Who Killed Daigorô Tokuyama? (2016)

 

Director: Keisuke Toyoshima, Tomoyuki Furumaya and Kôta Yoshida

Screenplay: Yasushi Akimoto, Kôji Tokuo, Kôhei Kiyasu and Ryôichi Tsuchiya

Cast: Nijika Ishimori; Yui Imaizumi; Rina Uemura; Rika Ozeki; Nana Oda; Minami Koike; Yui Kobayashi; Fuyuka Saitô; Shiori Satô; Manaka Shida; Yûka Sugai; Miyu Suzumoto; Nanako Nagasawa; Neru Nagahama; Mizuho Habu; Aoi Harada; Yurina Hirate Akane Moriya; Nanami Yonetani; Rika Watanabe; Lisa Watanabe; Kyûsaku Shimada; Noriko Eguchi; Kazuyuki Aijima; Ryô Iwamatsu; Hiroki Konno

Ephemeral Waves

 

That's rude to the cart. Apologise!

Regardless of the whole mini-series, which was still a pleasing experience, this Japanese murder mystery's first episode alone, nay, even just the moments before the first time the opening credits play in the series is how you start a narrative off brilliantly. Going to an all-girls school, Class 3-C's students come in at the start of the week in the morning only to find their titular homeroom teacher Daigorô sat dead at a desk with a knife in his back. Already, with cheery female vocals on the score and someone prodding him with a broom end to check if he is dead, this mini-series already did not beat around the bush with its premise and showed a sick sense of humour.

And said first episode gets better. When one girl, the MVP of the series with her space-headed sweetness and carrying a stuffed toy to class, takes a selfie with him (one of many throughout the show) and the class is contemplating whether you can commit suicide practically by stabbing yourself in the back. The score has already gotten idiosyncratic at this point with blaring saxophones, only to suddenly turn into a late era Tom Waits tribute, with a gruff vocal tribute of a man who smoked cigarettes to the point he got that voice, joining in. Daigorô is going to mellow out in the series, and contort itself in contrived ways with its ultimate mystery, as much as a show to promote the large female ensemble cast, to make everyone sympathetic. That proves not surprising as this is media to promote an idol group, specifically Keyakizaka46, a spin-off sister group to Nogizaka46, the "official rivals" of AKB48, an idol group that some readers may recognise just the name of. Alongside being a rare toe-dip into this culture as an outsider, this toe-dip for me in Japanese television already won me overbefore you even got to the opening credits.

And the pilot episode is perfect. Irrationally, but keeping in tone of the show's intentional (and even unintentional) sick sense of humour, the girls decide not to tell the authorities their homeroom teacher is dead but hide him in one of their lockers, the one owned by Neru (Nagahama Neru), who was not coming to class only to do eventually later on. Even then, the first episode the first lessons on the Monday, as one of the their class Hirate (Hirate Yurina, as most of the Keyakizaka46 group have characters named after their real ones) wants to "bust the crime", is taken up with the issue that the locker until someone kicks it on afterwards keeps opening mid-lesson. Already you are having a mass paper-rock-scissor game to determine who should try to give him mouth-to-mouth, and the ethical question that, despite deserving his killer punished, Daigorô himself was likely a sex pervert spying on his classmates, least going to a brothel with a schoolgirl theme a lot in his off-work time. Eventually the class will have to worry about him already starting to smell, having to bury him only to dig him back up when school ground redevelopment is about to transpire, and in spite of the mini-series clearly pulling back its punches later on, to be sweet and promote this ensemble cast of idols, Daigorô as a show is still won me over for knowingly playing a twister and openly strange tone. There will be only one actual dream sequence, one joke that will be lost on many, one member who speaks only in Yamagata-ben dialect that a classmate has to translate, and more of the surreal contnet is in the opening credits. But this show's nature is going to be deliciously perverse whilst also wholesome. There is also the fact that Daigorô is seemingly texting the entire classroom beyond the grave, so this show does not rest its laurels in racking of the tension for the students...

This is a lower budgeted production, as you only have a few locations, all in a real school, never seeing outside beyond a couple of aerial shots. You never see the students' home lives and it exists as a narrative in just a single week, where the adults and outsiders phase in and out of the students' class where most of the narrative transpires. Large amounts of the show are shot in a blue tint or a strong autumn yellow for afternoon scenes predominantly. One of the really distinct touches beyond this is that, communicating to each other by phone to secretly gossip on their situation, the classmates all have their own cute symbols representing them displayed onscreen. You see no other classes, just Class 3-C, but this narrative, a mystery full of red herrings, is entertaining in its own hermetically sealed form.

More so when you factor in the adults themselves, who in contrast to the students, baring a couple, are usually corrupt or weird. The meek head principal, who is obviously sinister, ultimately caught out for being bribed entry, or the janitor who sweats profusely and emphasises with objects like carts and the air conditioner, even demanding the class apologise to them for abuse they have suffered. One-off figures weave in complications and questions, like Daigorô's wife, who brings coriander grass and macaroons to try to trap a student, under the preteens that her husband's affair, including his favourite brothel being not just a schoolgirl based one but a peek-a-book one, means he has a student as a mistress. The adults here in this world, of Shinjuku North, come off as absurd, selfish and/or misguided. One exception, a slight spoiler is that in this show's convoluted narrative Daigorô has a twin brother, a meek onion farmer who still looks up to his twin, and helps provide empathy for the murder victim, regardless of his behaviour. Or the French art teacher, played by a Western actor speaking French with Japanese subtitles, who no one understands, because they cannot understand his language, until he reveals he has been able to understand and speak theirs.

The show, as mentioned, mellows. Everyone in the class learns to become a better person - such one accepting her entry into the school was bought, even if it means having to contradict it, revealed to the student that she passed the entry exam in a scene afterwards. Even when the killer revealed gets into some deeply silly content. ([Huge Spoiler Warning] - Natural causes, with the perverse fact one of the schoolgirls, the lovable one with the plush toy, is secretly a psychopath only guilty of desecrating a corpse. [Huge Spoiler Ends]). It is a testament however to the show that, even in how Daigorô's corpse is eventually brushed aside with that plot point, this show is sweet for all its grimness. Intentionally and unintentionally, it has a deeply sick sense of humour. It is not even a spoiler to reveal the final twist is that another random corpse appears, turning into a Groundhog Day scenario, as it just emphasises the show's virtues in the whimsically macabre.