"Bishoku Tantei Akechi Goro" drama: Episode one recap

 Air Dates: April 12th to June 26, 2020 on NTV, Sunday's at 10:30 pm and nine episodes in all

Title translates over to 'Gourmet Detective Goro Akechi'.... this episode's rating: 10.0%

Main Cast:

Tomoya Nakamura as Goro Akechi.... Runs the Edogawa Private Investigation firm named after the famous writer, he's a connoisseur of fine foods and is the the grandson of a very wealthy store owner. Seems like a capable detective but can he actually solve cases?

Fuka Koshiba as Ichigo Kobayashi.... Operates a food truck outside of Akechi's office, he stops by for lunch most days but never pays her. By pure chance she happened to get roped into helping him out on the first case and has become his 'unofficial' assistant.

Yukiya Kitamura as Toru Katono.... Detective at the local station who often butts heads with Akechi though the pair seem to respect each other.

Kanto Sato as Tatsuomi Takahashi.... Somewhat new detective at the local police station who is Katano's partner though he would rather help out Akechi on the cases.

Miu Tomita as Momoko.... Ichigo's best friend who appears to be crazy about all men.

Semi regulars or perhaps full time members of the cast.

Eiko Koike as Takizawa but is actually known as Mary Magdalena.... Hired Akechi in episode one to find out of her husband was cheating on her but in reality is was a clever ploy by her. Though it seemed to all she died falling from a cliff in the same episode she's somehow come back from the dead and think she'll be in every show but not 100% positive of that. 

Mirai Shida as Ringo but whose real name is Akane Furukawa.... We just saw her briefly at the end of this episode so don't know much about her but it appears she's murdered two people.

 I kind of like offbeat mystery dramas and this one I had noticed when it came out but didn't pay much attention to it at the time. So after doing a recent post for Fuka decided to give this series a try as I really want to view more of her shows and not enough have been subbed. What I also like about these quirky dramas is that they don't feature any 'superstars', everyone in the cast though is an excellent actor and whose faces you've seen in so many shows.

 Those descriptions at the top are from what I learned from this first episode, won't start on the second show until this recap is finished. But really enjoyed this opener which was a bit goofy at times but all in all is a very serious series. There was a nice twist at the ending and our 'hero detective' may have been duped into helping someone commit a murder, let's get to the recap. These episodes are 46 minutes in length so they should be medium sized but intro posts are always the longest.

 Goro Akechi runs the 'Edogawa Private Investigating Firm', it's named after the famous mystery writer though Akechi in this episode never mentioned his name or whether he's his hero. It's quite a spacious office and it appears Akechi has quite a bit of money yet doesn't seem to have a lot of cases. Will skip around a bit and near the end of the show we learned that Akechi is a very wealthy young man as his grandfather owned a very popular department store in Tokyo which is father now runs, money is really no concern to Akechi yet he can't pay for small things to the anger of one gal. Akechi is also such a connoisseur of fine food, especially dishes from Europe. His favorite moments of each day are his three meals and you better not interrupt him when he's eating one of them.

 That gal mentioned is Ichigo Kobayashi who operates a small food truck outside of his office. Almost every day for lunch he gets his meal from her yet never pays for what he ordered and his tab is getting quite high. From what he says Akechi never carries around cash and Ichigo can't accept credit cards, though she gets irate at him for not paying she lets it go and could she secretly have a crush on him? Ichigo in Japanese means strawberry yet can also be spelled and pronounced to sound as number one which is how Akechi refers to her, he usually introduces her to others as 'Kobayashi #1'.  Above is a scene from Akechi's office and it was the first time for Ichigo to visit the place, she wasn't invited but had gone there to return the credit card he left at her truck.

 At the time in the office were the above two detectives from the local police station who we'll be seeing often, Katono is the elder detective while his newish assistant is Takahashi. The pair were there probing the mind of Akechi as an employee of a bakery he frequents was found murdered on a local mountain, the location of this show is the Omotesando section of Tokyo. The detectives thought the owners may be to blame and Akechi is in agreement with them but not for the same reasons. The owners had secretly wanted to change the bakery to a convenience store and somehow Akechi was aware of the fact, he told the detectives that to their amazement. However that was the last we heard of this first case which may have been just for us to be introduced to the detectives.

 The pair of detectives left and we presume it was to follow up in the murder case, meanwhile Ichigo hung around to marvel at Akechi's office while she still nagged him about the money he owed. While this was happening a mysterious woman entered the office, that's her above and while she never mentioned her name it's Takizawa. At this point is when Ichigo became Akechi's 'unofficial assistant' as she was roped into making tea for them and overheard the entire conversation. Takizawa is very suspicious of her husband cheating and feels every day for lunch he's meeting his mistress. She had no way of confirming this so wanted to hire Akechi to find out the possible sordid details. One clue Takizawa had was that her husband always had the smell of different foods on his clothes and you wouldn't get that from eating at a restaurant.

