Assistant Professor of Japanese Kyoko Omori published an article titled "Narrating the Detective: Nansensu, Silent film Benshi Performances and Tokugawa Musei's Absurdist Detective Fiction" in Japan Forum (21:1), Routledge. This article discusses how Tokugawa Musei, arguably the most famous benshi or silent film narrator/commentator, undermined conventions of detective fiction by adding aspects of benshi narration to the typical formulae of detective novels. By doing so, Musei supplemented the main narrative with a perspective external to the diegetic narrative.

This supplementation resulted in a nonsensical story that overwhelmed the reader with too much contradictory information and overturned the premises of logic integral to detective fiction. To illustrate Musei's techniques, Omori analyzes Musei's "The Case of Obetai Buruburu" (1927).