After-Thoughts: Erased, A Murder Mystery, Yes or No?

 Erased: The Town Without Me, is a manga about a struggling artist by the name of Satoru Fujinuma. He has the ability to rewind back in time whenever a death is about to occur so that he can go in and stop it. Almost immediately after establishing and defining this power of his, his mother is killed and his ability named Revival initiates to save her life. The catch is that it doesn't rewind by only around a minute like it normally does. Instead it takes him back 20 years to a time in his life where 3 of his classmates mysteriously died and his mother was investigating the cause. His path is clear: stop the murders and save his mother's life.

Although every version of this story has differences in terms of how they approach the subject matter they all go with more or less this conceit. Satoru goes back in time to save his mother by stopping the murderer who does it. Now, notice my word choice there. I didn't say he REVEALS the killer, I said he STOPS the killer.

This is an important distinction because it plays into how many people view Erased as an anime. For context, I was watching a video by Gigguk on his second channel which you can watch right here under the name Garnt (I'm certain he'll get the monetization. If he doesn't, sorry Gigguk, this is the first time I've ever embedded a video).

At the 7:25 mark in the video he mentions Erased and has some criticisms of its placement on this particular Top 30 list, most of which have to do with his assessment that Erased is, in fact, a murder mystery. He surmises that when it comes to a murder mystery, the payoff of who the murderer is is just as important as the journey and concludes that because the ending was utter garbage, it's not an anime that deserves a spot on this list.

Now I'm not here to criticize either Gigguk or Kotaku because frankly that's not what this is about. What I'm here to do is answer the question of, is Erased: The Town Without Me a murder mystery series? That's what I'm here to answer.

In order to answer this question, though, we need to define what a genre is. This is probably basic stuff everyone knows but to summarize, a genre is a category of fiction that is descriptive of what you're likely to find in it. Now this can be just about anything by itself, after all by this definition Higurashi Kai can be referred to as an action series just because the last episode has a fight scene in it. However, usually genre tags refer to tropes that are common within the genre that are also contained within the given work. Because of that, for Higurashi Kai to be considered an action series, it can't just have one fight scene. Its plot needs to revolve around the fight scenes, so much so that the writing structure has to do a lot more with facilitating and communicating fight scenes than it does with almost any other facet of the plot.

So then, now that we know what a genre is, what are the general tropes that come with the murder mystery genre? Well, murder mysteries, also known as whodunnits by those that are ultra fans of the genre, are all about solving the mystery of who killed this person and how. This means that plot beats are usually built around the facilitation of solving the mystery.

Now, there are a few things to keep in mind about murder mysteries, such as the Ten Commandment of Murder Mysteries. As listed here: 

Now obviously not all of these commandments are going to be followed all the time but I do want to address a few of them since a few have become commonplace associations with the genre as a whole. Specifically the mentioning of someone early on in the story who could've done it.

Now, in theory, it could simply be a matter of someone being mentioned by name and having their face in an obscure location and that would qualify but in practice this person usually comes as part of a set, specifically the set of suspects. Making the murderer one of the suspects not only gives a clear reason to believe any of these people could do it but by consolidating all of the potential answers into this pool of people, you've effectively made the game multiple choice. So if a suspect pool has 4 people, that means you have a 1 in 4 of chance of guessing it right randomly, assuming one of those suspects isn't killed part way through the mystery, and even then that doesn't exclude the possibility of multiple culprits.

The rest of the commandments are just generally good practice when it comes to writing since murder mysteries are all about the plot consistency and more specifically the viewer's ability to put the mystery together before the final reveal. As a result you can think of a murder mystery almost like a game, and solving the mystery before you're given the answer is the goal.

If this were a game, it would be most similar to a puzzle game and to solve a puzzle you need two primary things: first, is you need a tool to solve the mystery with and you need a process with which to use that tool. So obviously the process is putting clues together to map out a general timeline of events. Meanwhile, the tool you'll use are the clues you're given throughout the way. If we were real life detectives we'd have to search for that stuff ourselves but because fiction is performative in nature, a mystery series will usually and necessarily place focus on anything that is supposed to be a clue. There's no such thing as an accident when it comes to fiction and this is especially true of animation. Because of this if the writer or cameraman is focusing on something, it's something they want you to notice.

One of these clues is obviously the suspect list, which is a group of people that could've committed the murder, either because they had a reason to do so or because their presence in the mystery fits the timeline of events as far as cause and time of death are concerned. In this way, the suspects require MMO, which stands for Means, Motive, and Opportunity. Or in other words, how they did it, why they did it, and whether or not they could've possibly done it.

