©米澤穂信・東京創元社／小市民シリーズ製作委員会
Despite the use of Murder on the Orient Express last week, Kobato and Osanai are more Tommy and Tuppence than Poirot and Hastings. (If anyone fits that latter dynamic, Kengo is the Hastings to Kobato’s Poirot.) Although they’re a lesser-known Agatha Christie duo, Tommy and Tuppence are a solid team, later a married one, and their stories have more of a spy thriller bent than straight mystery. That also fits with the denouement of this particular storyline, which began last week when Osanai was kidnapped. While it looks like Kobato is simply charging to the rescue with Kengo as his muscle, the truth is that Osanai isn’t entirely helpless, a classic hallmark of Tommy and Tuppence stories. (N or M? comes to mind.)
What’s most striking about it is that the resolution to the kidnapping plot shows why neither Kobato nor Osanai is likely to ever be ordinary. Osanai is consistently underestimated, which certainly gives her the appearance of being like everyone else. As far as the kidnappers are concerned, she’s just a quiet girl who acted the goody-two-shoes and ratted them out—and they’re positive that by kidnapping, threatening, and hurting her, she’ll be too scared to do anything else to them. But as we’ve seen before, Osanai’s sweet face and soft voice hide a steely resolve, and although she can’t move, she uses her words to put fear in her antagonists. In most of her few lines in the episode, Osanai quietly demonstrates that she has kept a mental catalog of her injuries and who inflicted them. When she gently says that she will remember them, and that scarring her will only make that memory stick harder, she’s the proverbial velvet glove over an iron fist. The more they hurt her, the more reason she will have to hurt them.
It isn’t until the leader of the girl gang decides to hurt Osanai anyway that Kengo and Kobato burst in on the scene, but given Osanai’s sly little smile before she spoke, I’d hazard that the boys saved the kidnappers, at least in the short term. We don’t know how Osanai would—and perhaps still will—have carried out her revenge but that statement from an earlier episode about how she’s a wolf to Kobato’s fox is probably worth remembering. Kobato himself seems to keep forgetting it, as this week’s fictional run through the liminal spaces of sandbars and bridges suggests. Kobato fully believes that he has to go and rescue Osanai, taking the Nancy Drew-like step of not calling the police until he’s solved the riddle of where she’s being held. But when he reaches the sandbank, she’s on the bridge, and when he goes to cross the roadway, she’s already safely there, blindfold removed. Kobato may very well be dancing to Osanai’s tune, and I’m not entirely sure that perhaps the better Golden Age of Mystery comparison for them is Kogoro Akechi and the Black Lizard.
This is the highest-stakes episode we’ve had thus far. I still feel like it fizzles a bit at the end but Osanai and Kobato are just two high school kids, complete with the angst about being ordinary. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to Osanai than we’re seeing, and I think Kobato may be starting to get that impression as well. After all, a wolf in the sheep pen can do just as much damage as a fox in the henhouse… if not more.
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SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.
