Spoilers: The killer, competing plans and ending are discussed below.
Pride of the Immortal Man, international episode 1159 (Japanese episode 1101), is an anime-original mystery built around two opposing deceptions. Shunichi Tsukuba wanted his own death to look like murder; vice-president Gakuto Nogi killed him and tried to make it look like suicide. The suspicious phone call is the point where those intentions fail to fit together.
A president with a reputation for surviving attacks
Conan and Kogoro discover the body of Tsukuba Corporation’s president after a fall from the building’s roof. Papers in his possession suggest that a third attempt on his life has succeeded, and another message assigns responsibility to an unidentified X.
Employees already know stories of two recent attacks: one involving a car and another at a station platform. Their image of a stylish, forceful third-generation president who repeatedly cheats death makes the fall seem like the culmination of a campaign against him.
But the physical scene does not settle whether he was pushed or jumped. The messages encourage a murder interpretation without identifying an assailant. The episode begins by making Tsukuba’s reputation seem like useful background, then gradually asks whether that reputation is itself evidence someone has manufactured.
Why the aunt's account changes the investigation
Tsukuba’s aunt, Sadako, arrives believing that he took his own life. She says he telephoned the previous night and sounded unusually weak and discouraged. Her account introduces an apparent personal explanation for the death that the threatening papers do not offer.
At first these clues can simply be treated as competing evidence for murder and suicide. The more useful question is whether they could all have come from the same intention. If Tsukuba wanted everyone to believe he had been murdered, a call emphasizing despair would undermine the image he was constructing.
The call therefore matters beyond its emotional content. It is a piece of communication that points in the opposite direction from the supposed attacks and the papers found with the body.
The attacks that could not have happened as described
Checking the earlier stories weakens the premise that someone had twice tried to kill Tsukuba. The intersection was closed for filming at the relevant time, while trouble at the station had closed off the location of the other alleged attack. His accounts do not fit the conditions on the ground.
The investigation also finds computer searches concerning the distinction between suicide and homicide, as well as self-defense. These searches are evidence of preparation, but they need interpretation; their existence alone does not explain who performed the final act.
Conan connects the impossible attack stories with Tsukuba’s concern for his public image. Tsukuba was preparing to make a suicide appear to be the murder of a man who had repeatedly escaped danger. The false incidents helped establish that story before his death.
Nogi turns the plan against its creator
Nogi, the company’s vice-president, was at odds with Tsukuba and resented the admiration the younger employees gave him. The president’s supposedly fearless image also made Nogi appear timid by comparison. His motive was to destroy that image as well as Tsukuba himself.
He took Tsukuba to the roof and pushed him off. He also impersonated him in the call to Sadako, supplying the despairing testimony that would encourage a suicide verdict. The victim’s existing preparations supplied one story, while the murderer inserted a contradictory one.
The decisive logical flaw is the mismatch between the call and Tsukuba’s own arrangements. A man carefully constructing a murder narrative had no reason to furnish a witness with the opposite explanation. Once the call is understood as impersonation, its author becomes central to identifying Nogi.
Confronted with the deduction, Nogi admits the crime and exposes his desire to discredit the president. The solution is not that the earlier signs of deception were irrelevant: they were real preparations, but they belonged to a different plan from the killing that actually occurred.
The title becomes bitter in retrospect
The strongest part of the episode is the way it makes each reversal preserve something from the previous theory. The attacks were fabricated, yet that does not make the death a suicide. The aunt really received a call, yet that does not mean she heard Tsukuba.
Two people try to control how one death will be remembered, and their incompatible pride leaves the contradiction Conan needs. That is what gives the title its bleak force. The apparently invulnerable man has turned his own reputation into a story, and another man uses his death to attack it.
The repeated changes in the inquiry can be disorienting, but the final opposition is clean: one plan disguises suicide as murder, the other disguises murder as suicide. Understanding that distinction makes the ending satisfying as a deduction and deeply unpleasant as a portrait of the men involved.
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