Human Specimens Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Soon afterwards, Shiro Sakaki (Shiro Sakaki), a biology professor at Meikei University, walks up to a police officer in the nearby town and admits he’s the one who created the art installation with the human specimens.
Of course, he’s arrested and is questioned by detectives. The detective is disgusted that Shiro can talk about killing six young men — including his son, Itaru (Somegorô Ichikawa) — so dispassionately, and then presenting a paper explaining why he made this macabre art installation.
Shiro starts talking about when he was six, 44 years prior. He was always fascinated with butterflies, which is his specialty at the university. His father, an artist, showed him how to preserve butterflies he caught in order to put them on display (yes, that means killing them, but they were dying in little Shiro’s box, anyway).
But Shiro’s father also talked about the beauty of using human specimens for his artwork, a notion that got him shunned from Tokyo’s art community when he voiced it publicly, which is why the family ended up in a mountain cabin near Nagano.
In the present day, Shiro gets a call from Rumi Ichinose (Rie Miyazawa), whom he knew since they were both kids and his dad painted a portrait of her mother. Even when they were kids, he was fascinated with how she saw colors differently than most people, and closer to the millions of colors a butterfly could see. She decided to buy his family’s old home and wants Shiro and his talented artist son Itaru to join her for a retreat where there will be five other boys Itaru’s age. It’s there where Shiro envisions his son and the other boys as his human specimens.
“Dispassionate” is a good way to describe the narrative of Human Specimens. It’s disquieting to watch the first episode and hear how methodically Shiro talks about making these young men into artwork, complete with an academic paper he created to explain it. What we expect to see as the series goes forward is how these killings happened, and how Shiro — if indeed he’s the one that truly killed these boys — could bring himself to kill Itaru, whom he’s been raising since his wife/Itaru’s mother died.
There are other factors at play, including Rumi and her daughter Anna (Aoi Itô), which might complicate this story. But we’re both intrigued and skeeved out that Shiro sees these teens — and most especially, his son — as specimens instead of people. How that will play out in the subsequent episodes should be interesting, but it might also be wince-inducing.
We’re ok with the format, where it seems that the story is structured around Shiro telling police detectives his story. As he tells the detective questioning him that he feels Itaru and the other boys are now butterflies flying to the Butterfly Kingdom, it feels like Shiro may have had some sort of psychotic break, but that aspect of his life and story will hopefully be explored more as the series goes along.
