Review of “A-shou satsujin jiken” (1979)

Sequential art with text

Ōtomo Katsuhiro (writer-artist).

Read in 2021.

Read in Japanese in the Sayonara Nippon (1981) collection.

One day, a young man walking past a construction site gets a bucket dropped on his head. When he comes out of the nearest clinic, he no longer remembers what he was supposed to do that day, so he goes home, where his broke flatmates insist on sharing the 50,000 yen he got from the construction crew. He then finds a dead body just outside his window. He resolves to identify the murderer, preferably as someone other than himself.

The title means “the murder at house A”, jokingly anonymizing the name of the building in the style of crime-adjacent authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky. A grotesque comedy, spoofing the Holmesian murder-mystery genre.

References here: Maison Ikkoku (1986).

sequential art text Japanese production fiction