There are plenty of anime out there that deal with law enforcement and detective work, but for every anime that deals with one of these themes, it seems that there is one to match that deals with the other side of the coin. That is to say, criminals. Some even incorporate both aspects as sympathetic positions which is exactly the type we're looking at today. In the early 1950's a young girl is rescued from the home where her relatives are slowly poisoning her to get her inheritance, by the legendary phantom thief known as Twenty Faces. After being subsequently reclaimed by the authorities two years later, Chizuko Mikamo pits her wits and her knowledge against the great detective Kogorou Akechi in order to find Twenty Faces first and unlock the secrets of his past while dealing with several other attackers who are after his legacy. So grab your throwing knives and make sure you're aware of your surroundings, today we're looking at
The Daughter of Twenty Faces. |
| Twenty Faces, the man who started it all. |
Read in Japanese as
Niju Mensou no Musume, and alternately titled as
Chiko, Heiress to the Phantom Thief, this anime was based on a manga of the same name by Shinji Ohara. It ran in Comic Flapper Magazine before it was taken up by the studios Bones and Telecom Animation Film as producers. The anime aired on Fuji TV, as well as Kansai TV, and Tokai TV and it ran from April to September of 2008. It has yet to be licensed by an American company, which quite honestly, I find to be a shame, especially for any literature buffs out there. Shinji Ohara had to get special permission to use Kogorou Akechi and his nemesis, Twenty Faces, in the story from the surviving family of
Edogawa Rampo who had been a well known writer of detective fiction during the periods before and after WWII. You can think of him as the Japanese Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with Akechi and Twenty Faces being the Japanese Holmes and Moriarty respectively. It may not be a clear cut comparison, but it's the best I got.
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Though here it's not so much in the romantic sense,
Twenty Faces sure knows how to sweep a young lady off her feet. |
Since the theme is phantom thieves, what better way to start than with a heist? After introducing Twenty Faces by having him make a total fool out of the Japanese police, we are introduced to our main character, the young heiress, Chizuko Mikamo. While living with her aunt and uncle, she has discovered after doing some research that they are trying to slowly poison her to death by drugging her food in hopes of getting her fortune. In order to counter this, she tries to find ways around it, with the assistance of the new Butler that was just hired. By coincidence, Twenty Faces happens to be after an heirloom of her family's called the Anastasia Ruby. At the last moment, it is revealed that the Butler is Twenty Faces and he offers Chizuko the chance to go with him as he takes the ruby. Naturally Chizuko accepts without question. After basically being adopted by Twenty Faces and his gang, she lives with them for two years, becoming fast friends with one of the younger members, a young man named Ken. However, tragedy strikes when most of the gang is wiped out in an attack by a rival gang of thieves leaving Chiko in the hands of a bumbling detective who had been hired to find her while Twenty Faces, her mentor and father figure vanishes without a trace. Over the subsequent days, she is returned to her aunt (who had killed off her uncle while she was away) and runs into another Detective named Akechi, who challenges her to see who can find Twenty Faces first, because he has good reason to suspect that the legendary thief is still alive.
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Edogawa Rampo often had Kogorou Akechi
wearing a dirty yukata or a business suit.
In this story Ohara paid attention to this detail by having Akechi
appear with both fashion choices. |
As is often common in seinen stories which tend to lean more towards character and plot development than other anime genres the world is very well defined. The story takes place in the early 1950's shortly after Japan has had it's sovereignty returned. As a result, many of the older characters carry their share of scars from that time and World War II is mentioned often, though always as "The War". Naturally, many of these scars are important to the plot and have some pretty major repercussions. The majority of the action takes place in Tokyo, though there are points where we venture into other parts of the world such as Britain, China, and other parts of Europe. Wherever the story goes, the locations are very well defined for the most part and I never felt lost when I wasn't supposed to be. Suspension of disbelief is maintained very well throughout the series and it goes out of it's way to make sure important events are kept into account, even if they aren't outwardly mentioned. Since it's a period piece, the costumes are designed specifically to reflect 1950's attire and as best I can tell much of the representation of the period is historically accurate seeing as by this point in time the rebuilding of Tokyo would have been mostly finished. There is a little bit of technology that shouldn't have been developed yet like a tank Twenty Faces' gang has commandeered (or in some cases has never been developed at all like some of the researcher antagonists who've done things with their bodies most of us couldn't even consider) but the story is good enough you're willing to ignore it, even if you are a history nerd.
