals is adapted into the anime, it is also taken further and told as his hobby, creating forced moments of awkward sexual tension between him and his close male friend Hashiba, while Kobayashi remains clueless to the whole thing. In fact this is the only purpose for Hashiba in the show. They remain in their roles with absolutely no character development, save for the earthshaker of finding out that Akechi doesn’t like small animals.
All the characters and arc titles are taken from Rampo’s stories, but they bear no resemblance to the original works. Take for instance the first story, called The Human Chair. In Rampo’s work this is a story of a young female author receiving a letter purporting to be an admission of a crime. The letter writer is a chair maker who has constructed a sofa chair such that he can fit inside the inner lining and sit there unnoticed, connecting in some bizarre way to the people who sit in it. The chair began in a hotel lobby, but eventually ended up in the possession of a woman who he grew to love and know intimately as he spent day after day just sitting inches away from her in silence. As he describes the woman the author realizes it is her herself that the chair maker is describing, and she is terrified until another letter promptly arrives saying that the whole letter was a manuscript for a new story, which the unknown author has decided to call The Human Chair. It was a brilliant and chilling work with a humorous twist that served as both a suspense story and a commentary on suspense works themselves.
Now we take Rampo Kitan’s version, which simply has Kobayashi waking up in front of his teacher, who has been dismembered and arranged as a chair. He's suspected until he figures out the true culprit, a figure we have not yet met, who confesses that it was an act of love for the teacher. The story serves to introduce us to Kobayashi, but is not only bizarrely devoid of any meaning but also elicits few reactions besides “Kobayashi is pretty smart and very seriously disturbed”. Why it bears the name The Human Chair when the show claims to be based on Rampo’s works is beyond me. They created something completely knew, and so they should take responsibility for the fact that it was vapid rather than claim association with the more brilliant original work of 90 years ago.
The ending is an arc to reconcile Akechi’s past with Twenty Faces, but revolves around a formula that can calculate any and all future events, a premise so ridiculous it makes even the laughable plot twists that come almost believable in the paradigm of this new utopian reality. The iconography of butterflies, a motif that came up constantly during the show, presumably takes on meaning, but really the motif takes on the shallowest possible meaning of “someone wanting to change”, with little or no complication. While the visual style of the show, using blank figures for unimportant people and filling them in or giving them the Twenty Faces mask as they become relevant, was engaging enough, and the opening and ending themes reflected the chaos and tension the show clearly wanted to convey, the stories themselves don’t hold up. My favorite episode by far was the comedy filler in the middle of the show revolving around a cat, a baby, a bomb, and a group of burglars. In the end most of the episode was chalked up to a coincidence, and none of it was ever referenced again. Yet there was far more entertainment in watching that circus act and having it all be chalked up to coincidence than seeing them fail to produce a true mystery, and then try to contrive a reason for us to care about it.