Furinkazan Murder Case - Detective Conan Vol. 59, F613-618

"An' where's Robin Hood right now?"

- Heiji Hattori (Detco f.613, p.8)

Detective Conan is quite the anomaly when it comes to detective fiction as it has stood the test of time for over 25 years but not only that, it's also gotten yearly movies since 1997 and the author Gosho Aoyama has always drawn numerous high quality frames for each of the movies (Aoyama's scenes are noticeable in the movies if you pay attention as there's a lot of focus and thick lines over the characters in his drawings). However this year has been quite bad for cinema industry due to the virus outbreak all around the world so I'm sadly expecting Detective Conan's 24th movie: The Scarlet Bullet, to sell far less than its box office breaking records of the past years, which is a shame as I know many people, me included, are quite big fans of the characters it's starring. 

Aside from the yearly films, Conan also stands out from rest in the genre for its much more main character-focused narrative and compact short cases. Most episodic detective fiction series tend to focus on locked rooms in uninhabited islands and mansions, but that's merely just a part of how Detective Conan is structured. Sometimes it focuses on old school tricks, sometimes on modern "current day" mechanics for its crimes which is pretty cool when it's pulled off well.

There are numerous other series that also do the short-case format but none of them manage to be as condensed yet fantastically crafted as Detective Conan - condensed storytelling is very hard to pull off as it more often than not feels boring and as if the author is simply info-dumping his ideas, which is why series like Q.E.D. and C.M.B., and often even Kindaichi tend to take their time until they start to focus on the case and its characters; taking your time to get to the point works well when you try to create atmospheric stories, but as I said, it can take a long time to get to the point and you end up flipping through the pages as they don't offer information to take in. Because other authors focus on atmospheric storytelling that needs to take its time, their short-cases tend to feel really lacking in comparison and waste of time.

Thus, the condensed pacing is what sets it apart most of the time along with Gosho Aoyama's style, and even when some of the tricks can be familiar, the series also tends to have cases where they subvert expectations from how the case would have gone in other series. Detective Conan is very professionally crafted and never feels draggy or fillerish in its cases the way practically any other series does, and one of the best more classic cases in the series to present this compact aspect of the series is the Furinkazan Case which takes place in volume 59 of the series - in the manga Furinkazan case happens right after the infamous Clash of Red and Black overarching story arc of volume 58, which is the longest story in Detective Conan. It's nothing but back-to-back greatness in these volumes.

Furinkazan Murder Case - Feud between Torada family and Tatsuo family
 
The first page of this story immediately kicks into high gear as Kogoro, Ran and Conan have a meet-up with Naonobu Torada (61), the head of the Torada family. Naonobu and his wife Tatsue (58) had requested the famous Sleeping Kogoro to come and solve a very perplexing case in which he assumes there's a killer out there who hates the Torada family. According to Naonobu this killer already took the life of his son Yoshiro, who died after hitting the ground hard, smashed his head, and lost too much blood from the impact.

Yoshiro's death is however quite perplexing one as he wasn't pushed off a cliff or anything normal like that, instead a tornado yanked him high into the sky and dropped him on the rocky ground while eyewitnesses saw him being taken by the whirlwind. A day later Yoshiro's body was found. However the reason why the Torada family doesn't believe Yoshiro died of a natural cause (which the tornado obviously would be), is because next to Yoshiro's corpse, in his own pool of blood, a centipede had been placed while the blood was still fresh and wet. In other words the person to leave this centipede to the scene of Yoshiro's death was a person who didn't even try to help him by calling for help or anything like that.

The person to find Yoshiro's body was Shigetsugu, who is also of the Torada family and the younger brother of the victim, but due to Shigetsugu's lazy attitude which causes him to spend his time "searching for a treasure that doesn't exist", the all too serious Torada family head (Shigetsugu's and Yoshiro's father Naonobu Torada) doesn't acknowledge him as a successor to the family.

