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Yuzuki is 26, and Reiko is 27, even Mifune who was on some people's lists of suspects is only 26 as well. Considering that the Kouji case is literally an example of APTX existing up to 17 years ago, its still possible for both of them. If, and I stress " if ", people who take APTX still have the ability to age after they have taken it, one of them could have taken the drug and merely aged up till their current state/age, in the same way that Conan can tell people that he is 6 years old, and Chris Vineyards character intro box can tell us that she is 29, and they technically aren't wrong since their bodies reflect that type of age, despite flashbacks from both characters that tell us otherwise. Also the idea that character boxes can lie for even non-APTX characters like that culprit from that Blog actress case where she was actually 5 years older than it said. Do you have any further thoughts on what you wrote above ? For a while I've been thinking about the various Urusei Yatsura references in the series and I keep seeming to think that Sakurako and Kuroda could be analogs to Sakura and Cherry (Sakuranbou). In Yatsura, "Cherry" is a wandering monk whose actual name is Sakuranbou, but since the kanji mean "deranged monk", he goes by the english equivalent. He kind of carries the loose plot of the series by popping up out of nowhere and telling the main cast that bad things are about to happen. Sakura is his niece, who is cursed, but some how it gets transferred to the main character. She starts out as a shrine priestess, but later becomes the school nurse. Pretty much the only thing they seem to have in common is that they can consume massive amounts of food and never gain any weight. In Conan I believe that Sakurako could be Kuroda's niece, or even his daughter. The death of Saurako's mother and the exact timing of Kuroda's 10 year coma have not been specified. Typically when someone's parent dies, the child just lives with the other parent. However if Kuroda was the father, and was in a coma at the time, it would make sense that she ended up living with the Wakamatsu family who were essentially family substitutes since she grew up there. There isn't really any mention of a father, but we know that by nature of being born, that she must have had one, even if he wasn't actually in her life. Kuroda, who is a Superintendent who keeps getting transferred (to Nagano, then to Tokyo), comes off as a wandering monk type character to me, although when I first saw his design, his sideburn beard combo made me think he looked more like Son Goku the monkey king from Journey to the west >_>. Currently both characters have been said to like Koucha (Black tea in english speaking countries, Red tea everywhere else). Kuroda even appears again at the end of that Blog case that Sakurako was in. Maybe he was simply there to pick her up? She did kind of just disappear halfway though the last chapter.

Once again... With that out of the way... Any reason Rumi couldn't be Asaka? And by that, I mean Koji's dying message was actually "Rum(i) (W)akasa." Mary must've shrunk around the time Shinichi/Conan, Ran, Kogoro and Hiroshi were in London (generally, I mean any time after Red Shirts, but before Masumi appears—between 704 and 767/581 and 645, and I mention the London case because it's pretty close to Masumi's debut... I'd say Mary was shrunk from the 740s to the 760s). If Mary had been shrunk before that, Masumi would've come to Japan earlier. Of course, anything related to Mary before her debut in 875/756 and 876–878/759–760 is hard to comment on. I think Masumi taking a photo of Shinichi/Conan in 856/740 was per Mary's instructions, and her showing Shinichi/Conan the picture of her and Mary was the follow-up to that. I couldn't tell you if Mary's been with Masumi since 768–770/646–647, or if she started living with Masumi sometime after Mystery Train (818–824/701–704). Does the middle brother know about what's happened to their mother? Was the phone call Masumi received at the end of Detectives' Nocturne (796–800/671–674) from him about that particular subject? Was Mary shrunk in the U.S., or did it happen to her in Japan? If the former is true, then the middle brother may have sheltered her for a time. There's just so much we don't know about Mary's actions and whereabouts, pre-875/756 (though I do think that she was living with Masumi by 856–858/740–741). For the possibility that he's Rum... If he's not Rum, but he's also not the real Hyoue Kuroda, then the only character I think he could be is Mr. Akai. Else, this whole amnesia thing was a red herring, and the only important thing about it is the accident that caused it (the accident is important, I think, regardless of whether Hyoue is the real Hyoue, Rum, or Mr. Akai). While him being of American descent, like Ethan Hondo, would explain the family ties to America, he could've been 100% Japanese, and the America connections existed because of Mary being connected to James Black, and those connections got Shuichi into the FBI (and in a position to go to Japan and undertake the BO case). Gosho's comment about Mr. Akai—suggesting he wasn't dead—plays into the Mr Akai = Post-Coma Hyoue theory, regardless of whether Post-Coma Hyoue is Rum or not. Yuzuki is 26. Assuming she's not lying about her age, she'd be 9 at the time of the Amanda Hughes/Koji Haneda double murder. She'd have to actually be around Rumi's age, now, to have been in a position, 17 years ago, to become a bodyguard.