The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

The Dinner Table Detective

Reiko Hōshō, daughter of the owner of the world-famous Hōshō Group, has become a rookie detective. Her boss is Inspector Kazamatsuri, the son of the owner of Kazamatsuri Motors. The two work to solve difficult cases. When tackling her cases, Reiko always consults her butler and driver, Kageyama, who spouts harsh language insulting Reiko but always brilliantly manages to solve the case.

The Dinner Table Detective is based on a novel series by Tokuya Higashigawa. The anime series is streaming on Amazon Prime on Fridays.

Oh, Madhouse, you've fallen so far since your glory days. Regardless of how I feel about The Dinner Table Detective's story, it pains my heart to behold its clumsy visuals. The character art, which faithfully recreates the manga style, is quite nice; there's a lot of variation in the characters' faces and dress styles that tell you a lot about their personalities right off the bat, from Reiko's soft-butch friend with a square jaw, mushroom cut, and jumpsuit in place of a dress, to Kazamatsuri's flamboyant white suit and feathered fedora. However, the animation is noticeably limited, chock-full of shortcuts. The backgrounds are startlingly ugly, looking like photographs run through a filter with ugly black outlines to make them look like drawn art instead of what they are. This was the studio of Osamu Dezaki and Masao Maruyama! What happened here?

The jury is still out on the story, though. As the title implies, this is a mystery series; heiress Reiko Hōshō works as a detective, keeping the two sides of her life separate. When a murder occurs at a party she's attending, she has to quickly change her clothes and hair and go into work mode. The criminal remains undiscovered by the end of the episode, largely due to Reiko and her fellow detective, Kyoichiro Kazamatsuri, interviewing witnesses and stumbling about. There's some fun to be had with that – Kazamatsuri is Mamoru Miyano at his most Miyano, braying and boasting without any actual understanding of the situation. They couldn't be clearer foils: where Reiko tries to blend in and keeps her status as a wealthy heiress under wraps, Kazamatsuri doesn't even try to hide his wealth. We love a high-level failson in this house.

But a mystery is only as good as its conclusion, and I can't speak to how well-executed it is without seeing how it comes together. Are there clues I'm missing? Bits of foreshadowing that will only make sense after the fact? Is it blindingly obvious, and I'm just stupid? Plus, there's the matter of the new butler, who I know from reading the description helps Reiko solve mysteries. He insults her right off the bat, which I know is exciting to some women (a girl who was watching the show with me squealed with joy when he questioned her intelligence), but I have reservations about a story that hinges around a man doing a woman's job for her because she can't handle it.

Maybe, after everything, the greatest mystery is whether The Dinner Table Detective is good!

You know, this might be a good mystery show if everyone would just stop yelling so much. The Dinner Table Detective is part of a long tradition of lady detectives, meaning upper-class women who solve crimes on the side; Agatha Christie had a few, and the trend goes back into the 19th century. It's a winning set up, generally speaking, and Reiko Hosho almost feels like a worthy addition to a line up that includes Christie's excellent novel Why Didn't They Ask Evans?. She's smart but human and clearly doing her level best to do her job without letting her social status dim people's view of her capabilities.

This first episode also gives every appearance of being a decent fair-play mystery. The near-death of Mizuho is preceded by an appealing number of clues – the attempted suicide of another woman, the conspicuous amount of red dresses with green necklaces in the crowd, and a plotline about old friendships soured all give us things to chew on long before we really even know the crime. I daresay the solution isn't going to involve dinosaur fossils out of nowhere or other similar contrivances.

The problems are really two-fold. One is that this doesn't look great. Oh, it has some nice touches, like the clearly opulent surroundings and the way something about Ayaka's mouth reminds me of Naoki Urasawa's art. There's also nice attention to detail in the various body types we see, as well as dress and necklace styles. But the movements are stiff and unnatural, and it's clear that shortcuts are being taken whenever possible, which brings things down. The other problem, however, is the bigger issue: the attempts to inject comedy into the story fall flat. I'm okay with Reiko herself having a flaky side because she otherwise seems fairly competent. But her fellow detective Kazamatsuri is a buffoon, and the aforementioned yelling is frankly annoying. It feels as if the writing doesn't trust the audience to be invested in the mystery, or possibly as if it needs a gimmick besides the rich girl detective. Here's a hint: if it worked for Agatha Christie and Anna Katherine Green, it's going to work for your anime. Trust your viewers a bit more.

Even with these issues, I am interested in knowing the solution to the mystery. That's worth watching at least to the end of the case, and hopefully, the second episode will even out a little. But if it doesn't, there's another mystery anime with a preternaturally gifted butler airing on Saturdays, and that may be the better bet.

If I could give one solid piece of advice to anyone checking out The Dinner Table Detective on Amazon Prime, it would be to avoid the English dub at all costs. Usually, I hate it when folks get all weird and hostile about English dubs, especially these days, since almost every professional dub you're liable to find for a licensed anime is, at a bare minimum, passable. However, Amazon seems determined to drag us back to the bad old days of genuinely baffling and damaging localizations. I don't know what web of contracts, outsourcing, and possible anti-union chicanery is going on behind the scenes that has shows like Tonbo! and The Dinner Table Detective premiering with English dubs that sound like they've been unearthed from some thirty-year-old Central Park Media vault, but this madness has to end. Everything about The Dinner Table Detective is made categorically worse in English on account of the overly literal and completely inhuman sounding translations to the forced and very awkward sounding flat accents of the presumably South African performers (the dub was recorded by Transperfect Media Cape Town, whose “A.I. solutions” approach to their marketing does not speak to a company that cares much about the human quality of their productions, even when a dub like this one has a cast of flesh-and-blood humans).

I hate to spend so much time railing on Amazon's terrible licensing and localization practices, but if they are seriously going to make a second attempt at penetrating the anime streaming market in the West, they need to be held accountable for how badly their service compares to every single other streaming service out there. Even Disney is doing better with their anime, which is one of the saddest phrases I have had to physically type on my keyboard in a long time. It makes me truly afraid for what is going to happen to GQUUUUUUX.

Anyways, what about The Dinner Table Detective itself? The good news is that it is a fine and functional mystery caper—at least when you watch it in Japanese—even if it doesn't make for the most terribly memorable first impression, even in its native language. I enjoyed the bright colors and the playful direction of the show, which keeps it from getting too bogged down in exposition, and there's definitely a charm to the wacky banter that Reiko and Kazamatsuri get into as they try to solve the soiree's murder mystery. Your mileage may vary, though, depending on your tolerance for a lot of shouty-shouty manzai antics.

Really, my main beef with the actually-watchable Japanese version of The Dinner Table Detective is that I didn't find the detective work itself very interesting, which is a problem for a whodunit. It's not bad, by any means, but the whole affair is laden with “random episode of a long-running mystery series that you could put on in the background while you eat dinner” vibes. It's far from the worst thing you could watch this season, and shows like this always have the chance of picking up when you move on to a new case, but I'm not going to be waiting with bated breath for the next thrilling episode, either.