Book Review: Case Closed Volume 65
I hope that everyone has been having a good week, and are putting
up with the monotony of the daily grind.
Things have been going pretty well, though things have been
a little dead here because I chose to drop a simulcast and the month is not
seeing many new releases, and I can still do what I like.
Towards the end of last year, I received some credit for
Barnes & Noble and used it to get some books that I did not expect to
receive until February or March, due to how they have shipped things in the
past, but, for some reason, they have decided to ship each title from the order
as they come, and the penultimate title of that order recently arrived.
Today, I will be reviewing that title, which is called Case
Closed Volume 65 by Gosho Aoyama.
As I have given a series synopsis in an earlier
post, I will not go over it again.
Everyone is on the hunt for Kaito Kuroba, who is determined
to break into the safe for what everyone thinks is another valuable gem, but
things do not seem right, and Jimmy is determined to find out why the thief
that slips away from him so often is really there.
However, this encounter with the ever-elusive thief is not
the only thing to crop up for the child super sleuth, because somebody that was
thought to be dead appears in front of an FBI agent and gets wrapped up in a
robbery case, along with Jimmy and the Junior Detective League, and some recent
acquaintances head off to Tokyo to get Jimmy's help with a baffling case
involving a red wall and a friend of those acquaintances is among the suspects.
I must say, this volume was quite intriguing.
As expected from the pattern in that been established of more
than 30 volumes, the case that started up in the previous
volume, which made it seem like somebody was impersonating Kaito Kuroba or
trying to set him up, finally came to a conclusion in this volume.
While Viz might not be releasing every series that I follow,
mainly because their main focus is on series that are highly popular, though
like DBZ (Dragon Ball Z), probably not worth any high praises that they get,
one of things that I have really liked about them was how there is good
consistency in maintaining a pattern.
Yes, they do not have that much control over the titles they
bring over to my country, as I have mentioned a few times, but they have yet to
annoy their fans as much as Yen Press did with a title that I have probably beaten
like a dead horse, because they did not give us the content that was important
to the flow of the series that fans over in Japan got, and because of that Viz
does deserve the support they get, as they deliver what fans want, even if not
everyone is happy with how they translate things.
If they had removed the conclusion of the KID case, like how
Yen Press never released the complete contents of chapter 28 of Judge in
the final
volume, I would have berated Viz as much as I berated Yen Press for a book
that had problems no fan of manga, let alone other mediums used to tell people
fictional stories, and the cases involving Kaito Kuroba seem to be some of best
in the series.
Thankfully, that did not happen, which makes me want to give
Viz Media good round of applause, though not as much as if they were not so
behind either the German, Vietnamese, or, even better, the Japanese releases.
I also liked how well this volume started off.
Even though Detective Conan does not have a terrible
track record when it comes to starting or ending its volumes, it is not exactly
perfect.
Last year, Viz Media released volumes 61-64 of Detective
Conan and, even though most did not start off in a way that were incredibly
dull, though one was dull because Viz refuses to release more than 4 volumes a
year and the four month wait lessened my interest in the wait, the 63rd
volume had one of the worst starts in the series because the cases that
started it were dull because either the culprit was obvious or did not succeed
to in getting me to suspect anybody other than the person I first guessed to be
the culprit, which made it one of the best examples of how to push fans of
detective, mystery, and crime fiction away, instead of pulling them in and give
them reason to read through every case contained in the volume.
Fans of any genre of fiction want to pulled in enough to
lose themselves, and even though this can be accomplished through various
means, depending on the medium used to present the story or series and kind of
work it is, the only way that this could be accomplished in the detective,
mystery, and crime fiction genres is to start out with cases that seem
interesting enough that people would want to investigate things on their own,
which is something that Gosick, another
series I like, did right, though the cases there ended so badly that they would
not measure up to the best cases in Detective Conan or Agatha Christie's
best works.
Here, that excitement was presented by continuing on with
the KID case and things played out in a way that kept making me wonder what
Kaito Kuroba was up to, as well as who he was, though I did kind of remember
who he disguised himself as from what I remember before reading Viz Media's
translation, and things escalated further when Gosho Aoyama tried once again to
make us wonder what happened to Akai, by presenting a person that looks like him.
Now, I might not be entirely pleased with this, since it
further convinces people that things are not that interesting unless there is a
KID case or incident involving Black Org, whose boss may have been revealed
in the Japanese releases recently, even though the mystery is still focused on
the identity Rum, Black Org's second in command, but I was at least pulled in
and wanted to see what was going on, as well as try to figure things out for
myself and did not give things away immediately.
