Kubikiri Cycle: Aoiro Savant to Zaregotozukai

Due to a mysterious disease, the genius Iria Akagami has been forced by her family to stay in a mansion on the isolated Wet Crow's Feather Island with only a handful of maids. To keep herself entertained, Iria invites a variety of fellow geniuses to stay as guests in her home, including computer savant Tomo Kunagisa and her unnamed assistant, skilled fortune-teller Maki Himena, famous artist Kanami Ibuki, academic scholar Akane Sonoyama, and renowned cook Yayoi Sashirono.

These visits progress as normal until one of the guests is found gruesomely murdered in the night without a single clue as to the identity of the killer or a possible motive. Tensions rise between those on the island as the killer remains at large, and Tomo's assistant takes it upon himself to uncover the culprit's identity before the murderous events progress any further.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Boku Main

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Kunagisa, Tomo Main

Yuuki, Aoi Japanese

Aikawa, Jun Supporting

Kaida, Yuuko Japanese

Sonoyama, Akane Supporting

Shimamura, Yuu Japanese

Himena, Maki Supporting

Endou, Aya Japanese

Ibuki, Kanami Supporting

Kawasumi, Ayako Japanese

Chiga, Teruko Supporting

Gotou, Yuuko Japanese

Chiga, Hikari Supporting

Shintani, Ryouko Japanese

Handa, Rei Supporting

Kuwashima, Houko Japanese

Akagami, Iria Supporting

Ise, Mariya Japanese

Yodo, Akiko Producer

Matsushita, Takuya Producer

Shinbou, Akiyuki Director, Series Composition

Yase, Yuki Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Apr 1, 2025

Iamtragedy

Recommended

As a devoted fan of Nisio Isin’s works, I went into this with high expectations and he still managed to surpass them. This experience has only deepened my appreciation for his skill in crafting intricate mysteries and, more importantly, his mastery of character writing. His ability to bring depth, nuance, and unpredictability to his characters continues to amaze me.

On the technical side, Shaft Studio once again demonstrated why they are the perfect match for adapting his stories. Their signature style was at its peak here, elevating every scene with striking visuals, dynamic direction, and an artistic flair that perfectly complemented the narrative. The OST was ... nothing short of phenomenal and each track enriched the atmosphere, heightening the emotions and immersing me even further into the story.

Every element came together seamlessly, making this a must watch.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Mar 23, 2026

Belts

Mixed Feelings

Is Akiyuki Shinbo, the auteur anime director at the heart of Studio Shaft, famed for Puella Magi Madoka Magica and the Monogatari series, a genius?

In my essay on Shiboyugi, I mentioned that newcomer director Souta Ueno distinguished himself from most well-regarded anime directors by focusing less on the details of movement and more on shot composition and framing. Of course, Ueno is not the only anime director with this style, and the description undoubtedly also applies to the far more established Akiyuki Shinbo. Shinbo's use of eye-catching backgrounds with modern art aesthetics mean his works often look intriguing even when absolutely nothing is happening on ... screen. It's no surprise why he has often paired with writers known for their long-winded philosophical monologues, particularly Gen Urobuchi and Nisio Isin: when a character starts rambling about the nature of hope and despair, or truth and nonsense, Shinbo is certain to prevent the audience's attention from wandering via the use of some staggeringly unique visual.

In his inimitable eye for composition, Shinbo is thus the dictionary definition of a genius: "a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect."

But he's also a fucking idiot.

The Beheading Cycle, also known as Kubikiri Cycle, and stupendously subtitled "The Blue Savant and the Nonsense Bearer," is perhaps the ultimate showcase both of Shinbo's genius and his idiocy. After Shinbo's successful adaptation of Nisio Isin's Monogatari series, it only made sense for him to adapt another Isin work. This time, it was his debut novel, published in 2002 when Isin was only 21 years old.

Though obscure to a western audience, the original novel likely had a significant influence on Danganronpa, or at least served as its blueprint: a locked room murder mystery in which the characters are all "geniuses," each one adept in their own individual skill. There's a genius painter, a genius scholar, a genius chef, and their unique abilities play some hand in either the murder or its resolution.

Also similar to Danganronpa, the actual mystery was so easy even I was able to solve it!

I'm not interested in commenting on the mystery itself. My interest is much more in the thematic wrapping-paper around the mystery. As expected for a story with a cast of geniuses, the nature of genius is a major thematic aspect of the work. Oddly enough, this theme is rarely tackled explicitly, despite Isin's willingness to monologue endlessly about the story's true main theme ("nonsense"). Yet the work itself demonstrates an understanding of genius that carries certain significant implications.

