Recap / The Kindaichi Case Files The School Of The Hanging Necks Murder Case

"The School of the Hanging Necks Murder Case" (a.k.a. "No Noose Is Good Noose") is the eighth case in the File Series of The Kindaichi Case Files.

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Tropes include:

• Adults Are Useless: When it comes to bullying from the Gang of Bullies, the staff are tacitly complicit, and even the principal of the cram school himself turns a blind eye to their acts.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: According to a student who had suffered severe bullying himself from the Gang of Bullies (and Kindaichi actually witnesses one such act against said student), the gang leader among the members would instruct the others into doing cruel acts, including cutting off tails from dogs and ripping legs off insects.
• Bully Brutality: The Gang of Bullies definitely crosses this line for causing the death of a target of theirs, even if it's technically an Accidental Murder.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Kunio Akutsu, the cram school's classic literature teacher, has an eccentric way of teaching from the very few moments he has. He also openly cries in honor of Yoko Asano who gets caught because she's a prime suspect for the first murder, saying that she's done a "valiant effort" to vanquish the bullies. Well, he wouldn't be employed in a coveted cram school if his teachings are incompetent, even though because of the nature of the storytelling it's more of a Show, Don't Tell situation...
• Cloudcuckoolander: The female student Kindaichi manages to save from hanging herself early in the case arc turns out to have the mentality of a space cadet, as Kindaichi quickly discovers when he talks to her. For starters, she tells Kindaichi that she tried to off herself in order to keep a deceased student, whom she claims had an obsession with her body after his passing even though the two of them never interacted with each other while they were both alive, company in the great beyond.
• Continuity Nod:
  • After Kindaichi is successfully coaxed into applying for a cram school by his mother, she and Miyuki have a brief discussion about Kindaichi having fallen for the same trick for the second time.
    Miyuki: I don't believe it. He fell for it, just like he did for the treasure island.
    Hajime's mother: Well, it's good he's stupid, I guess.
  • Upon seeing Kindaichi's name on his report card, the math teacher mentions that a childhood friend of Kindaichi, who's currently a student in the cram school as well, had informed her of Kindaichi solving the murder case taking place within Fudo High School.
• Cram School: The case takes place in Shinokura Cram School.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: While the female student spouts a lot of stuff that's really "out there", her belief that the Gang of Bullies have been "chosen to die" for the death of a particular student is spot-on, even if the deceased student's ghost has nothing to do with the murders.
• Delayed Reaction: After Mrs. Kindaichi and Miyuki coax Hajime into enrolling for Shinokura Cram School at the start of the case arc, Hajime tries to reassure himself and Miyuki, only for his choice of words to cause Miyuki to have a private Double Take after the fact.
  Hajime: I'll be on this elite list next year, Miyuki. You can count on me. I won't let you live a life filled with debts!
  Miyuki: Go, Hajime-chan! *thinks privately* Um... what did he mean by that?
• Gang of Bullies: The victims in this murder case overlap this trope with Teens Are Monsters, given their frequent bullying of other students, on top of their other delinquent acts, and the fact that they're teenagers.
• Hanging Around: Death by hanging is a disturbingly frequent occurrence in this case arc.
  • For starters, everyone who has been slain in this serial murder case dies by hanging, and Kindaichi encounters one female student trying to hang herself shortly after entering the school ground, though it results as an Interrupted Suicide for her due to Kindaichi's early discovery of it and subsequent quick actions that ends up saving her life.
  • Moreover, this school is nicknamed "The School of Hanging Necks" because so many students have hanged themselves, regardless of whether the students ended up dead or not. Case in point: Kindaichi's childhood friend, who's among the school attendants, discloses that the total count of people who hanged or tried to hang themselves have been seven in the past two years alone, according to his memory, and the school custodian reveals that, in the ten years since the first inception of the school, over twenty students have hanged themselves... and they're just the well-known, successful examples.
  • From the testimony given by the school custodian, who has been the caretaker of the building for forty years, it was once a prison fifty years ago for the Japanese POWs after WWII, where close to thirty prisoners died by hanging. After it was torn down, the place was rebuilt several times for different purposes, including as a wedding chapel, as a hospital, and as a museum, but they always ended up being torn down because at least one person would be found dead by hanging, until it was finally settled as a college prep school ten years ago.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: "The School of Hanging Necks" is definitely ominous for a moniker, and its notorious reputation is well-deserved.
  • According to Kindaichi's childhood friend who now attends the school, if one counts each Interrupted Suicide alongside the successful ones, the total count of people who hanged or tried to hang themselves would be seven — in the past two years alone, according to his memory.
  • The school custodian informs Kindaichi at one point that, in the ten years since the first inception of the school, over twenty students have hanged themselves... and they're just the well-known, successful examples.
• Interrupted Suicide: Kindaichi spots a student hanging herself soon after entering the cram school for the first time, but he manages to save her in time.
• Million to One Chance: Quite a bit of evidence Kindaichi gathers to expose the culprit and break the culprit's alibi apart actually hinges on this.