The crime scene will also have clues of its own, such as blood trails, indications of the weapon used, items on the person that are present and/or suspiciously absent. Anything that could provide a hint as to what happened without outright revealing it by itself.

Dying messages can also be used as long as they're used carefully. For a dying message in a story like this to be believable it needs to be just ciphered enough that the murderer doesn't see it as a clue, otherwise they'll just get rid of it, but not so indecipherable that the person it's intended for can't code break it. This sort of thing will obviously depend a lot on the situation and the characters involved so there's no one size fits all right way to do it.

And finally, while the commandments do list that the detective can't have been the one to do it, and this is absolutely something all mystery works should do there is some leeway for characters to believe they did it.

So with all of this in mind, do I believe Erased: The Town Without Me is in fact a murder mystery? Frankly, no. And when I say it's not a murder mystery, I don't mean it's automatically good or bad just because it is or isn't one, I'm saying it's not written the way a murder mystery is generally written. Even bad murder mysteries will contain many of the tropes that I've listed yet all of them are seemingly absent in the story of Erased.

Let's start with the plot structure, I won't cover everything but I will bring particular focus to Satoru's actions during this series in both the anime and manga because his actions as the protagonist are crucial to understanding the lens this series was written from. I won't be consulting the live action series just because, while I'm sure it has its merits, I haven't watched it. So let's take note of some of the things that occur, starting with the first episode of the anime, which will approximately be around the first 4 chapters of the manga.

You see a few things of note about Satoru's actions: the very first thing we see of him in this anime is his Revival being used as a means to save the lives of various people from a truck driver who passed out at the wheel. Satoru himself took some injuries but everyone else is more or less unharmed as a result of this. In the anime we get one more event like this prior to the main catalyst at a shopping center, where Satoru goes back in time and has to identify not only who's about to be killed but also where in the area it's happening.

Now in the manga, this event actually takes a little bit longer. Namely that in the anime Satoru rewinds one time before asking for help from his mother who is present for this excursion. In the manga, he rewinds around 10 or 15 times unsuccessfully before his mother helps him after noticing the desperation on his face. In both versions it's revealed to be a kid with a balloon who was in the process of being kidnapped.

Another thing the manga has during this event which is not present in the anime is an outing with Satoru's currently established closest friend Airi, who helps him save a child who's suspiciously looming around a condemned building. In the manga it's supposed to be the same person setting this up to try and figure out how his plans are being foiled, which inevitably leads into the next event that results in Satoru's biggest Revival which is his mother's death.

Before we get to that though one thing I'd like to highlight here is that Sachiko Fujinuma, who is Satoru's mother started thinking about things that will become relevant to the later parts of this plot, specifically that there were some murders 20 years ago that involved at least one suspect who looked suspiciously like the guy committing the kidnapping. She also notes that he noticed her spot him, which is why he goes to Satoru's house in the first place. He doesn't kill her right away though.

Rather he waits for Satoru to leave the house angrily after the two of them fight. In the anime it's nothing more than a shouting match but in the manga Satoru breaks one of the windows in his own apartment which is a pretty good use of circumstantial evidence to commit a framing for a murder. Satoru then comes home to his mother having been killed and he has to escape, yes, but he also goes through his biggest revival yet, which takes him back to when he was 9 years old and he has to stop the murders that took place at his old school.

A few things of note are brought up during this following sequence. Firstly, that Satoru is trying as hard as possible to blend in and ironically him failing to blend in is in itself blending in. The other thing though is that Satoru uses his knowledge of the present to help him form a mental model of what's going on in this current past. Namely that the three victims, Kayo Hinazuki, Hiromi Sugita, and Aya Nakanishi are the victims and it's Satoru's goal to prevent their murders. And at least at first, the situation seems fair enough. Two of the victims go to his school, one of them is part of his friend group, and the one convicted at the time Jun Shiratori AKA Yuuki is close with Satoru which will allow him to gather at least that alibi.

However, on his first go around he's not successful, not in the way he'd like anyway. He didn't manage to save Kayo that time, what he did manage to do was delay her death by about 3 days, which in turn showed up as a modification to his present when he went back there. This was enough to prove that the past can be altered and Satoru gives it a real college try on his next attempt.

From here Satoru's actions are placed on two priorities: the first is getting Kayo away from her abusive mother as her mother's negligence is likely what resulted in her being targeted in the first place, not helped by the fact that she's abusive in her own rite. And the second, is to make sure that Hiromi never goes home alone thereby creating a deterrent that can buy Satoru some time until he can fully rescue Kayo and move onto Aya.

