The Detective Is Already Dead is full of surprises: It combines mystery, action, sci-fi, and romance into a single package. We spoke to novelist Nigojū, who created the original work, and anime director Manabu Kurihara about their involvement in this genre-bending work.
(For Nigojū) Although the story is about a detective, the mystery-solving elements in the first volume are surprisingly not too prominent. Was the “mystery” aspect something you wanted to downplay in favor of the other genre influences? What was the balance like for the later volumes?
It’s true that the title has the word “detective” in it, but the fact of the matter is that I myself did not write this story while thinking of it as a mystery novel. That hasn’t changed with the continuing volumes past volume 1. At the same time, this story does…
