Thank you @Phryne for making the vocab spreadsheet!
Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.
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
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The format of showing floor plans to subtly ask you to spot what’s strange as the character is asked is really fun. I managed to notice the toilet in the kids room and… that’s it. The entrance to the kids room and the lack of windows seems obvious in retrospect but I didn’t even think about it before it was mentioned!
I also may have peeked just a page or two ahead to see what “that” was, that the occult writer found when lining up the images.
“Yeah it’s just a ventilation column for the kitchen, pretty standard stuff. They probably closed it when they remodeled the second floor to put a children room right in the middle, with the only toilet on the other side for some reason.”
They buy the house and die from carbon monoxide poisoning due to the poorly ventilated kitchen.
I only noticed when I reached page 31 and the end phrase was nowhere to be found…
Anyway, I think it was a great choice for my first novel in Japanese, I struggled a bit with the first couple of pages but as soon as the dialogue started it was fairly smooth. I spent a lot of time double checking readings and meanings on my phone to make sure not to miss anything, I could have gone faster if I was willing to risk it.
Amusingly an unforeseen difficulty was getting used to vertical writing: sometimes I would skip an entire column by mistake when returning to the top of the page…
plot discussion
I thought it was funny that the narrator first only noticed the 謎の空間 while for me it’s their insane layout of the 2nd floor that immediately stood out to me.
Also didn’t 柳岡 visit the house before talking about buying it? Didn’t he notice the lack of windows in half the rooms?
speculation about what's to come
I wonder if the entire book will only be discussing floorplans without any on-premises sleuthing? I think it’s a cool concept but also I wonder if the author can really stretch this to full book length without it becoming tedious or frustrating.
I’m still reading this week’s section, but 間取りwill be a very frequent word if they keep talking about the blueprints. I’ll try to keep up because I’m curious about what the mystery house is hiding.
I may have gotten to the ending spot and read a page or two ahead after that. It’s pretty cool so far. Definitely harder than other things I’ve read but I’ll stick it out. I see what people mean about this being an addictive book.
weird house, weird family
The people who built this house probably:
“Yeah we love the neighborhood and all but what we really wanted in our dream house was a prison like enclosure for our child whom we keep a secret from the world. We’re 20 miles from the nearest schools, but that’s fine because again, we hate our child.”
Windows? we run Linux in our child’s bedroom and the “attached” bath if you go through the secret area
I read ahead a bit and finished chapter 1. I’ll wait till the week 2 thread to talk about it but hmm, this house stays strange. I was worried this would be above my pay grade for Japanese, but it isn’t as bad as I thought. I can usually sound out half of a word with the kanji I know even if I don’t know all of it. Reading without furigana is harder, but doable.
Off to a good start. So far, it’s been a much smoother read for me than anything else I’ve started recently.
Plot
This also struck me as weird. I can think of a million trivial reasons why you’d have a small dead space in an older house, so I don’t get why it would make anyone think of something supernatural. But the layout of the second floor just screams “prison room”, and anyone setting foot in there would immediately notice how inconvenient it is to have this long, space-wasting corridor loop around the entire floor. And no-one even commented on the fact that the downstairs bedroom doesn’t have windows, either.
I got the first volume of the manga adaptation, since it was on sale, and it illustrates the conversation with 柳岡 with a flashback of him and his wife visiting the house, so uh…maybe they just got a weird taste in houses or something.
First time joining a book club and this will (hopefully!) be my first novel in Japanese. There were a few words I wasn’t sure about, but it was a surprisingly easy read. That being said, it took about 20 minutes for me to read this week’s section.
This book is already super creepy and as a lifelong fan of Detective Conan, I’m dying to read more. Like others in the thread, I’m probably going to end up reading ahead. I’m also a huge scaredy cat though, so it’ll be strictly daytime reading for me.
Signed up for a month of kindle unlimited so I can listen to the parts I’ve already read to catch any misreadings, but we’ll see how long I stick with that.
very vague minor spoilers about what I've heard about the ending
The main thing that kept me from reading this book despite constantly seeing it at Kinokuniya and on Amazon is the reviews criticizing the ending. I avoided looking into it too much out of fear of spoilers, but I’m curious to see how it’ll go.
Whew, finished this week’s reading.
The writing is very different from the other (few) books and (a few more) manga that I already read, so that has been both challenging and fun!
I found the vocab sheet that shows every occurrence of the word helpful, it certainly is easier to find the words I’m looking for. (I wonder if this is bad for the retention of the words I’m searching? )
Plotwise: As others pointed out, there are some obvious points in the 間取り that the characters take a while to notice that I found baffling but the story progress and tension are promising and I’m enjoying it pretty much!
Finished this part and read past, will try to be careful about avoiding spoilers!
Summary of Thoughts
I was able to notice everything pointed out in this chapter about what’s weird about the house (child’s room has double-doors from parents’ bedroom, toilet, but no window, space downstairs) but I only wouldn’t noticed the first floor being weird with the hint abot there being an odd inaccessible space, otherwise I would’ve glossed over it and thought it’s just some weird planning.
I showed the floor plans to my boyfriend who knows about building houses and he looked at it for a few minutes but couldn’t find the points above. He said though that the placement of the kitchen is weird which I agree on.
He’s going to pick up a paperback version! Maybe I can get him to join the bookclub too haha. He wanted to see the movie that came out earlier this year but ended up not.
I was very tempted to read ahead.
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