Butt Detective

There’s a talking butt in Japan that solves crimes. Oshiri Tantei—Butt Detective—started as a manga and got successful enough to warrant an anime series. The character, created by Yoko Tanaka and Masahide Fukasawa, drinks tea, eats sweet potato cake, and apparently solves cases by farting on people. It’s a children’s show.

This is the part of Japanese pop culture I find genuinely fascinating. Not the cool stuff—anyone can do that—but the commitment to taking the most absurd premise imaginable and actually making it work. Detective Conan solved murders for twenty years. Meanwhile a butt detective does the same thing. Both exist. Both have audiences. Both are executed with craft.

I haven’t seen it, but the trailers suggest it’s not cynical or ironic about itself. There’s a sincerity to treating a flatulent butt investigator as a legitimate character in a story. That’s harder than it sounds. Most things that rely on novelty collapse the moment they have to actually be a show. This one apparently doesn’t.

I want to see more of it. Whether it’s clever or just committed, I can’t tell from the outside, and that’s the appeal.