The Woman Called Fujiko Mine

The series that looked at forty years of polished Lupin and went back to the scratchy, dangerous original.

Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine aired on NTV for 13 episodes, April 4 to June 27, 2012, the first Lupin television series in twenty-seven years. It is a prequel in structure: Fujiko, voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro, meets Lupin, Jigen, Goemon, and Zenigata one by one, and for the first time in the franchise the protagonist is not Lupin. It was the first Lupin title directed by a woman, Sayo Yamamoto, with Mari Okada as head writer.

The look is the argument. Character designer Takeshi Koike discarded decades of Miyazaki-inflected polish for designs taken from Monkey Punch’s manga itself: visible pencil scratch, charcoal shading, watercolor-washed backgrounds. The tone followed the art back to the source: darker, more serious, and adult in the way the 1967 comic was adult. It won the New Face Award at the 16th Japan Media Arts Festival.

The Woman Called Fujiko Mine key visual — **FUJIKO'S SERIES**The key visual for The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012), the prequel series drawn in Takeshi Koike's sharp, shadowed style.

WHAT IT SET IN MOTION

The Koike line

Lupin the IIIrd

Koike’s take continued in a run of hard-edged features he directed: Jigen’s Gravestone (2014), Goemon’s Blood Spray (2017), Fujiko’s Lie (2019), and the 2025 feature The Immortal Bloodline, the line’s full-length culmination.

The music, once removed

Naruyoshi Kikuchi composed the score, with Cowboy Bebop’s Shinichirō Watanabe as music producer: the one Lupin series where Yuji Ohno’s jazz hands the room to someone else’s.

Why it matters to collectors

Fujiko Mine is the bridge object between the manga and modern Lupin: proof that Monkey Punch’s original line, unmodified, could still carry a television series in 2012.

The original manga →

Part IV: Italy →

The Woman Called Fujiko Mine

WHAT IT SET IN MOTION

THE FIRST WORD