Is Himitsu: Top Secret Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Set about fifty years in the future, Himitsu imagines a world where brain scanners can pull up to five years of memory out of a person's mind, even after death. Japan's Ninth Forensics Laboratory uses this technology to solve murders by literally watching a victim's final moments play out, and the series follows the investigators who have to reckon with just how invasive that power really is. Ikkou Aoki, an earnest new recruit, joins the lab under its guarded director Tsuyoshi Maki, who's quietly still carrying the weight of having shot his own best friend during an earlier case.

What it does well

This is a procedural with a genuinely unsettling sci-fi hook at its center, and Shimizu doesn't let the premise coast on novelty — the show is just as interested in the ethical weight of memory-reading as it is in the murder cases themselves, which gives it more staying power than a straightforward crime-of-the-week structure would. Maki is the series' best element: his buttoned-up exterior and the specific guilt he's carrying give the investigative plots real emotional undertow, and his relationship with Aoki (who resembles the friend Maki killed) adds a layer of quiet, unresolved tension to every case they work together. The character drama around grief, memory, and what we owe the dead ends up being just as compelling as the mystery plotting.

Where it falls short

The pacing can be uneven across its long run — some case arcs resolve with real weight, while others feel more like filler between the stronger emotional beats involving the main cast. The science-fiction premise also asks for a fair amount of suspension of disbelief about how memory scanning would actually work as forensic evidence, and the series doesn't always interrogate that as rigorously as its best chapters suggest it could. And because there's no confirmed current English print release, tracking it down takes more effort than picking up something from a major ongoing licensor.

Verdict

This is a thoughtful, character-driven sci-fi procedural that uses its central gimmick to ask real questions about grief and privacy rather than just solving crimes for their own sake. If you can track it down, it's a rewarding read for anyone who wants mystery manga with real emotional stakes underneath the case-of-the-week structure.