Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace

Middle schooler Yoshio Kobayashi’s routine day shatters when he comes to in his classroom to a grisly scene: his teacher has been mutilated, and the murder weapon is in Yoshio’s hand. With suspicion immediately turning toward him, Yoshio reacts with an unsettling calm—almost intrigued by the idea that someone would try to pin the crime on him.

Dragged into the fallout, his beleaguered friend Souji Hashiba becomes an accomplice as they scramble to clear Yoshio’s name. Their path crosses with Kogorou Akechi, a brilliant high school detective investigating the case; when Akechi takes an interest in the boy at the center of it all, Yoshio pushes to join the detective’s world as an assistant, and Akechi tests whether that eagerness can survive the realities of his work. Told in a surreal, psychological tone and marked by brutal, bizarre crimes, *Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace* draws loosely from the stories of influential mystery writer Ranpo Edogawa.