In the final episode of the show, after the "who" and "how" of the mystery is solved, a hitherto-unseen detective appears and explains the "why" of the mystery over the course of a torturous 40-minute car ride that ends with the main character, and the audience, remarking that they feel like they've just been mugged. The detective, Aikawa, explains—allow to describe this as best I can without revealing the actual identity of the murderer—that the murderer sought to steal the identity of the murdered, replacing them in society.

(In fact, they have successfully done this, since even after the murderer was exposed, nobody felt like calling the police, allowing them to go free.)

The unnamed protagonist, hearing this explanation, is baffled. After all, these aren't just ordinary people, these are world-renowned geniuses. How can one of them, known to be skilled in a very specific area of expertise, be replaced by another without everyone immediately figuring it out? The replacement has somehow continued to perform the victim's usual work without even a hiccup. Surely this is impossible, right?

Aikawa then proposes what I can only describe as the story's thesis on "genius": that genius is universal, and that what we call geniuses have only focused this universal intelligence into a specific "vector." Basically, a genius is someone who has the potential to be a genius at anything, they only need to apply themselves. So when one the genius replaces another, all they are really doing is refocusing their genius in a new direction.

The story does not seem to question this explanation, though it is patently absurd in reality. Perhaps you can argue it by pointing to Renaissance Man examples like Leonardo da Vinci, both a genius painter and a genius scientist, but it's ridiculous in a modern world of hyper-specialization.

Nonetheless, the story seems to accept the explanation. It is, quite likely, intended to be taken at face value.

Yet it made me reconsider the entire story up until that point. If a "genius" can be replaced so easily, maybe the real reason was because they weren't all that much of a "genius" to begin with. Sure, they might be considered a genius by society, but at the same time, plenty of incompetent people somehow find themselves in positions that imply intelligence.

Of course, the geniuses on the murder mystery island don't often prove their smarts. Part of this might be the typical problem of an author (especially a debut amateur like 2002's Isin) struggling to write a character who is supposed to be smarter than they are. But none of the geniuses are capable of solving the mystery, leaving it instead to the average, non-genius, self-insert protagonist (who all the girls are inexplicably interested in). Even more telling, there's a subplot where two characters uninvolved in the murder swap identities as a prank, or more specifically "to see if any of the geniuses on the island would figure it out." None of them do.

The actual geniuses on the island include a painter, a scholar, a chef, an engineer, and a fortune teller. The fortune teller, Maki, can supposedly not only tell the future, but read minds. In a work that otherwise has zero supernatural elements, this seems like complete bullshit, especially when Maki claims to know the culprit, but won't reveal it simply because it's more fun that way. Other than a small number of dubious cold reads, Maki never actually proves her abilities. While the story itself never actually questions Maki, in this context, doesn't it make more sense to see her as a fraud? (Quite comically, the protagonist does monologue it's "nonsense" that Maki knows the culprit but won't reveal it, but never thinks it might be because she doesn't actually know the culprit.)

The engineer, Tomo ("Great Value Konata," as my friend Remy called her), is supposedly a computer whiz, but when she makes her singular contribution to solving the mystery and searches the internet for any secret connections between the people on the island, she just asks someone else to go find the information for her. Otherwise, she does nothing except look cute and beg the protagonist to fuck her (he refuses).

The painter, Kaname, can supposedly paint anything from an eidetic memory, yet her one painting shown contains an error that turns out to be a clue. The scholar, Akane, has no explicit specific skills and never demonstrates any. And the chef, Yayoi... well, she's the most interesting character in the story. I'll talk about her later.

Since none of these characters ever demonstrate any actual genius abilities, since none of them solve any of the mysteries regardless of stakes, since at least one of them can be replaced by a different person and continue doing the same work without anyone catching on, I can only conclude that none of these people are actual geniuses.

They just have the branding of geniuses.

This story isn't proto-Danganronpa. An eccentric millionaire inviting a bunch of fraud geniuses to an island as the setting of a murder mystery... Beheading Cycle is proto-Glass Onion.

I'll reiterate that I find it impossible to speculate on whether this reading is intended or whether it's a byproduct of authorial incompetence. There are aspects of the story that I think call attention to the incompetence of the supposed geniuses, but other aspects that seem to accept the geniuses at face value. There's a recurring suggestion that the culprit's motive is to eat the brains of the geniuses in an attempt to gain their genius, and though this is not the actual motive, its existence as even a possibility implies a superstitious, primitive understanding of intelligence that surely not even Isin himself believes. Either way, I bring up this reading less to comment on the story itself, but rather to comment on the concept of genius when applied to the story's two primary creative figures.

