Don’t get me wrong. I love Kindaichi Case Files manga. And I even talked about it on my blog a long time ago.
But for some reason, I find that this particular scene in the manga just doesn’t make much sense to me.
The thing about the scene isn’t so much to do with how gruesome it is. Rather, it’s more about the scene being illogical. You can say that the scene itself is meant for heightening the tension within the reason behind the murder itself.
Even for that reason, it still doesn’t make much sense to me.
The scene in Kindaichi Case Files manga that bothers me the most
The scene that I’m referring to is the scene for the first case, which is the phantom of the opera case.
Okay, I’m not sure about the name of the case in English since I read Kindaichi Case Files manga in Malay. So, let’s call it phantom of the opera case since that was what the case implied – the murder carried by none other than the phantom of the opera itself.
Of course, there’s no such thing as the phantom of the opera. It was the living human being who murdered those people. But I’ll leave it to you to read the manga to discover the actual culprit behind these murders.
In that scene, Saotome confessed to Kindaichi that Hidaka, Kiryu, and her asked Tsukishima to come to the science lab.
At first, they were only planning to scare her by putting a tiny bit of sulfuric acid on her uniform just to ruin her uniform. The logic behind the plan was to make her unable to attend the audition because of her ruined uniform.
What they didn’t expect was Tsukishima ended up ramming into the cabinet filled with potent chemicals in it by accident instead because of what they did. As a result, the sulfuric acid which was inside the cabinet fell on her face and burned her face. What made it even more tragic was the surgery didn’t help at all because the burn was too severe.
What makes the scene seems illogical to me
The thing that I find illogical about the scene has a lot to do with the location of the sulfuric acid itself.
Well, it’s nothing strange to keep potent chemicals like sulfuric acid inside the cabinet. But that is if the cabinet is in a storage room where only the lab assistant can access. Even if the cabinet was in the entryway like the one in the manga, it was usually locked.
If they’re going to keep the sulfuric acid in the lab, it tends to be placed on a low-tier rack that is on the floor.
Okay, it doesn’t have to be on a low-tier rack. At the very least, it’s not accessible to anyone other than the lab assistant.
Well, that was what I saw during my high school years. I even saw cyanide among the chemicals on the rack too.
Not sure if you can use it to kill someone with it, though. According to what I read from The Ice Man: Confession of A Mafia Contract Killer, you need pharmacy-grade cyanide to kill people. So, I doubt that the cyanide that you can get from the school lab is the pharmacy-grade type.
And who in the world will enter a science lab without permission? You can’t just enter the science lab when no one is around.
You can only enter the science lab when the teacher is around. And that is also applicable to the middle school science lab where there are barely any potent chemicals involved.
The live-action adaptation makes even less sense
If you think that the live-action adaptation was faithful to the original Kindaichi Case Files manga, then you’re in for the rude awakening.
Unlike the scene in the manga, the scene in the live-action drama takes place in a room that doesn’t look like a science lab at all. It looks more like a storage room because there wasn’t much light entering the room.
And the location of the sulfuric acid? It was at the top of the rack. I can’t remember how Tsukishima ended up knocking down the rack with the sulfuric acid at the top. But yes, the sulfuric acid did fall on her.
All I can say is that the scene itself was so horrendous to the point that it was laughable.
It was nothing like the scene in the manga. I’m not saying this because I’m being biased here. It’s just that it was really that bad.
What is the point here?
You’re probably thinking that the purpose of this blog post is to trash the manga, to which the answer is no.
Despite the blunder, I’d like to believe that the writer already did the best he could to do the fact-check even as something as trivial as the lab rule. Even with that, he can still get it wrong which is still fine for me. For all I know, I could be committing the same blunder as he does in my own story too.
To be honest, I’m not sure if that’s how things are done in high school in Japan. The only experience I had when it comes to entering the science lab was during my student exchange stint in Japan. And that was in middle school, not high school.
So, it may not be unusual for students to come in and out of the science lab even without having no teacher around. But in other parts of the world, that’s never the case at all due to safety reasons.
The last thing you want is a similar accident like Tsukishima happened for real this time.
Heck, I could be all wrong about that too.
P.S This may seem like it’s coming out of nowhere. But if you’re like me who enjoys reading manga like Kindaichi Case Files, then you may enjoy reading my thriller light novel, Trigger Locked.
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I'm an author who writes thriller and suspense light novels. But when I'm not writing a book, I love to blog about books that I enjoy reading. Some of these books also become the inspiration for my novel as well.
Most of the books that I talk about on my blog tend to be manga and light novels, with nonfiction books in between. If you're looking for interesting books to read, then you will certainly enjoy reading my blog. 