Yui Aragaki: "Okitegami Kyoko no Biboroku" episode one recap and screenshots

 Start Date: October 10, 2015 Episode one rating: 12.9% Director: Toya Sato

Main Cast:

Yui Aragaki as Kyoko Okitegami

Masaki Okada as Yakusuke Kakushidate

Mitsuhiro Oikawa as Horo Kizunai

Arioka Daiki as Nuru Narikawa

Rio Uchida as Makuru Makuma

 One of the smaller main casts I've seen for a drama, though there were quite a few characters in this episode have a feeling most shows are going to have many guest stars. Not going to come back to change this but think this will be a shorter recap than most first episodes, usually the first or last episode's recaps are the longest. Reason for thinking that way is that there were many unanswered questions for this first episode and think those answers will be coming out as the series goes along so perhaps future recaps will be a longer than usual. Here are the five main characters listed above but least for the first episode the top two garnered almost all of the screen time, naturally we knew that Gakky would.

 Kyoko works as a private detective for her self named 'Okitegami Detective Agency'. There will be a lot of details left out of this recap because as I mentioned above there's so much to be found out about the pasts of the characters, especially Kyoko. Though it's her own agency Kyoko is affiliated with Kizunai who owns an upscale coffee shop, he's the one who takes care of getting her cases. Narikawa and Makuma also work at the shop but we didn't see too much of them in this first episode until the very end.
 Kyoko has been hired by Yakusuke who works at a contact lens company, he's assigned to their main office. He hired Kyoko because one day an SD card was stolen from the desk of Yakusuke's boss, the card had plans for a new contact lens product and those plans could be worth quite a bit of money.
 Yakusuke is the other main character in this drama, he's gone through so many jobs in the last few years as something always happens to him at a job and as a result he's been fired too many times to count. He thinks the reason is because of his name which can mean 'bad luck', he doesn't have just bad luck at his jobs but seemingly with everything in his life.

 For some very flimsy reasons the rest of the office workers including the boss thought that Yakusuke was the one who stole the SD card. That's why he hired Kyoko to come and solve the mystery, it's also a mystery to us why he called her as he never heard of Kyoko before this incident, another thing that will be hopefully be answered.
 Kyoko was able to prove Yakusuke's innocence, the culprit was actually a disgruntled worker who had been passed over for the last few years when it was time for raises or promotions. She was planning on selling the plan to a rival company and actually almost succeeded until Kyoko with the help of Narikawa caught her at the rival company's offices.
 Don't think this will be happening in future episodes but there was a second case for Kyoko to solve, it was another one where Yakusuke was thought to be the culprit. Before his current job he had worked at a small office of a manga artist, that artist has recently had a million yen stolen from her. But what makes this case a bit perplexing is that the artist who is a woman receives a note after saying she can have the million yen back if she buys it for 10 million yen!? Doesn't make much sense and that's what Kyoko, Yakusuke and the woman's manager thought too. But then the manga artist told them she now does her banking on line and has written all of the passwords on 100,000 yen notes. Also on some of those notes were passwords for her future manga editions, they could be worth quite a bit of money so the woman is prepared to pay the ten million for the one million yen.

 Once again Kyoko solves the crime and once again the culprit was a disgruntled employee. That employee was a failed manga artist herself and was getting tired of working so hard with someone else getting the fame and money from it. And that employee was nabbed just as she was able to break some of the codes, she was about to delete all of the future editions of mangas stored on the cloud but just before she could hit the delete button she was found and all was saved.
 The cases were just okay, think this is the one area that will be improved on in future episodes or the one area that should be. Don't think Kyoko did all that much deducing to solve the crimes, they could have been much more interesting but they did have to squeeze two cases into a 57 minute show, would imagine that the rest of the episodes will only have one case for Kyoko to solve.
 Haven't described the character of Kyoko all that much yet, actually most of the unanswered questions have to do with her. Kyoko has a strange problem and one that none of us have probably ever heard of before. What that problem is when she falls asleep all her memories from the previous day have been erased, she can't recall anything in her past when she wakes up. She did mention briefly that there are certain things she can remember from the past but hasn't told anyone what they are or why she can remember them.
 Also we haven't learned how Kyoko's problem came about, has she had this forever or is it a somewhat recent issue? Think with each upcoming episode little bits of Kyoko's past will be coming out and hoping the story of her not remembering will be interesting. One other thing about her forgetting her past or what happened the previous day is that she has to solve her cases in one day or she at least tries to. Kyoko does write things on her arms and legs so if she does fall asleep in the middle of a day when she wakes up she'll have a clue of who certain people are or what case she's supposed to be working on.

 Did leave some details of the cases out, mainly did that in case you do end up watching this episode as I don't want to give away too many spoilers. Suppose this first show could have been a bit better but all in all it was an enjoyable view and really do think the episodes will keep improving, no basis for that thought but just have a feeling as there's a lot of potential for this series.
 Gakky's looks didn't take too much getting used to, she actually looks fine and much better on screen than versus the screenshots. Screenshots is what there are plenty of as the next post as so many more from this episode and am hoping to have the second episode done this weekend.