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The first official meeting of the Shojo Tantei-dan,
Shunka tried to be inclusive by making it the "Onna tantei-dan"
(Onna=woman) but Tome vetoed it because
she didn't want to be considered old. ^^ |
The main characters are well done. Chiko is a smart and intelligent girl who learns early on from the gang how to take care of herself, and when she comes home, she uses these skills to do everything to evade her aunt's continued attempts to poison her. Because of this she is still living in a very unfriendly environment and it's interesting to see how she deals with this challenge while steadfastly soldiering on in search of her missing father figure who constantly seems to evade her as well as the antagonists that are also searching for him. She is also joined by Tome, a maid in her aunt's household who helps her once she discovers the truth and her schoolmate, Shunka. Tome is hard to read at first but she is unconditionally protective towards Chiko, initially pitying her for the hard times she perceives Chiko went through while "kidnapped" and then coming to care for her as a younger sister almost as they get closer. Shunka has a vivid imagination and conceives of calling the core group the Shojo tantei-dan, which is a play on words based on the Shonen tantei-dan or the Detective Boys who were the original helpers of Edogawa Rampo's character Kogorou Akechi (think of them as the counterpart to the Baker Street Irregulars who helped Sherlock Holmes on some of his cases.) The only difference being that Shojo indicates that everyone in the cabal is female. Shunka is mainly interested in Chiko and the adventures she gets wrapped up in because she herself is bored and says she wants to have as much fun as possible before her arranged marriage kicks in. This is especially funny since not only is she the most prone in the group to getting herself in trouble following Chiko around, but she even recruits one of the other girls at the school to be the group's manga artist at one point.
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Not to downplay the loss of his eye or anything,
but considering the before and after shot,
I'd say in his brief absence, Ken took a level in bad-ass. |
Naturally the focus is on the main characters but the supporting cast is fun in it's own right. Naturally Akechi and Twenty Faces are an important part of that supporting cast. Twenty Faces on his own is presented as a larger than life type character who is shrouded in mystery even to those who know him and yet in Chiko's mind his status as a father figure is as solid as granite. In spite of his absence throughout much of the show, his presence is felt very strongly. Akechi plays a much more outlier part but his unwavering devotion to his craft and his determination to find Twenty Faces serves to fuel Chiko's drive to to get there first. Akine, the bumbling detective who was initially hired to search for Chiko by her aunt and then to handle the press after her return is also of interest since even though he's something of an bumbler, he isn't a bad guy, and even strikes up a friendship (and possibly even a romance?) with Tome later in the series. There's also Ken, who later turns up as a survivor of the attack, sporting an eye-patch and longer hair. His development is also interesting as he has come back from the experience bitter and angry because he feels like he had been abandoned by "the boss." Even so, he is a helpful ally to Chiko through the rest of the story. The only real gripe I had with the supporting characters was the fate of the gang of thieves. They're set up at the beginning to be the
nakama as the gang travels the world in search of things to steal but right at the point where it becomes easy to remember everyone's names and care about them, everyone dies. It happened a little later in the series than most sacrificial lambs are slaughtered, (episode 6 is fairly late by most standards) but by that time I had invested enough into getting to know them that it was pretty upsetting to see them go. ;-; Although on the flip side, it makes Chiko's return to her aunt's house all the more traumatic because she had only just before been with a surrogate family (however morally questionable) with whom she was legitimately happy.
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They say love will make you do crazy things,
but volunteering as a guinea pig for the military funded
body enhancements she developed just so Twenty Faces
would notice her might have been a little excessive. |
As far as antagonists are concerned, they are a far cry from monster of the week. The aunt is a constant threat to Chiko's health and well being while she is at home, and one has to wonder how such an evil witch could have ever been allowed near the family. Clearly Chiko's as of yet uninherited fortune must be incredible indeed for her to risk poisoning Chiko and her own late husband in order to get it. While the thief known as Tiger and his gang who are responsible for Twenty Face's gang's demise are definitely a threat, he's not around very much. However, once Chiko get's home she finds herself the target of a number of other unsavory characters who are after her thanks to a rumor that she has been given Twenty Faces' legacy. For starters we have a number of characters who have basically been human test subjects for military research. One woman basically inhabits a prosthetic body except with a more supernatural element as it seems her mind is the only thing that's still really human while she seems capable of hypnotizing people and controlling them on a whim. She had this done to herself why? Because she wanted Twenty Faces' attention. Another duo of antagonists (one of which shows up later to help Ken out) are the results of experiments to reinforce their own existing muscles for superhuman strength.
