Kenichi Kurokawa is a middle-aged former detective from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department who now serves as the de facto leader of the Danger Service Agency, a three-person team that takes on high-risk, often illegal jobs for money. Known affectionately by his partners as Pops or Mr. K, Kurokawa brings a world-weary and cynical perspective to the group, a direct result of his time on the force where he witnessed guilty criminals escape justice through corrupt loopholes. His disillusionment led him to adopt questionable tactics, and he was eventually dismissed from the police under disputed circumstances, stripped of his pension. In retaliation, he authored a bestselling exposé under a pseudonym that detailed police corruption and severely embarrassed his former department.

Following his firing, Kurokawa co-founded the DSA alongside Mikura Suzuki and Tomohisa Harada, forming what the press would later dub the Risk Their Lives Trio. Within the agency, he assumes the role of arranging jobs, leveraging his deep knowledge of police procedures and underworld operations, though his authority is more informal than official. His criminal expertise and contacts remain vital to the group's survival. Kurokawa has a mixed Japanese and American heritage and resides with his partners in a converted double-decker bus that serves as the DSA headquarters, where he also acts as the team's primary cook, much to the annoyance of the others.

Physically, Kurokawa is a man with dark, tanned skin and black hair that is thinning on top, a trait about which he is notably sensitive. He often laments over hair growth commercials yet refuses to purchase the products, and he reacts poorly when others tease him about his receding hairline. In the original OVA Mezzo Forte, his typical attire consists of a light grey hoodie layered under a green sweater and a khaki overcoat with brown pants and black shoes. In the television series Mezzo DSA, his wardrobe changes to a red and pink striped button-down shirt under a burgundy jacket with black pants. While cooking, he wears a yellow apron with a picture of a bunny on it.

Kurokawa possesses a handful of pronounced personality quirks that define his day-to-day behavior. He has an obsessive love for noodles, eating them almost exclusively, and becomes upset when his partners consume other foods like fish and rice. He drives a Volkswagen Beetle, which is yellow in Mezzo Forte but replaced with a pink model after its destruction. He frequently cracks lame puns and openly expresses his attraction to women, as shown when he instinctively looked for a reported nude woman outside a diner. The dynamic within the DSA is pragmatic and familial; Mikura and Harada defer to him as Pops while occasionally mocking his hair loss, and he displays a protective streak toward Mikura when she is targeted. An ironic twist in his backstory is that he arrested both Mikura and Harada during his police career before they eventually became his partners.

A major driver of the plot in Mezzo DSA involves Kurokawa's past coming back to haunt him. He is seen blackmailing his former police chief using a compromising DVD that contains evidence of the chief having an inappropriate relationship with an underage pop star. Through this leverage, Kurokawa extorts ammunition and other resources for the DSA. This act, however, leads to a contract being put out on his life, and an assassin from the mercenary group Black Scissors is dispatched to hunt him down. This subplot reveals that, beneath his comedic and sometimes bitter exterior, Kurokawa operates in a morally grey area, using his former colleagues secrets as a means of survival.