Along the way he ends up working alongside a boy named Kenya, who if you guys thought he was a smart kid, yes he is, in fact he's smart enough that in the altered present, as well as I assume the prior he successfully became a lawyer. And since I've seen the criticism that these kids are too smart to be kids, I want to argue that the only particularly smart one is actually Kenya himself. Satoru doesn't count due to the fact that he has a 29 year old's brain and everyone else is more or less average for kids their age. They're just following Satoru's lead and doing what kids do for the most part.

Anyway, this process consists of putting Kayo in a place where neither her mother nor the murderer can find her until the authorities get involved, after which Kayo is basically home free. This process mostly consists of creating a space that can keep Kayo warm in the snow and entertained while she's not in school so that hiding isn't so unbearable.

Now if any of you are about to ask "When am I going to start bringing up the clues Satoru uses to solve the mystery?" that's just it. Clues are never really presented. We do have musical and visual cues on a particular person that indicate they may be the culprit but no real emphasis is placed on solving the mystery in question.

Now I'm not saying I'm a particularly good writer, however, if I were a mystery writer and I was working with this premise, I would make the jumps between the past and present a lot more frequent. More specifically, I'd create more situations for Satoru to be in the present to help make sense of clues he finds in the past. This story doesn't really do that.

This story doesn't really highlight clues as much as it exposition dumps retrospective information as Satoru learns it, and the present is mostly used for the sake of drama following his mother's murder. No real time is spent gathering evidence, and we're never explicitly given a list of suspects. And it's not as though the series never had an opportunity to.

Without changing the narrative at all, Satoru after coming back to the present before his final revival, is given access to the old records that his mother and her coworker had gathered on those old murders. We are technically given a list of suspects in that around 6 names flash across the screen but the presentation is off when compared to the murder mystery genre. Namely that the 6 names we're given do not belong to any character we physically see in the setting. All of these names are faceless. And secondly, the person who actually did it that Satoru recognizes on a more detailed page is not shown to us the viewer until the murderer reveals himself to Satoru.

So we're never really given a predefined group of suspects that have anything to do with the plot and the one that is on the list that we know is listed as a pseudonym except for his profile page, which we never see in full and the vital parts that Satoru saw are not revealed until much later. An actual whodunnit series would've given each of these suspects a face, a reasonable combination of MMO, and some time interacting with Satoru so that we can put the pieces together as he does.

Instead the plot plays out more like a game of cat and mouse where the murderer is always present but never visible, and the characters have to outsmart him, not by figuring out his entire plan but simply by predicting his next move.

In fact, I want to go back to episode 1 as that actually has a directly comparable moment in a series that categorically is a whodunnit, regardless of whether or not it's actually good at it (Hint: it is, sometimes). That being Danganronpa. I'll give some vital information on the very first mystery of the series only because it's directly relevant.

Makoto Naegi is a boy who got recruited for the prestigious Hope's Peak Academy as one of 5 students who won the lottery to get in. Hope's Peak is a school filled primarily with supernaturally prodigious students each with their own special talents. Makoto, being one of the five that got in via the lottery, is considered having a talent for Luck, which according to this school is measurable and possible to study which is why they do the lottery in the first place.

Fast forward a little bit to the first death, Sayaka Maizono. After spending the majority of the first chapter bonding to Makoto, she ends up dying in his dorm room due to the fact that they chose to swap rooms the prior night. Makoto is naturally the prime suspect and that means that much of the tension in this first chapter is based not only on solving the mystery but also on clearing Makoto's name. Sound familiar?

Right away, we're given a mystery that starts off in a very similar way to how Satoru is implicated for the death of his mother. Yet this event plays out very differently. Firstly, Makoto ends up getting the help of the girl named Kyoko Kirigiri who, at this time, does not know her talent or even her backstory but she appears to be amicable at least. Rather than jump to the conclusion that Makoto killed Sayaka like everyone else did, Kyoko approaches him more inquisitively than anything. She's calm and rational, she mostly just makes observations and she asks Makoto questions that illuminate more of the situation.

During this event, two particular things are made note of: first off, the nameplates on Makoto and Sayaka's doors were swapped, meaning that whoever did it seemingly wanted people to think that Sayaka was killed in the wrong room. Very suspicious for someone to do who randomly attacked but not so much for someone attempting to frame another person, if they intended to swap them back that is.

The other thing that's noted is that Makoto's bathroom has a doorknob that is a little tricky to open and is prone to jamming. This is important to note because Monokuma establishes that the girl's dorms have locks on the restrooms but the boy's dorms do not. Meaning someone who was lured into the room could be convinced that it's a girl's room without suspicion being cast upon them.

In other words, these clues suggest that Sayaka wasn't a victim of a premeditated murder as much as she was a victim of her own plan. She intended to kill someone in Makoto's room, then swap the nameplates and frame Makoto for the murder and it just ended up not working out for her.

