Bōkyaku Tantei

Kyōko Okitegami (掟上 今日子, Okitegami Kyōko)

Played by: Yui Aragaki[4]

The protagonist of the story. She is the head of the Okitegami Detective Agency and a detective. Date of birth unknown. Self-proclaimed: 25 years old. She is said to be the "fastest detective" and the "forgetful detective" because she loses her memory in a day (said to be a kind of anterograde amnesia), which makes her suitable for highly confidential cases.

The moment she loses her memory is not strictly 24 hours later, but the moment she falls asleep (the same applies if she is forced to sleep by sleeping pills, etc.). When she wakes up, she has forgotten her name and even her occupation, so as a backup for her memory, she writes information about herself and the case on her arms, legs, and stomach with a magic pen in her writing, and she is willing to stay up all night for as many days as necessary to solve the case. She has a very good memory.

She will not take on a case that she cannot solve within a day, and because of this, she does not accept appointments in advance, but thanks to this, she is one of the top five detectives for sudden cases.

The detective's office and her home is a three-story building, and it takes an hour to get to the entrance of the parlor because of the various security checks. She has a keen sense of money, including gratuities. She usually wears modest clothes, but when she's in the mood for something, she wears revealing clothes that show a lot of skin. It is rumored among those who know her that she never wears the same clothes once.

She has lost her memory after a certain point in her life, but she keeps that point a trade secret. Before that time, she remembers some things such as the books she was reading, but she does not remember who she was. She also remembers some of her physical experiences even after she became this way.

On the ceiling of her bedroom, in black paint, someone's handwriting, not hers, is bold and rough: "From today on, you are Kyōko Okitegami. You will live as a detective." It is the first thing she sees when she wakes up from bed in the morning. As she continues to be a detective according to this text, she is looking for the person who wrote that.

She appears in Mazemonogatari, a crossover novel with the Monogatari series. She also appears in the fifth volume of the Pretty Boy series, Panoramato Bidan, in the section White-Hair Beauty. She gives to Mayumi false theories about an art-theft case that happened at a certain museum.

Yakusuke Kakushidate (隠館 厄介, Kakushidate Yakusuke)

Played by: Masaki Okada[4]

The narrator in some of the novels since the first volume. 25 years old. Height: over 190cm. He tends to be falsely accused and has been involved in many cases since he was a child. He is suspected of being the culprit, which has made him timid, but he cannot do anything wrong or tell lies. To defend himself, he keeps asking for help from various detectives, and Kyōko is one of them. He also has trouble finding a job and moves from one place to another.

He has a crush on Kyōko and is always taken aback when she greets him with "Nice to meet you" every time he asks her for help.

Nisio recalls that he began to want to write mystery stories around the time he was writing Koyomimonogatari.[5] Since many of his works were becoming more and more elaborate on rhetoric and dialogue, he says that he wrote this series with less of that area in mind.[5] He also stated that it has much in common with his debut novel, Kubikiri Cycle: The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User, noting that Kyōko is a person who could have been called to the island where the novel is set and that it may be a return to his roots in that sense.[5]

As for the character design, Vofan explains that Nisio had a broad audience in mind for the series, so he decided to draw the characters "focused more on the fashion aspect, and tried to give it a warmer feel, as opposed to Monogatari, which has a more male-oriented audience."[6]

Nisio stated in the afterword of Okitegami Kyōko no Kansatsu-hyō that the series is planned to have 24 volumes.

In the 2014 Award of Book☆Walker, held on the e-book distribution site Book☆Walker in 2014, the first volume won a "Special Award" for both the author's first e-book and for its phenomenal sales despite being a single publication.[26] It also ranked seventh in the site's 2014 e-book rankings and categories for "Literature".[27]

The site's 2015 Award of Book☆Walker won the 2015 Award of Excellence in Literature.[28] It also ranked 51st overall in the site's 2015 e-book rankings[29] and third in the category "Literary Arts" in the site's 2015 e-book rankings.[30]

In This Light Novel is Amazing! 2017, it ranked ninth in the 2016 edition of the "Single Books and Novels" category.[31]