SHOSHIMIN: How to Be a Normal Person – Episode 8

©米澤穂信・東京創元社／小市民シリーズ製作委員会

Despite last week's Murder on the Orient Express, 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.) Though they're a lesser-known Agatha Christie duo, Tommy and Tuppence are a solid team, the latter a married couple, and their story has more spy thriller elements than straight-up mystery. That also fits with the ending of this particular storyline, which began last week when Osanai was kidnapped. While it seems like Kobato simply swooped in to rescue him with Kengo as her muscle, the truth is that Osanai isn't completely helpless, a classic Tommy and Tuppence story line. (N or M? comes to mind.)

Most notably, the resolution of the kidnapping plot reveals why neither Kobato nor Osanai ever become normal. Osanai has always been underestimated, which certainly makes her seem like the others. To her kidnappers, she's just a quiet girl who plays the good two shoes and talks bad about them—and they insist that by kidnapping, threatening, and hurting her, she'll be too scared to do anything else for them. But as we've seen before, Osanai's sweet face and soft voice hide a steely determination, and despite being unable to move, she still uses her words to strike fear into her antagonists. In most of her lines in the episode, Osanai quietly demonstrates that she has a mental catalog of her injuries and who inflicted them. When she softly says she will remember them, and that the scar will only make that memory harder, she is the velvet glove on the iron fist. The more they hurt her, the more reason she has to hurt them.

It’s not until the girl gang leader decides to hurt Osanai that Kengo and Kobato burst into the scene, but given Osanai’s cunning Smile Before She Speaks, I’m in danger of the boys saving the kidnappers, at least for the time being. We don’t know how Osanai will—and probably still will—carry out her revenge, but last episode’s line about her being a wolf to Kobato’s fox is probably worth remembering. Kobato herself seems to keep forgetting, as this week’s fictional journey through the liminal spaces of sandbanks and bridges suggests. Kobato is absolutely convinced that he must go rescue Osanai, taking the Nancy Drew-like step of not calling the police until he solves the mystery of where she’s being held. But when he reaches the sandbank, she’s on the bridge, and when he crosses the street, she’s there, safe and unblinded. Kobato is most likely dancing to Osanai's tune, and I'm not entirely sure that perhaps a better Mysterious Golden Age comparison for them would be Kogoro Akechi and the Black Lizard.

This is the highest stakes episode we’ve had so far. I still felt a little let down by the end, but Osanai and Kobato are just two high school students, worried about being normal. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to Osanai than meets the eye, and I think Kobato might be starting to get that impression too. After all, a wolf in a sheep pen can be just as deadly as a fox in a chicken coop… if not more.

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SHOSHIMIN: How to Be a Normal Person is now streaming on Crunchyroll.