  • Late in the case arc, Kindaichi, with help from Miyuki and Kenmochi, sets up a psychological exam that's intended to have the culprit Lured into a Trap. To elaborate: As Kindaichi explains to all surviving participants after Miyuki finishes grading the answer sheets, the exam contents are all bits of information that are related to the murder case but not revealed to the general public, so only Kindaichi, Miyuki, the police, and the culprit would know. Because the exam itself is set up in multiple-choice format, it's possible to get the answers right even via blind-guessing, but the culprit is likely to intentionally answer wrongly in an attempt to keep up the facade of innocence. Since each question has five possible answers and there are fifty questions in all, the possibility of answering all fifty questions wrongly without doing so on purpose would amount to 0.00142% (roughly 1/70,000). With this in mind, Kindaichi exposes the culprit's true identity, as the culprit answers ALL questions wrongly.
  • During the Summation Gathering, Kindaichi states that the culprit, by exploiting the position of being a teacher, tricks one of the victims into taking some exams earlier than other students through distributing answer sheets meant for said victim earlier than the others before slipping the early-answer sheet in the file after everyone has had the turn (e.g. having the intended target taking exam #16 while all other students took #15 at the time), at the same time randomly having students' seating arrangement altered using lot-drawing under the premise of preventing students from cheating by writing on the desk while concealing the real motive of insuring that no one would notice said student missing when the student should have been taking exams in class, using the pre-written answer sheet to create a fake impression that the victim in question had been present when he was actually already dead. Ironically, this ends up providing evidence for Kindaichi to incriminate the culprit, because the victim in question cheated off Kindaichi while taking an exam when he was seated behind Kindaichi due to the lot-drawing (and obviously still alive) and Kindaichi, bored with the exams, filled the answers via blind guessing before plopping down asleep on the desk, causing his answer sheet to slide a bit off the desk without showing the exam number, and Kindaichi presents both his answer sheet and the victim's, which have identical order of answers despite having different exam numbers, as proof of the trick.^note  Bear in mind that the answer sheets are of the ScanTron form and consist of dozens of questions, each having four to five possible answers.
    Kindaichi: The probability that two different answer sheets can have the same order of answers is practically zero! Therefore, the order of these answers is proof... that he wrote on a different answer paper from the others and that his papers were swapped!
• Never Suicide: None of the deceased in this case died as the result of suicide. Not only are the victims in this case all killed by the culprit, but the victims themselves are responsible for covering up a bully victim they accidentally killed as well.
• Orgy of Evidence: A rare moment in this series where this trope is heavily exploited by the culprit instead of showing the audience that the implicated person is innocent. The culprit creates two incidents with hanging chickens where test papers from her class are splattered with blood and scattered around the crime scene, spreads their familial connection with the cram school building's mass suicide history, and make themselves found in the same locked room as the first victim so that Kindaichi as the designated detective role will automatically assume they are not the culprit because they leave too many implicating evidence while that's what the culprit has intended. This is done so that the moment a plausible explanation to why they're in the first murder's crime scene appears, they're immediately off the hook.
• Public Exposure: The deceased student who turns out to have been killed in an Accidental Murder that's covered up and passed off as suicide was a talented painter in life and drew a portrait of the sleeping model while said model was nude. The painting has remained hanging high up on a wall in an unused room in the school after the student's passing and there are security alarms set around it to prevent others from trying to take it. After the case concludes, the parents of the deceased student asks Kindaichi to pass the painting to the model, which Kindaichi obliges in his subsequent visit to said model.
• Skipping School: The case arc ends with Kindaichi deciding that a competitive school life is not for him and, as a result of his "resolve", playing hooky yet again. Miyuki is NOT pleased.
  Miyuki: Hey, wait! Damn it, stop, Hajime-chan!
• Teacher/Student Romance: The culprit is the teacher who fell in love with a student of theirs. After the death of the student in question, the teacher resorts to murder after accidentally discovering that the ones who bullied said deceased student also killed said student, albeit accidentally in a bullying act gone wrong and covered it up to have it passed off as yet another suicide.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Played for Laughs in one scenario. Upon seeing the notification on the board that there would be three math exams on that particular day, Kindaichi decides to write all the math formulas on the desk he's sitting in to cheat off it. Unfortunately, a lot-drawing system is in place, and it occurs at the start of EVERY hour, so his tactic is rendered useless.
    Kindaichi: *thinking to himself* There goes the exam.
  • Part of what the culprit overheard from the Gang of Bullies, who callously dismiss the life of the student they had killed in a bullying act gone wrong before covering up to make it seem as though said student had committed suicide via hanging included this line: "This is the School of the Hanging Necks! You can never predict who's gonna die next!" Right from the gang leader, no less. Guess whom the culprit will make sure to become hanged next.^note  This is not counting the female student Kindaichi manages to save early in the case arc, as she tried to hang herself due to her... own self-deluded belief, being a Cloudcuckoolander.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: After managing to help save a girl from suicide via hanging herself, Kindaichi asks his childhood friend how everyone in school, students and staff alike, could remain so calm after a student nearly died. His answer to Kindaichi? "Because... everyone is used to it." The testimonies that Kindaichi and Miyuki receive from said childhood friend and the school custodian later on in the case arc would justify the nickname "The School of Hanging Necks" that's given to Shinokura Cram School and the nonchalance everyone in the school ground gives toward incidences of suicide by hanging.