I won't spoil the rest of the mystery just because the answer is literally written out by the deceased but if you want to know, the hint is 11037.

Anyway, notice how the plot is written in such a way that Makoto is implicated for Sayaka's murder but emphasis is placed on gathering clues and crafting alibis that can both solve the mystery and clear Makoto's name in the process.

Compare this to Satoru and while his event does play out very differently, the way in which it is different is not conducive to either solving the mystery or clearing his name. Instead after his mother is killed, he spends the bulk of his time in the present running away from the cops and trying to gather information on old records when he has some free time. None of this is spent clearing Satoru's name but what's even more indicative of this is that a mystery solving plot could have been written around this idea using only the pieces the series itself presents to us. Specifically Satoru has a time that he was out and about during the murder and he has a friendly character, namely Airi, who'd go to bat for him in the event he needed it. All this sequence would've had to do is just have Satoru run into Airi and chat with her for a few minutes before he gets back to his mother's corpse. Then the police can take him in, he tells them who he spoke to, she corroborates his story, and then Satoru is let go for the most part but is only given information on the downlow via Sachiko's old connections and with some extra advantages due to his ability to travel back in time.

In addition, Revival is another element that's not conducive to a mystery series. Not so much the fact that he can go back and forth in time in the first place but how little control Satoru actually has over it. In a proper mystery series, Satoru may not have complete control over this ability but he'd certain have enough control that solving a mystery in both the past and present would be easily feasible. This is something that other series have done and continue to do and yet the fact that Revival is a power that not only activates only as necessary but also only takes Satoru far back enough to prevent a particular killing, makes it an element of chaos, one that Satoru cannot control. It induces randomness into the equation and as a result it sparks drama, suspense.

All of these things are what lead me to believe that this is a suspense show. After Satoru goes back in time, there's quite a lot of calm. However, that calm is spent enjoying the quiet moments Satoru now appreciates with his mother rather than contemplating everything that happened and how to piece it together. The actual murder prevention is spent more on preventing acts as they happen rather than figuring out the nature of the culprit to catch them in the act. In fact, once the timeline starts deviating too much, Satoru loses his edge and makes mistakes, attempting to prevent a kidnapping on Misato Yanagihara whose kidnapping is bait to lure Satoru out to allow the culprit to take him out of the equation.

A murder mystery can be thought of as a game of cat and mouse in a sense but usually the culprit is the mouse and the detective is the cat. The culprit's already committed the crime now they need to make sure they get away with it. Meanwhile, the detective is the one on the prowl, searching for tracks, he's on the hunt. Yet the way Erased plays out is the opposite. Satoru is saving the mice while living among them but the culprit is the cat, the hunter.

This dynamic is pretty much inverted from what you'd expect of a typical murder mystery dynamic which I'm sure can work but there are so many other things that don't align with the tropes of a murder mystery that I simply can't call it one.

Now I'm not blind to the anime's flaws in particular. Its final two episodes in particular were rushed out the door with some first draft writing that never took place in the manga which is why the live action series was made in the first place, to give people the ending that they wanted. However, the major distinction here between a suspense series and a mystery series is that with a mystery, yes, the destination is paramount. With a suspense series, the journey is a lot more important. The destination isn't completely irrelevant, it's definitely possible to be taken out by the final reveal of what's been going on, it's something even this series could be seen as guilty of. However, the process of finding out who the culprit is for a murder mystery is the journey and having all the pieces come together is the destination. For a suspense series, the journey is escaping a threat and the successful evasion or erasure of that threat is the destination.

Now I don't personally want to watch Erased ever again after having fully finished the manga. However, if you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend you do so. It does cut some minor stuff out of the beginning. However, episodes 1-9 are in a lot of ways a better telling of the narrative than the manga. Once you've reached episode 9, I highly recommend jumping over into the manga to pick up where that episode left off as it includes a lot of things that give context to not only the anime but to the major players of the series in general, such as the culprit's full backstory that elaborates on how he became a serial killer, Kenya's history that leads him to want to become a lawyer in the first place, and even some weird predestination shenanigans with Airi getting involved in these final chapters.

As for why I'm talking about this, it's mainly because I thought this debate on whether Erased is a mystery or suspense show or both or neither was settled a long time ago but I guess it wasn't. I also didn't message Gigguk directly because he and I don't really know each other and I don't think he'd respond to my messages anyway. And leaving a comment this long on a video that's not even primarily about Erased does seem a bit too passionate for a youtube comment. Not for a blog post though. Unlimited characters baby.

Anyway that's all for now. Have a wonderful evening.