While A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics opens with fantasy characters dropping into Japan, the presence of a detective makes it an intriguing blend of genres. Even then, the anime chooses to be unusually grounded, focusing on real-life case scenarios rather than fantastical noir set-ups. For fans of crime and detection, this may make it an intriguing alternative to the “great detectives” that are all too commonplace.
Certainly, Salad Bowl owes much to Detective Conan, like many other anime that brush with mysteries. But its private detective, Sousuke Kaburaya, is cut from a different cloth than the likes of Conan Edogawa or Sherlock Holmes.
Even with the inclusion of magic, the cases Sousuke takes on are startlingly mundane, providing a very different look at detective work that is ironically rare in today’s media.
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Salad Bowl Shows Detective Work In All Its Trite Glory
Original novels written by Yomi Hirasaka; anime adaptation by Synergy SP and Studio Comet.
Despite the unlikely partnership of a luckless detective and an otherworldly princess, Salad Bowl’s focus thus far has been on unglamorous detective work. Within its first four episodes, Sousuke’s cases had him tackle suspicious husbands, infidelity, and school bullying. Meanwhile, the most “exotic” situation occurs to an entirely different character, when magical knight-turned-vagrant Livia unwittingly stumbles into a cult recruitment. The next episode even implies that Sousuke’s future challenge is the “heinous” crime of reselling. It is a far cry from the dramatic adventures that audiences tend to expect, especially when reverse isekai is mixed into this genre.
As said, most anime today references Conan, who tackles grisly murders, international terrorism, and lurid conspiracies across countless anime and movies. But Salad Bowl has resisted the impulse to romanticize the job, and at times even offers some pointed criticism, such as when Sousuke reveals that his old agency was willing to employ honey traps to satisfy their clients. While Sousuke makes for a less flashy detective, it also means he’s shown doing his job, rather than falling prey to the cliché of his position being a boilerplate that gives him free time to go on unpaid adventures with Sara.
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This means the anime provides an interesting alternative for fans who’ve ever wanted to see what “actual” detective work is, between Conan getting involved in runaway trains, Sam Spade dealing with Maltese falcons, or any other pulp detective who just happens to now of all times get into life-threatening situations between unseen “ordinary cases”. Here, thus far, Sousuke has done nothing but those, and it helps sell the idea of a “reverse isekai”. As its title implies, A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics is already brimming with oddball residents, showing real life doesn’t need high adventure or magic to be impressive.