Now, the Torada family most suspicious group of people to leave Yoshiro to his demise are the Tatsuo family. The Tatsuo family also had a tragedy just the other day as they lost their own son a day prior. Tatsuo family had already taken steps to figuring out their son's killer, and their suspects were the Torada family, which is the current client of Kogoro. The Torada family had called Kogoro to not just investigate Yoshiro's death but also as a countermeasure against the Tatsuo family's antics - as apparently since the police have been slow on the uptake, the Tatsuo family had hired a skilled detective to solve the case for them.

What makes this case more curious is the duality between two families blaming each other and two different but very familiar detectives and new Nagano -region police that are introduced to work on the case in a way that's not really seen in Detective Conan as overarching characters have personal business with this murder case itself.

The detective hired by the Tatsuo family head, Tamefumi Tatsuo (56) to figure out who of the Torada family could have killed their son is none other than the duo of Hattori Heiji and his childhood friend Kazuha Toyama. The murder case on the Tatsuo family side is pretty cold-blooded in comparison to the one on the Torada family side.
Koji Tatsuo was found dead the other day: he had been tied up, buried so that only his head was visible, and bludgeoned to death with a blunt object. Before Koji's blood had dried up, someone had put a centipede on his head. So the case shares similarities with the Torada family case. Tamefumi's mother, Shigeyo Tatsuo (78) believes whole-heartedly that the monster to kill her grandchild was one of the Torada family members, and the motive for the murder would have to be revenge as they believe the Tatsuo family left their son to the wolves so to speak.

This second case also shares similarities with the other case as Tamefumi's other son Akira Tatsuo was the one to find the dead body of his brother Koji while Akira was on his way home from Yabusame practice, which is the art of horseback arrowshooting that is practiced around the town for a local yearly festival that's also happening very soon in the story. Akira himself is extremely good at shooting whatever target he's given, but there's still someone else hiding in the story that used to be, according to Akira himself, a much better ranger.

The case gets even crazier as Akira's wife Ayaka disappears and winds up dead in the forest - except the reader gets to see her death go down as she gets stranged on a rope tied to a tree branch. With a dead centipede found on this third crime scene as well, along with the fact that the crime is actually an impossible crime due to the fact that there are no footprint marks on the muddy ground, this case ends up being pretty chilly. There is also a fourth death in the case when the last son of Torada family winds up dead from burning alive next to a train rail track. These four cases follow an old classic japanese war slogan known as Furinkazan.

The village festival is the core thing that connects the two cases and the symbolism of the centipede together as there are people in samurai suits shooting arrows during the festival. However the case does go deeper as six years prior the previous master Yabusame archer of the village, Kuroto Kai, fell off a cliff and died during practice. The one to find the body of Kai six years ago was none other than Yui Torada, the wife of the victim of Torada family and with surprising connections to certain characters.

When it comes to the overarching story, this case introduces us to a new hardboiled detective, the one-eyed cane-using Yamamoto Kansuke from the Nagano Prefectural Police. The policemen in Detective Conan are usually overarching in a way that they make their appearance every time our cast goes to their region. But unlike other cops in the series, Kansuke is very serious, dangerous-feeling, semi-aggressive and down-to-business. What makes this case more interesting is that our hard-boiled detective is included in the list of suspects in a pretty convincing manner. I'm impressed at how the everything in this case flows so naturally and without feeling forced.


Okay so, this case is feaking amazing! I spent hours upon hours just immersed in the story of these two families and the numerous mysteries that were presented with our great, great cast of characters solving them individually very professionally. This is one of the harder Detective Conan cases for sure - I've read the case about decade ago but I can't believe that I didn't get who the killer was on this reread! It feels amazing to be wrong when it comes to these long cases, as this case was double the length of the usual Detective Conan case.

The motive of Furinkazan - a classic samurai slogan, two families at war, murder scenes with centipedes, a village festival, mysterious deadly history, a samurai armor, a hard-boiled detective, a missing treasure... the Furinkazan case is fantastic example of peak Detective Conan storytelling in so many ways. I could easily spend hours just theorizing and talking about a single chapter of a case of this caliber.