"The Blue Savant and the Nonsense Bearer" is a subtitle that could refer to Shinbo and Isin themselves. The core issue with Beheading Cycle is that it is the debut work of a very young author, and it shows. The fumbling toward philosophical insight is often confused or substanceless, and conversations go in circles for way too long before arriving at a pretty simple point. In true amateur fashion, Isin is self-conscious of his rambling, so he preemptively defends himself from criticism by having his characters criticize him first; many long monologues will end with the protagonist muttering that maybe everything he just said is nonsense (he is, in fact, the true Nonsense Bearer in the subtitle). "Nonsense" is one of the core themes of the work, but often this is not in service of any actual insight about nonsense, rather than defending certain nonsensical writing decisions post-facto.

(I will, at least, give Isin credit for not making the mystery nonsense too. Or at least most of it.)

I'm not prepared to speak about Isin in this essay, so I'll spare him by excusing any issues with his writing on account of his youth and inexperience. I cannot apply the same leniency to Akiyuki Shinbo who, adapting this work a full 14 years after its original publishing, ought to have known better.

The aforementioned final episode and its 40-minute car ride is nearly a line-for-line adaptation of the source material. Shinbo exhibits zero willingness to make any cuts to the original dialogue despite how easily cuts could have been made without sacrificing meaning. It's as though Shinbo—a 54-year-old veteran—holds the long-winded prattling of a 21-year-old amateur as sacrosanct, or, potentially, that Shinbo himself doesn't understand the material enough to determine when to make cuts. (My friend Lurina proposed an alternative explanation that Isin, now an industry heavyweight, has contractual stipulations to ensure adaptational fidelity, but surely this cannot apply to a full line-for-line copy, right?)

Maybe Shinbo simply sees a 40-minute car ride conversation as an opportunity, a blank canvas on which he can dump as many of his insane visual concepts as possible. He does, in fact, dump many of them.

Whichever of these explanations is the truth, they all point to the same underlying issue:

Akiyuki Shinbo is utterly devoid of storytelling instincts.

For an auteur, this is a seemingly ridiculous statement. Sure, not every auteur is Quentin Tarantino, pulling permanent double duty as writer and director. But even more mercenary directors like Steven Spielberg or Stanley Kubrick, who work primarily with adaptations, who operate within a variety of genres and tones, bring a narrative eye to the material separate from their visual stylings. They will make creative decisions that are based around telling a stronger story in the medium of film, even if this draws the ire of the original author or the critics. Spielberg can transform any story into one of sentimentality; Kubrick one of alienation. Kubrick famously performed a hysterectomy on The Shining, stripping out almost all of its plot and character, in service of constructing a work where implication supersedes explication. I sensed a similar Kubrickian surgery in Souta Ueno's Shiboyugi, which would frequently elide dialogue in confidence that the storytelling could be carried via visuals alone, and it is this grasp of narrative that is exactly lacking in Akiyuki Shinbo.

Across a 40-year career, Shinbo has collected an almost completely random filmography, an endless array of works with absolutely no narrative or thematic throughline. He has done shounen, slice of life, hentai, magical girls, gothic horror, anything and everything, and he brings the exact same visual energy, the exact same visual language, to all of it, as if it is all completely interchangeable even in his own mind. Kubrick may find a way to place a long hallway in all of his movies, but the character of the hallway changes to fit the story: the anonymizing army barracks in Full Metal Jacket, the mazelike corridors of the hotel in The Shining. Shinbo, by contrast, papers over the narrative with his digital backgrounds, which swallow even the basic elements of setting in an all-devouring image. The image does not adapt to the material. It is eye-catching, it is intriguing, it is perhaps even beautiful, but it does not tell a story. Like James Turrell in Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective, Shinbo forsakes the power of a story in favor of the power of light.

This is idiocy, but it's also genius; an idiot savant, the Blue Savant of the subtitle. In complete refutation of Aikawa's theory of "vectorized" genius, Shinbo is capable only of his one narrow technical niche, and absolutely nothing else.

The result is sometimes stultifying. The Beheading Cycle always looks amazing, but is often incompetent as a story, when Shinbo could have potentially crafted a tight, somewhat thought-provoking little mystery with just a tiny amount of adaptational acumen.