 Akechi was in full agreement about Takizawa's assessment of the food odors which could only happen in a small kitchen or apartment so he agreed to take the case. For a few days he followed Takizawa's husband at lunch time and as she suspected he visited the apartment of a young lady. But there wasn't much Akechi could deduce from their meetings, he saw the woman greeting the husband but who knows what took place behind closed doors? But a pattern was set as he would show up at exactly 12:30 pm every day and leave at 1:30, one hour to eat and have an encounter may not be enough time to do both. That's the news Akechi gave Takizawa when he visited her at the couple's apartment which was a very nice place.

 From a man's point of view one hour to eat and have sex just may not be enough time according to Akechi, twenty minutes to eat and then have a roll in the hay or vice versa? If Akechi had to make an assumption then he would say that the the only thing the pair did was to eat lunch having many varieties of food which would account for all of the food odors on his clothes. Didn't appear Takizawa agreed fully with Akechi but she understood his reasoning but she still had to wonder why did her husband have to visit the woman every day? Takizawa is an adept chef and has so many elite items that a chef would use. She cooked up a lunch for Akechi who was very impressed, he'll never come out and say so but as he's told many people when he says 'It's not bad' it means it's excellent. For now Takizawa isn't sure what she's going to do with her husband as she has no concrete evidence if he's truly cheating and what happened next stunned Akechi.

 The following afternoon on the news was a report about a killing right outside the apartment building the husband had been visiting. Of course the man was Takizawa's husband and immediately Akechi surmised that she did the killing and was 100% correct on that theory, He received a call from Takizawa who confessed to slashing her husband's throat, she's so distraught she's heading to a remote location to kill herself. 'Whoa' blurted Akechi who said he would meet her before she did such an act, he arranged for the pair to have dinner at his favorite French restaurant. To his shock who was there first but Takizawa and at this point I'll start calling her Mary. That's the name she began using, Mary Magdalena to be exact who was a woman associated with Jesus.

 At their dinner Mary went into more details about the killing and how she felt her husband was truly cheating on her, she knew it wasn't so but gave that story to Akechi. This restaurant was on the ground floor of a hotel, Akechi had reserved a room for them to talk and perhaps do something kinky on her.... last night of freedom? While this was going on the pair of detectives had brought the young lady in for questioning, according to her there was nothing going on between her and the husband. She had plans on opening her own restaurant and the husband was just there tasting her dishes as he knew her from the the bakery she regularly worked at. Haven't mentioned Ichigo too much but she's always in the picture, she had been secretly spying on Akechi when he was having dinner.

 When he went to the room with Mary their conversation didn't last too long as she had spiked the wine they were drinking. Akechi took a few sips and before you knew it he was out cold, was it poison in the wine? No it wasn't as coming to the rescue was Ichigo who witnessed Mary leaving the hotel alone and dashed to the room to see what happened. Good thing she's the prying sort as Ichigo found Akechi unconscious on the floor but luckily it was just sleeping pills in the wine. When she needs info on anything Ichigo looks at her Smartphone which she's named 'Clook', she found info to revive Akechi and soon the duo were on the hunt for Mary.

 Final segment, thanks to 'Clook' they've found out where Mary may attempt her suicide and that info was correct. The pair arrived just in time as Mary was standing on a cliff ready to throw herself over, no matter what Akechi said to her it had no affect as she inched ever so closer to the edge. Ichigo couldn't stand there and do nothing so tried jumping to the rescue, she's a bit of a goofball and she herself went over the edge but was able to hang on. Shortly after that Mary herself did jump from the cliff and by all indications she perished as her body was never found. But it was the start of the new team of Akechi and Ichigo who do work closer as a pair in the next show.

 As this episode came to it's conclusion Akechi was at a meeting of his 'Gourmet Club' at an exclusive hotel. While this event was taking place a double murder or suicide had been discovered at the hotel, Akechi and the pair of detectives were quickly on the scene. But won't be discussing any of it now as that's the case for episode two but we did learn in the closing minutes about how wealthy Akechi was due to his family owning such a popular department store. In the final seconds we met a young woman named 'Ringo' who was talking to a woman about a.... double murder, could she have been the culprit? But to top the ending off was such a twist as the woman she was talking to was.... Mary, how did she come back from the dead????

 That finished up the actual recap but do have some thoughts about Mary. She is one conniving woman and everything that took place was part of a devious plan she created. Mary wanted Akechi to find out where her husband went every day for lunch, not to get evidence for a divorce but to kill him at the location! Plus she only put sleeping pills in the wine as Mary wanted Akechi to find her at the cliff so he could be a witness to her death! There were a few other details in the plan and wonder if Akechi realizes how badly he was used by Mary?

 Longer recap than I planned but this ended up being a very decent show. If there's one thing positive about long recaps is that it means I enjoyed an episode or film and have a feeling this will end up being on of my top Japanese series of the year. Not much more to add, plenty of screenshots so you can follow the action better and the next post has the recap for the second episode.