Baba Maiko

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), Baba Maiko is the parallel of Mary Debenham in the original novel. Like in the original, Suguro Takeru (Poirot) overhears a conversation between her and Colonel Noto Iwao (Colonel Arbuthnot). This takes place at Shimonoseki as Suguro is waiting for his train to Tokyo. The conversation is similar to what is in the original: "Not now, when it is all over, when it is all behind us...."

When Suguro links the murder of Todo Osamu (Samuel Ratchett) to the five-year old kidnapping case linked to the Goriki family, he asks Countess Ando Ryoko (Countess Andrenyi) to describe the members of the Goriki household. Among them is a governess whose name she cannot quite remember but says it might be "Takada". From this, Suguro infers that the name might have been "Baba". He explains that the Countess is struggling not to say the real name and hastily finds a substitute based on word association from the name of a place in Tokyo "Takadanobaba". This inference is a cleverly constructed parallel to that in the original novel where Mary Debenham's name is said to be "Freebody" from word association with the department store "Debenham and Freebody". The shopping idea in Debenham and Freebody is carried across as Takadanobaba is a neighbourhood in the Tokyo shopping district of Shinjuku.