🏨 マスカレード・ホテル 🎭 Week 11 (ABC Reading Club)

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:hotel: マスカレード・ホテル :performing_arts: Week 11


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Week 11 26 October 2024
Parts 34-END
End Page 515
End phrase The end! You made it! :tada:
Total Pages 52
Previous week Week 10

Vocabulary

Discussion Guidelines

Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.

  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).

  3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.

Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).

Hide Details results in the dropdown box like below:

Example

This is an example of the “Hide Details” option.

The “Blur Spoiler” option will simply blur the text it surrounds.

This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.

Posting Advice

  • When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.

  • Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!

Trigger Warnings

None known.

Proper Nouns

Name Reading Notes
山岸 尚美 やまぎし なおみ Main character
新田 浩介 にった こうすけ Main character

Further names are listed in the Vocabulary Sheet found above! Let me know if you’d like to be able to check them here as well.

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?

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Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay abreast of discussion!

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Well. What an ending, haha. All the action happened in the last pages. :grin:

I’m really curious what you all thought about this book. For me, it was not at all what I expected, even knowing that 東野圭吾 likes his mysteries on the subdued, chill side. There were so many non-incidents! And for 尚美 to have been the target, did anyone suspect that? I suppose it got teasered a bit in their conversation about how you can easily incur someone’s wrath at work. If I remember correctly, it went something along these lines: you’re such a professional hotel clerk, I can’t possibly imagine how someone might have reason for a grudge. :grin:

I don’t know if I’ll be buying the next books. At the very least not right now. If someone does go on to read them, I’d be very curious to know if they keep that same tone and slow pace.

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Ever since that conversation you mentioned, I really thought that 尚美 is probably gonna be the final target, but the reason behind it definitely surprised me. In some way you might still understand, why 長倉麻貴 acted the way she did, but at the same time there would’ve been many other solutions to her issue.
Overall I enjoyed the book, even if it was a bit lengthy at times, however I guess it really showed the slow pace of police work/undercover work. At the beginning I thought the “event” at the hotel was going to happen a lot sooner and there would be more investigation after the incident, but it turned out to be quite different.

At some point in the future, I might give the other books a go, but for now I’m gonna read some other stuff.

And thank you for hosting the club for this book!

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Alright, yesterday evening I managed to catch up to this week :muscle:

To get it done in time, I need to finish it today because I’ll be travelling tomorrow and not planning on taking the book along. So let’s see what I can do… :dizzy_face:

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Thoughts on the book

Overall I enjoyed the book. While it was long, the writing style was not so dense that reading through it felt sluggish. On the flip-side, having the through line of the eventual attempted murder at the hotel kept me engaged, while a book with a similar episodic sort of structure would probably lose my interest without an overarching narrative. I also enjoyed the main pair and how they’d interact (I also enjoyed the scenes with 能勢).

I didn’t see the ending coming per se, but during the last 100 or so pages I began to suspect that the whole wedding was going to be a red herring, especially as 新田 wasn’t tasked with keeping an eye on the wedding (because then how would he have been able to save the day?)

I remember commenting several weeks ago that I suspected that something seemingly innocuous would be what was truly related to the killer (when we were in the episode with the angry English teacher, I think). I was only somewhat correct as it was the suspicious ‘old lady’ who had previously pretended to be blind, but the clues to her motivations came from a brief throwaway remark.

I did see the whole motivations behind what she was doing rather implausible though - you’d think she’d at least try to communicate better when her other option seemed to be freezing out in the cold.

I’m also curious about what others thought about the structure of the mystery: I know that sometimes people will dislike mysteries where they feel as though the reader/ viewer was never given sufficient information or context to deduce the culprit in advance. I feel like this was pretty much the case in this book, but that sort of thing doesn’t bother me too much.

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I was a bit disappointed by this book. At the beginning I enjoyed discovering the setup and the everyday of hotel-staff, but very fast I felt frustrated that nothing main-plot related seemed to be happening. For the first 350 pages of the book!
And despite the numerous tricks used (hidden coordinates via a weird code, multiple killers instead of one, young woman professionally disguised to pass as an old woman) in the end it felt pretty straightforward and predictable (man meets woman and they don’t get along. man and woman end up falling in love anyway as they go through hardships together. turns out woman is the target of the killer. man comes in at the crucial moment and saves woman, declaring his love to her too). The only real thing that I didn’t see coming was that when Nitta had “left” the room where Naomi was taken hostage, he hadn’t really left.
Language wise it was a great experience. It took me a while to get through the first chapters but then I flew right through the rest of the book, not a lot of complicated vocab, easy to read in paper version and I really enjoyed getting better and better at looking things up and practicing my kanji reading.

I have bought the other 3 volumes already! Definitely want to read them even though my review is not very positive. Will not read them right away though, but whenever I get to it I will let you know how I liked them :slight_smile:

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Overall, I found the book to be quite enjoyable but not at all what I had expected it to be. I have two other books of the series on my shelf, but I will take a break. I will look for something (hopefully) faster-paced now. Admittedly, the fact that I am not reading in my native language here, hence it taking more time, of course contributes a lot to my feeling of it being slow-paced.

I had not expected this ending at all.

I thought it had to do with the wedding after all, and I had not expected Naomi to be the target. What I had in the back of my mind, though, was that one of the persons appearing in the „unrelated“ episodes would reappear again. And I kind of thought it might have to do with that old lady and her blind husband. But more along the lines of „they will help solve the murder somehow with their special intuition“ or „he is also not blind, and he will commit the murder and his wife helped to
set it up“.

Thank you for leading the club, @Belerith

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In retrospect it should have been obvious that the guest who wore gloves the whole time was up to no good. :sweat_smile:

I think the cover implied the book would have more of a spy thriller vibe, with a masquerade ball in a luxury hotel. But in practice the hotel and the individual stories felt much more “ordinary” than I expected.

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