In my Kikuchi/Onozuka series, I made Kikuchi's father a retired detective. Recently, in this comment (*swats away Sawa and crossover bunnies. I swear...*) on one of my fics, bronze_ribbons reminded me that Sawa used to be a detective--giving me more plot bunnies to add to the gazillion already clamoring for attention! >_<

So anyway, I decided to go back to the Sawa flashback story "Mother's Rouge" in Book 4, to see if I could figure out where Sawa had been stationed, and whether he and Kikuchi-Papa could have crossed paths in their work. (I haven't really explained it fully in the series yet, but Kikuchi senior was a detective in Division One of the Metropolitan Police Department--more commonly translated in English as the Tokyo Police Department, since it serves the entire Tokyo metropolis. Going by my experience of watching numerous detective J-dramas, Division One seems to be the elite Homicide division, although they sometimes investigate other high-profile crimes like kidnappings. Division Two handles financial crimes, narcotics, weapons trafficking, and assaults, and in TV-land, there is sometimes a friendly or not-so-friendly rivalry between the two Divisions. There are also local precincts in the various wards of Tokyo, staffed by their own detectives.)

Going back to the manga...it seems that Sawa is a detective at one of the local precincts, the Shinjuku Police Station, and was investigating a transvestite bar on a narcotics charge. One of his coworkers refers to him as "a former bureaucrat" who was "tossed down into our district" after his uncle murdered his aunt. So it sounds like he was probably in the adminstrative branch of the MPD, probably on a fast-track career path, but was demoted when his family was touched by a scandal--which would be standard practice in TV-land, where the top brass are usually more concerned with covering their own asses than looking out for the welfare of the officers serving under them. (Just saying that's the stereotypical fictional potrayal and not necessarily how it is in real life, of course.)

So it's unlikely, but not impossible that Sawa and Kikuchi's father would have known each other. In TV shows, Division One sometimes assists and supervises the local stations when they handle a murder investigation, so if Sawa had been involved with the investigation of a local murder in Shinjuku, Kikuchi senior could have been sent to assist.

What really surprised me is how young Sawa is--only twenty-three at the time of the flashback. I'm not sure how quickly officers achieve detective rank in the Japanese police force, but that seems a little young to be a detective--and that's actually supposed to be a step down for him! Maybe he was an elite Tokyo University graduate, maybe with family or social connections who were able to secure him a good position in the administrative branch of the MPD right after graduation?

His face looks youthful, but due to his air of sophistication, I had assumed that he was older--in his early to mid-thirties, perhaps. But Yukihito appears to be in his early teens in "Mother's Rouge"--about middle school age, I think, old enough for Sawa to feel the first stirrings of attractions to him. And since Yukihito still seems to be in high school in Book 7 ("Six Nine"), no more than a few years could have passed between the flashback and that story. Let's say, a maximum of five, assuming that Yukihito was 13 in the flashback, and is an 18-year-old high school senior in "Six Nine," which means that Sawa can't be older than 28. (Assuming Yukihito wasn't held back in school due to the trauma of losing his mother and being unable to speak, but even taking that into consideration, I think Sawa would be 30 at most.)

Which means that Sawa is actually a peer of Katou and Iwaki, age-wise--near Iwaki's age, or somewhere in the middle between the two, I think. I was just curious, was I the only one who overestimated Sawa's age, or did you guys assume that he was in his 20s at the start of the manga? The mistakes he makes in his relationship with Yukihito expose his youth, perhaps, or could just be chalked up to the fact that he hasn't had any other serious relationships? (Although he has had casual sex, with the sexy tattooed guy in "Six Nine," and probably with other men in the past. And damn the plot bunnies, but I've been wondering about the tattooed guy and how he got into that profession, and someday I'd like to write a fic about him--or better yet, read one that someone else wrote! ~_^)

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At about the same time, I was trying to flesh out Asano's character for my series, and I suddenly started wondering what his family was like. When he engineered the sleepover scandal with Iwaki, he didn't seem to be concerned that his family would read about him being embroiled in a gay love triangle in the tabloids. So does he think that his family won't care, or does he not care what they think? Or does he think his family's possible embarrassment and disapproval of him is worth the reward of becoming famous? What kind of family would have created such an ambitious, scheming, ruthless young man?

Asano could have a perfectly nice, ordinary family and still be a jerk, of course, but looking back at the manga, families seem to play a very important role in how the various characters were formed: Iwaki comes from a very conservative family that doesn't express its affection very well, and Iwaki himself is defensive and often shuts out the people who care about him. Katou's family is more liberal and accepting, which seems to have contributed to Katou's warm, outgoing personality and his ability to take a male lover without any shame. And Sawa, having been rejected by his narrow-minded family, appears to have rebelled against them and transformed himself into Nagisa. But the family influences still linger: he tries to protect Yukihito from the "shame" of being gay by taking on the aggressive "male" role, so that Yukihito can still claim the escape route of merely being the "submissive." (Which really doesn't make sense to me, but that does seem to be the standard yaoi trope, that being the uke is somehow not as bad, because taking the "passive" role absolves one of responsibility.)

Incidentally, I find it a bit skeevy that Sawa is sleeping with Yukihito while the latter is still in high school, although I overlook it in the manga since it's made clear that Yukihito loves Sawa and sincerely wants to be with him. When he first appeared in the manga, I assumed that Yukihito was older--still young, but (in US terms at least) a legal adult, somewhere in the 18-20 year old range. Normally, I can only handle the older-younger man type romances when the older man waits until the younger man is a legal adult before consumating the relationship, as in "You and Harujion" by Keiko Kinoshita. (Actually, there is no consumation in that story, only a kiss, since the older character makes it clear that nothing's going to happen until the kid, who is 17 at the time of the story, graduates from college, even though the kid is eager to begin the relationship. Despite the lack of hot smex, it is a really lovely and tender story.)

Getting back to Asano's family, I think there are a number of possibliites: cold, calculating types who turned out a son as ambitious as they are, or indulgent, wealthy parents who never denied Asano anything as a child, so now he believes that he's entitled to anything he wants, no matter the cost to anyone else. Or maybe he is so ambitious because he comes from a poor family, and that makes him even more determined to become a success, even if he has to hurt other people along the way. Although I think it becomes apparent in the Fuyu no Semi chapters that he's not really as ruthless as he would like to think he is, otherwise Iwaki's harsh words wouldn't bother him so much.

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On a final, completely unrelated note, I had the weirdest dream the other night about Kikuchi! I think maybe it was a combination of working too hard (work has been hellish recently) and working on my current K/O fic. In the dream, Kikuchi was a vampire, and a jealous lover or maybe just an admirer (the details are a bit fuzzy now, but the guy was not Onozuka) tried to expose his identity after overhearing snippets of a conversation and mistakenly believing that Kikuchi was involved with someone else. He tried to expose Kikuchi's true identity with a photo taken of Kikuchi decades ago, still looking as young as he is in the present--that part, I think, came from the Petshop of Horrors manga, where the detective Leon finds what looks like a photo of the mysterious Count D, only it was taken during the 1940s. Maybe the vampire part came about because I had been recently discussing the Twilight series with a friend, and I've been thinking of getting the True Blood dvd set, so maybe vampires just happened to be on my mind and my subconscious picked up on it.

When I woke up, my first thought was, "Damn, now I've got to have Kikuchi star in a movie where he plays a vampire!" ^_^

ETA 8/6/09: The Metropolitian Police Department has an informational page in English here.