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Again wrote my thoughts down before after speeding through from week 5!
My Thoughts
Confirmation that protagonist isn’t a woman? Since Kurihara-san says he doesn’t want a woman at his place. Of course be nonbinary, the manga seems to want to keep the gender vague, but not sure how likely that is. Also he has a good excuse, but it’s a little suspicious he doesn’t want her at his apartment.
Another 間取り図 let’s gooo.
Okay so I’m trying to figure out if there could be some kind of family curse based on the first born? Maybe when the uncle (who was first born) died it passed onto the sister? Just throwing things out there.
Also glad the protagonist is pointing out weird parts in people’s stories now and now just going with the flow.
After hearing the grandma describe out the weird sounds, the other wild theory I have is the dad committing the murder, then kicking her out knowing she’d be next to have to kill. Maybe the oldest member of the family has to commit a murder, so after the uncle died it became the dad, then the older sister killed in Saitama, then her kid killed in Tokyo? As someone else pointed out before the no windows thing could mean vampires.
Why doesn’t anybody question the exact time when Yuzuki fell asleep? How would she know that she fell asleep at 4 a.m.?
The first theory about Youchan being killed in room 4 and later being brought to the altar through room 3 didn’t convince me at all. How could the murderer be sure that none of the 3 persons sleeping in room 3 would be awake or be awakened by the noise of the sliding doors?
There were a lot of look ups and some quite specialised vocabulary this week (especially 仏壇 related).
I think I added 35 words to my flashcards and I skipped quite a few…
What is the implication of ペンション here?
I’m assuming that these are some of the former cottages? of the servants/employees of the 片淵 estate, or something like that.
But all the dictionaries that I have checked refer to ペンション as hotels or similar (presumably from the French/German use of ‘pension’)
I struggled with 心臓が悪い because I first assumed that it meant that the person was evil (has a “bad heart”) but as far as I can tell it means literally “bad heart” as a physical condition.
I just think the context made it pretty clear. The uncle seems to have died of 心臓が悪い after all, and no-one ever died of being an asshole.
Thoughts on this chapter
I thought it was pretty weird that no-one questioned the accuracy of Yuzuki memory. She’s talking about a night 20 years ago when she was a frightened, sleep deprived child, and her floor plan is also based on memories of a house she apparently hasn’t visited since childhood. And yet, everyone takes this as the gospel truth instead of asking obvious questions like “Are you sure you didn’t fall asleep for awhile?” or “Are you sure there was a door between the living room and the grandparents’ bedroom?” or “Are you sure your grandma said “neighboring room”?” Instead Kurihara skips straight to his wild theories about hidden rooms again. Somehow it always seems to be hidden rooms with him.
I was also wondering about that. The whole history of the Katabuchi family is very mysterious. If your theory is true, I guess the ancestor who first build the detached house is the one who caused the curse.
She checked on the next door room - but it was connected by a sliding door, so why did she end up looking in the corridor?
The most likely reason is because a person of a certain age who gets up in the night to check on something, cannot possibly go back to sleep unless they go to the bathroom.
And to go to the bathroom… she would have to go into the corridor…
Yuzuki was awake until 4am
Small kids (and bigger people) who are awake until the small hours lying in bed (especially in a pitch dark room [how does she know the time anyway?), might often drift in and out of sleep. So she could have been unaware of someone coming into the room, then roused later, but not realised that she had been asleep.
(I certainly remember something of that nature when waiting for Santa to come a few moons ago…)
Frankly the whole idea that she would have such an accurate and detailed recollection of something that happened so long ago when she was still a child is hard for me to take seriously.
Of course it was a traumatic event that would have left a trace, but blindly trusting the exact timing of her falling asleep or her recollection of what other people have experienced and said at that moment is just wild IMO.
I’m really curious to see where kurihara is going with this hidden room theory which doesn’t really seem called for here at far as I can tell.
So that you can understand my comment better, allow me to illustrate with a drawing of me reading katabuchi’s testimony in disbelief:
I fully agree with those! Especially the bathroom thing - can’t argue with that!
Well, obviously…
in that small unused space by the stairs on the right. And to get them there, you first put them in a blender and you have a hidden pipe running from the bathroom to there.
Yeah I’m pretty sure we’re meant to assume the narrator is a man, although I suppose technically Kurihara is implied to be lying here (the real reason is probably that he doesn’t trust Katabuchi-san and prefers to meet in a more anonymous and public place) and you could also imagine that if the narrator and him are very close he may not see her “that way” because they’re very close, but of the way they talk to each other doesn’t seem to support that either (they seem to be acquaintances at the beginning of the book, not super close friends).
So yeah, probably a dude.
Do you add most new words to your flashcards? I tend to be a lot more selective and actually never do it for these book clubs in order to not slow the process too much.
Yeah, and the more often he mentions hidden rooms, the more I start assuming that he’s projecting and there’s a hidden room in his apartment or his rental space or something.
Btw, that’s an impressing amount of extra staircases with mystery spaces in your blueprint. How many people did you kill so far?
Raced through this chapter during some spare time at work to keep pace with the club. I know if I fall behind, I’ll just let myself get further and further behind. I’ve been trying to avoid reading ahead, but then that leads to me forgetting the book exists by the next week lol.
Summary
Very excited to get another 間取りthis chapter, and the handwritten nature is a fun way to spice things up
Like everyone else, I was super suspicious about Kurihara-san’s detailed memory, especially regarding what time she fell asleep. I do think so far, this book requires a decent amount of suspension of disbelief though, so it’s hard to tell when things are actually suspicious…
Also, if anyone has ever played the Ace Attorney Investigations games, the blueprints in this book remind me of how Kay’s Little Thief device works in that they don’t always show things that would be on a real blueprint likea potential hidden room in the triangle room house, but they do sometimes show things like furniture. The bed being shown in the triangle room house?? At least this chapter’s blueprint gets more leeway for being hand drawn from Kurihara’s memory.