If Shogakukan, or whoever had they had compile these
chapters into the 65th volume, had not started things off like this
back in 2009, which was when this volume was originally published, according to
the volume
list on Detective Conan
World's wiki, I would have been disappointed because this is the first Detective
Conan release of 2018 for fans in my country and in the UK and made it look
like the start of another bad year for Detective Conan here.
Fortunately, that did not happen, and that has my hopes up a
bit, though I will not say that things are not completely back to the way they
were when Detective Conan could still be considered great like it was
back in the original 26 volumes.
Hopefully, the next three volumes Viz releases this year will
be able to start off as well as this one did, but I would not be surprised if
the ball is dropped once again.
Another thing that I liked how Richard realized that he was
just being dragged along for the ride.
Ever since Jimmy started living with Richard and Rachel,
Richard has had an ego that was probably as big as, if not bigger than, Jimmy
was before he was given APTX 4869 and was thinking that people were coming to
him because he was so good, but the audience knows from the beginning, even if
they just jump into the series, as opposed to just those who followed it for
years, like me and the people who were following it back when the first volume was
released Japan, that the only reason Richard's business took off was because
Jimmy solved many of his cases for him, and Richard rarely even suspected that
the kid he called Conan was the true brains behind it all, which made him seem
much more like a third rate detective.
However, in this volume, sometime after Agasa and Haibara,
as well as the audience, were made to believe that the people who helped them
were criminals with a grudge against Jimmy, instead of police officers, Richard
says that he noticed that the officer really wanted help from Jimmy and had
Richard come along just to have the kid on the scene, which we, as we, the
audience, knew ever since the conversation that took place while Haibara and
Agasa pretended to sleep, though at the time Gosho wanted us to believe that
the people who picked up Haibara and Agasa were criminals.
Seeing this play out, I was wondering if there would be
another point in time where Richard suspected that the kid he called Conan was
no ordinary child like he did back during the murder case featured in volume 2
of the manga, or episode
38 of the anime, because, at this point, I am kind of tired of how Jimmy is
able to throw people off his track time and time again, and such an occurrence
might make things interesting again, though there have already been over 1000
chapters and Jimmy's secret still seems to have been maintained somehow, aside
from Rum deciding to investigate Jimmy Kudo through Bourbon.
If this did not happen, I probably would not have been able
to enjoy myself, because things would end up being just as disappointing as how
Gosho's explanation for why Kir is Eisuke's sister back in volume
58, and made Richard even more unbelievably than he comes across.
Thankfully, Gosho did not remove any more layers from the
somewhat realistic feel that Detective Conan ended up having in recent years
with something else that I find kind of hard to believe without having to check
even further into things to see if it is even a remote possibility, which makes
me want to give him some applause.
Hopefully, things do not end up sounding just as fishy as
the explanation for how Kir can be Eisuke's sister, but I highly doubt that I
would never encounter another situation where I am left wondering how something
could happen.
There were two things that I liked the most though.
First, the hints were easy to understand and figure out in
at least one case were easy to figure out.
Back when FUNimation was actively releasing the series over
here, one of the major problems people had was that the hints were not preserved
because everything was localized, such as how Osaka became Alberta, and the
staff working on FUNimation's translations had to find a way to make fit
together in spite of how many of the cases relied on knowledge of the Japanese
language and/or culture, which probably hurt its chance doing well over here,
in addition to the poor marketing treatment it received.
However, Viz, in their translation of the manga, have been pretty
good about preserving the hints in Japanese and having the series take place in
Japan and even led to me learning a few things, though much of it was from
research I did to find out if Gosho was not pulling leg or just made something
up out of thin air, rather than the content itself, since fiction must be
questioned just as much as our religious and political leaders and peers and
elders.
Now, some people would think this is a nice thing, since Detective
Conan fans who speak English should be getting see what the Japanese fans
when these chapters were new them, but a big problem I had with Viz is that it
was still hard to follow because there were instances in which Viz left the
kanji in, expecting that their fans would know how to read or pronounce things
not written in the Roman alphabet, and that makes it really hard for people
like me, who have no knowledge of how to read any of the character in the
various Japanese writing systems, except Romaji, so I could not really immerse
myself in the case and beat Jimmy Kudo to the punch.
Here, however, Viz was nice enough to remember that English
is the vernacular where they release volumes and explained how the characters
arrived at the conclusions, though we still do not get enough to truly learn
anything about Japan.