But by the same token, the result is sometimes that of a genius among geniuses. Shinbo's lack of storytelling instincts is often what enables him to produce such truly unique images, unhindered by any conventional paradigms of narrative. I have increasingly come to consider one of Shinbo's films, Rebellion, as potentially the best film I have ever seen, and while it follows the same Shinbo template—leaning on the writing of an established author, unwilling to make cuts, treating philosophical dialogue as a blank canvas on which to splash any image he can conceive—the result is an almost accidental masterpiece, a sort of lottery-winning spark of complete random chance that I'm not sure Shinbo himself, or Gen Urobuchi, or anyone involved truly understands how it came about.

Earlier I mentioned Yayoi, the genius chef. Unlike the other so-called geniuses, she exhibits one of the only actual superhuman feats of the story. To demonstrate her "genius-level" capacity for taste, she licks the protagonist's skin, and correctly identifies his blood type. Regardless of whether this is absurd or not, it is, at least, demonstrably preternatural.

Later, when a terrified Yayoi asks the protagonist why he thinks she was brought to the island (she suspects she will be pressganged into cooking genius brains Hannibal-style), he responds, "Because you're a genius."

Yayoi scoffs. "Cooking just isn't that big of a deal," she says.

Indeed, her situation on the island is more ambiguous than everyone else's. She has been brought on "indefinitely," essentially living on the island, though with the caveat that she always prepares the meals. She isn't part of the island's staff, but her position is less guest and more unpaid laborer. (It's her meals everyone eats during the Danganronpa-esque round table dinners where much of the accusing and speculating takes place.) Her "genius" is explicitly limited, containing no mental or intellectual dimension, and is if anything only a byproduct of her being a physical freak of nature, with a superhuman sense of taste. As a result, she is treated less like a genius than the other geniuses, a mentality she internalizes, as evidenced by her own self-disparaging remarks.

At the very end of the show, after the interminable car ride, the protagonist monologues about every character one after another, noting the contradictions between their supposed genius and their actual behavior, dismissing them as nonsense, but without going so far as to question the validity of their self-professed "genius." Notably, only one character is never mentioned during this monologue. It's Yayoi. Maybe he's forgotten her, deciding cooking just isn't that big of a deal after all. Or maybe he has nothing to say because she's the only character whose actions actually correspond to their supposed genius, whose skillset could never be replicated if her head was cut off and she was replaced by someone else. Not someone branded as a genius while relying on their position in an academic institution, or their hacker friends, or a few con artist mind reading tricks. Not someone who thinks being a genius in one area means they can be a genius in any area they put their mind to.

Yet Yayoi will continue living on the island indefinitely, applying her unquestionable talents to the taste of a capricious Nonsense Bearer, perhaps under contractual obligation to cook to their exact taste, or maybe simply too limited in perspective to attempt anything else. Of course, while they will always cook the best possible version of whatever was ordered, at the end of the day they can only cook to order.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Feb 15, 2024

AnimeEnjoyer420

Not Recommended

Funny

I love a good mystery, and Kubikiri Cycle does at least somewhat deliver on that, so it's hard to entirely dislike it. While it does get a little too convoluted at the end, the actual murder mystery portion of the series is the most sound and enjoyable part of it. It's the other parts of the series that are a letdown.

In particular, there are two elements that stand out above the others as critical issues: the characters and the dialogue writing. These problems are distinct, but related of course. The characters are insufferable virtually without exception, and a big part of that is the pretentious ... dialogue. Conversations feel about as authentic here as they do in an Ayn Rand novel. Characters talk in grand philosophical statements and go on endless, preachy monologues about their personal outlooks on life, most of which tend to be miserable and nihilistic. Even characters that are meant to be viewed positively tend to be gratingly wacky and quirky instead (I'm thinking of Tomo, the "blue savant" from the series' subtitle here). When the murders begin to happen, you feel nothing because the victims feel more like bundles of college undergrad philosophy essays that have been clumsily arranged into the outline of a human than real characters that you can identify and empathize with.

Visually, Shaft brings its B game to this series. On the positive side, get plenty of Shaft-isms here - the head tilts, the dramatic use of blacks and reds, and so forth - the animation looks good and occasionally great, and there are some strong storyboards late in the series. On the negative side, the 3D backgrounds look comparatively chintzy and there is too much use of camera rotation, almost as though the director decided he may as well take advantage of those 3D environments and spin the camera all over inside of them, whether or not it was appropriate for the scene. It still looks better than the average anime TV series, but probably will not rank among Shaft's best in that regard.

If you're really into mysteries (or a huge fan of the source author's better-known Monogatari series), you may give this one a try and find that you like it. I find it hard to recommend because of the unlikeable characters and a style of dialogue that I find deeply annoying, but if you can get past those issues, you may get more out of it than I did.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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