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| I guess you could say she sweeps the floor with these guys. ^^ |
Thankfully the story is almost completely free from filler unless you count the single interlude where Shunka asks one of her classmates to chronicle the adventures of the Detective Girls in manga (which is really funny) and most of the stuff that might otherwise seem eccentric such as the sequences in the first few episodes where Chiko learns her skills from the Twenty Faces' gang serve very clear purposes as the viewer recognizes the affect of this training well after Chiko has left the gang behind. It also trains the viewer to keep on their toes to some extent since the show is largely an extended mystery. While you will get several action sequences, which are very well executed by the way (there's one scene in particular where Chiko uses a broomstick as a weapon and basically pwns a pair of would-be assassins), most of the focus is on Chiko's quest to find Twenty Faces and to find answers, while dealing with her aunt and various other dangers. Even the side trips that do exist are worthwhile, such as when Tome takes Shunka and Chiko to the beach, because it serves to establish their relationships with each other before the story moves onward. The other main characters do also get their moments of awesomeness, like when Tome, after having learned the truth about the poison basically intimidates Chiko's aunt into allowing her to take Chiko and live in a different house (you could feel the intensity in that room). Ken was also a pretty cool guy before, but after he gets the eye-patch his level of coolness goes into sufficient bad-ass territory to give him clearance to take part in the finale rather than just watch which can't be said for Chiko's nakama since the rest of them are decidedly non-combat personnel.
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Somehow, my intuition told me that this strangely friendly
and innocent old guy couldn't be trusted.
What do you know? My Intuition was right. |
As the story continues, and Chiko and the others draw closer to getting answers to what's up with Twenty Faces, the stakes seem to get higher and higher. At first, it's just a matter of Chiko wanting to find him, but then the antagonists start coming after her for a legacy she doesn't even know she possesses. It is eventually revealed he was a military scientist during the war turned rogue when his research became too dangerous for anyone to have access to as it involved the creation of plasma, most commonly referred to as the fourth state of water and it is this that drives us closer to the climax of the story where one of Twenty Faces' fellow researchers puts the entire city in danger in his mad desire to complete the research. As far as the ending is concerned, the climax is well worth the effort. In fact the whole journey is very enjoyable from start to finish, especially if you like mysteries and thrillers. The only real problem I saw was that in some places it was kind of easy to predict what was about to happen, and that got to me a little bit, but it wasn't enough to ruin the experience.
The presentation was well executed. Some 3D animation is used for vehicles on occasion but it's completely unobtrusive and you barely notice. Music also plays a small role as a song is one of the keys to the story. This is nice because it takes some advantage of the fact that the roles of Chiko and Twenty Faces were both given to singers. Aya Hirano, Chiko's voice actress is known pretty well for playing the lead role of Haruhi in
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but she's also an accomplished singer in her own right. Twenty Faces' voice actor, Yuya Uchida has appeared in a number of films and shows both live action and animated including playing Dr. Stein in the Japanese dub of
Soul Eater but his musical resume takes him back as far as the 1960's, even touring with the Beatles. The ambient music is at times reflective, jazzy, and even whimsical on occasion, but does it's job decently well. The show only has one opening, "Kasumi", by 369 Miroku, and one ending theme, "Unnamed World", performed by Aya Hirano. "Kasumi" covers the overall tone of the show perfectly as it reflects Chiko's longing for the family and father figure she has lost, while "Unnamed World" is an upbeat but somewhat generic pop song. Overall, the show is very well put together and it's a shame it hasn't seen a release in the United States. The show is heavily underrated and should get a lot more attention. If you manage to find it, check it out. It's well worth it, and that's the tiger's two cents.
Images taken from The Daughter of Twenty Faces.
