Countess Ando Ryoko

In Fuji TV's 2015 miniseries Murder on the Orient Express (オリエント急行殺人事件 - Oriento kyuukou satsujin jiken), Countess Ando Ryoko is the parallel of Countess Andrenyi in the original novel. She is the wife of Count Ando and are travelling from Shimonoseki to Tokyo. Her husband explains to Suguro (Poirot) that he is a diplomat and his duties require him to travel around Japan and he is sometimes accompanied by his wife.

Like in the original novel, Countess Ando also has a grease spot against her name on her passport. With ideographic Japanese characters it is not possible to obscure a single letter to convert, for example Helena to _Elena. Here Suguro makes a cleverly constructed parallel inference. He works backwards from her given name Ryoko and infers that her original given name might have been Namiko. The original characters for Namiko (浪子) has been converted to Ryoko (良子) by having a grease spot obscure the 3-stroke radical on the left. The fact that her original name is Namiko also casts suspicion on her because a handkerchief with the Roman letter "N" (in the case of this adaptation) had been found at the crime scene.

Questioned by Suguro, she admits that she is Namiko, the sister of Goriki Soneko, the Mrs Armstrong parallel. Like in the original, she does describe the members of the household but can't remember any names except for the governess, Takada which leads to another interesting inference by Suguro about Baba Maiko (see her article for details).