Gosho Aoyama
3The Telling · 48青山 剛昌
Born 1963
The creator of Detective Conan, the most successful mystery manga ever, who has drawn it every week since 1994.
3Filed under 3. The Telling takes an act of telling, and this entry is performs one.
Career
Gosho Aoyama was born in 1963 in Tottori Prefecture. He made his debut in Shogakukan's Weekly Shōnen Sunday in the 1980s and drew the gentleman-thief comedy Magic Kaito and the samurai adventure Yaiba, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award.
The work
Detective Conan, which began in 1994, became his life's work and one of the best-selling manga in history. Its gentleman thief, Kaitō Kid, comes from Magic Kaito, and Aoyama has linked his series into a shared world.
The style
Aoyama loves classic detective fiction, from Arthur Conan Doyle to Edogawa Ranpo, and builds his cases as fair-play puzzles, with clues set out for the reader. His characters are drawn in a clean, round style that makes the frequent murders less grim than they might be.
Recognition
His home town of Hokuei has built a museum and statues around his work, and in 2015 Tottori's airport was renamed Tottori Sand Dunes Conan Airport. The annual Conan films are among the highest-grossing releases in Japan.
The name by its numbers
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 48 across 2 words, reducing to 3. The weight sits in “Gosho”, which carries 28 on its own and reduces to 1.
What the 3 brings is expression. The reference files it as an act of telling. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 3's instinct to turn everything into a story worth telling.
Heart's Desire 3, Personality 9: the presentation folds back into the want: reckoning in service of expression.
The letters give 3; the subject's own figures do not agree. 人格 core is 13, a 4, 総格 total is 29, an 11 and born is 1963, a 1. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because the romanisation is a convenience for readers abroad, while the strokes are what the pen name was actually built from.
The 3 asks you to watch the technique rather than the plot it is carrying. The 3 talks past the point. Where an entry here runs long, it is usually because the technique was more fun to describe than it was important. The other entries that reduce to 3 are collected on The Telling.