Woodpecker Detective's Office

Tokyo, at the end of the Meiji era. Takuboku Ishikawa, a young poet who is chronically short of money, runs a private detective agency in order to support his family. Joining him as an assistant is his friend Kyosuke Kindaichi, a serious and long-suffering scholar who often has to deal with Takuboku's carefree and irresponsible ways.

Their partnership is put to the test when a newspaper reports that a ghost has been spotted on the twelfth floor of the Asakusa Juunikai, the famous tall tower that was one of the landmarks of the capital at the time. The strange sighting draws the pair into an investigation, and it becomes the first of many mysteries they take on.

Woodpecker Detective's Office is a period mystery that reimagines real literary figures of the age as amateur sleuths. It mixes puzzle-solving with character drama and a portrait of the city and its writers, giving equal weight to the cases and to the complicated friendship between the two men.