Noisy Killer Case - C.M.B. Vol. 40, Chp. 131

Momoya Tamajirou is a normal artist who according to at least himself works in the movie and manga industry, but there is something odd about his acting as he likes to flail around with knives and call himself the best assassin ever. Tamajirou has a young daughter, Momoya Ichigo, who brings this odd contrast of comedic and ever so slight sorrowful elements to this story as we see her father act very stupidly. The author never presents the daughter to be in a psychologically bad state, but she likes to say things like because of her father's acting, her mom left the house. It's not easy for her.

The story of Noisy Killer is very simple but it has its own type of twist to it. A well-known company does a background check on Tamajirou and learns that he's an assassin who never manages to assassinate anyone, the zero kill assassin. Regardless of this, the company decides to hire him to kill another company's poaching businessman Kakinuma Ryuusaki in hopes of at least bothering his businesses. They offer Tamajirou two million yen ($18 800) if he manages to successfully assassinate Ryuusaki, and 30 000 yen ($280) as a failure reward if he doesn't manage to take Ryuusaki's life.

Tamajirou takes up this offer and starts to go ahead on the assassination. The problem here is that the Kakinuma office where the businessman resides in is a nigh-complete locked room space where the door in front of the office requires two card keys to use on two different locks, and what's more the door is guarded with multiple guards 24/7. One could always sneak around through the secretary's room through the veranda, but the office is surrounded with bulletproof glass that has ventilation windows (usually open) at three meters height. It should be impossible to get in.

But regardless of everything, we see for most of the chapter different situations where Tamajirou goes to the office and try to run past the surveillance, break open doors and fight off guards, he even runs around the place with four legs, and one time he tries to stab the broker with a knife but the knife drops to the floor and he makes his way out. Another time he decides to try to pour gas everywhere to set a fire, but he forgot matchsticks and just poured oil all over himself. He then just slimed his way out of the building, only to come back strapped all over with fireworks for some weird reason.

However, then things take a weird turn. As the fireworks are going off and Tamajirou fights off the guards in his attempt to assassinate the businessman, they see that the broker is actually in his room, on the floor with a bloody knife next to him, and then Tamajirou gets arrested as the blame is seemingly put on to him for attempting to kill the broker.

The situations surrounding the incident are that Kakinuma was stabbed in the shoulder and that caused him to fall backwards and hit his head on the desk, but he's not dead. He was suddenly stabbed in his office by an unknown assailant with the knife Tamajirou had bought (it seems the police have cleaned the weapon for some reason or maybe the author forgot to draw blood on the knife). The police then try to get a confession out of Tamajirou, but he tells them that he didn't do it, yet wonders if he should confess as that might get him the full two million yen reward. This situation forces Inspector Kujirazaki to go get help from our protagonist Shinra to solve the case. How did the killer do it?


Now, the case has some good ideas to it. The fact how it reminds us that in some cases you just have to flip your thinking around - the problem with the case to the police was that without any type of key card or a ladder to use, there is no way to get in the office- but of course that also means that conversely, if you were to get your hands on those, then the culprit would have been able to accomplish their deed. Also, the idea behind the events basically being a sleight of hand type of trick to fool the reader into thinking something else was going on than what we were assuming, was somewhat neat, as it gave importance to the pretty much filler-feeling material in the chapter.

But other than those core ideas, the execution was pretty terrible, the comedy unfunny and the pacing just felt off - very little happened during the case. Maybe I'm too used to Detective Conan's condensed pacing but this was just empty. I can't believe this took 100 pages to tell, 4 times longer than it should've been. It's a story you'd maybe enjoy more in Lupin the III than in C.M.B. Whether or not one can actually logically pinpoint who the culprit is and how they did it, I don't know... doesn't seem possible. Guessing is of course a freeway to victory in this case but whatever, I guess. It's a simple read that doesn't really do much.

The reason why I even read or talk about this case now is because I was just flipping through the C.M.B. chapters and saw this intriguing character connection between a young girl and her pitiful father.