If Viz had continued to assume that all the fans of Detective
Conan could read even a small amount of Japanese, I would have been made
because the enjoyment from works in the detective, mystery, and crime fiction
can only come if the audience can piece things together for themselves, as well
as see how the detective characters pieces things together, which can only
occur if things were translated in a way that everything is at the audience's
disposal.
Thankfully, they finally realized that their audience may
not be familiar with anything no using the Roman alphabet and provided a way
that the same clues the Japanese fans got, though I cannot say that it was
exactly the same, and that makes me want to give them more applause.
Hopefully, Viz will continue to do things like this, because
that would allow Detective Conan to continue being as accessible as it
is to newcomers, and would continue to make their version look better than
FUNimation's dub, but knowing that the people working at Viz are only human, I
would not be surprised if they start putting kanji back in.
The second thing that I liked was how this volume did not
rely entirely on either Black Org or Kaito Kuroba to make this volume seem
interesting.
While Detective Conan has been focused from the very
beginning of the series on Jimmy's pursuit of Gin and Vodka and getting an antidote
to APTX 4869, the thing that made this series great was that many of the cases
were actually intriguing and were kind of hard to figure out, whether it was
breaking the culprit's alibi or finding out how they committed the crime or it
was a true whodunnit, in that the objective was finding the criminal amongst a
list of suspects, though I would not say they were so hard that even people who
have been fans of the detective, mystery, and crime fiction genres their whole
lives would have a difficult time, which made this series worth following
because it actually provided a possibility for readers and viewers to feel
elated that they actually beat Jimmy.
Unfortunately, as the series progress, things began to go
grow so dull that it became hard for people to even justify following the series
any further because the only time that things felt great were when Kaito Kuroba
or Black Org was involved, suggesting that Gosho had finally reached his peak,
because things were too obvious, or people would end up being lucky too often on
guessing the culprit.
However, the final case featured in this volume never had
any big hints that it was a Black Org incident, yet it still came across as
interesting by making the police officers seem like criminals and even trying
to keep making me guess who was the one behind the red wall case.
Seeing how things played out here and how it the volume
ended right at what could probably have been the best moment to end it, I want to
read go out and read the next volume right now just to see how it ends, though
I will have to wait until April, like everybody else here, because Amazon is
not allowing me to preorder it in my preferred format and the product page there says it will not be
out until then.
If the case had not been presented like it was, I would have
been disappointed, because how a book ends is just as important as how it
begins, especially if it is an installment in a series as long as Detective
Conan, and this series would probably end up losing even more fans.
Thankfully, the people who compiled these chapters into this
volume made a good decision to end things where they did, even though I am kind
of annoyed by it too, and that makes me want to give them a bit more applause.
Hopefully, things can continue ending on a note as great as
this as Viz gets closer to the events of the Rum arc, because that will allow
the series to become better, though still not quite what it once was, but that
will only happen if we humans ever find a way to stop making the same mistakes
over and over.
Outside of those things, I cannot think of anything else
that I particularly liked, at least that could not stand on its own or spoil
things too much.
Because the volume started off with some interesting cases
and events, stayed consistent in the pattern, by concluding the case that
already began in the last volume, Richard was not as clueless as we all
thought, as he recognized that he was not the one being sought for help, Viz
realized some of fans of the series might not be familiar with languages that
do not use the Roman alphabet, and that the volume ended with a case that
seemed interesting, even though it was neither a Black Org or KID case, this
volume was a great read.
Although I liked the book, there are some issues.
However, aside from things that can be inferred from what I
already said or things that are too minor too talk about, such as typos, the
only thing that I can was rather annoyed with probably would have ended up
making this volume look worse, instead of better, if things were changed.
As a result, I will have to say that there is nothing worth
mentioning.
Considering that there was quite a bit to like and the only
thing that could possibly be annoying, unless one wanted to be really nitpicky,
allowed the volume to end as well as it did, this was definitely worth reading.
I recommend this to fans of detective, mystery, and crime
fiction, as well as fans of Detective Conan, as this is one of the few
volumes in which something other than a Black Org or KID case actually stood
out and did things right.
As for everyone else, this might be worth giving a try, as
it does serve as a good introduction to the series, and the detective, mystery,
and crime fiction genres in general, but because it starts of with the
conclusion of a case already in progress, I recommend reading the previous
volume first, so that this volume could be enjoyed to the fullest.
I you liked this review and would like to see more, please consider
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or, if you like a copy of the reviewed title, purchase
a copy of the 65th volume from Book Depository, who offers free
shipping to many countries worldwide and also helped me close the gap between
volumes 26 and 42 in my Detective Conan manga collection, so that I can
continue following a series many us enjoy and possibly find other worthwhile
reads for you guys.