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I’ve been thinking it could be the regular family members not just children doing the murders (if Kurihara-san is on the right path, of course he could be wildin’) but thinking about it again that’s an awfully small space…
Okay, the process of elimination ended up leading to the dad anyways.
I was forgetting that the aunt was the one who wanted to call the police, who is also the only one awhile was at the house who married into the family, so wouldn’t know about any family secret. Of course this could be explained away by her being the closest relative to ようちゃん.
And now we’re going to get some info from the mom which should be interesting. I wonder if there’s another reason Kurihara-san isn’t going?
Current theory is still some kind of family curse that requires first born to kill, when it got passed onto the older sister they made her stay at the grandparents to… train?
This made me laugh like…really? After everything that’s happened, THIS is what you find hard to believe?
I’m still enjoying the read a lot, but some of the theories are hard to get behind when the characters aren’t at the house to confirm anything. I guess that’s the point of this blueprint based story lol. I’ve been watching Detective Conan again on Japanese Netflix, and I just need that lil boy to drop into these books and solve things for me.
I did like the idea about the fusuma doors being doubled. I was confused at first because I thought they were the same as shoji, which are slightly transparent, and would expose a double door trick, but fusuma are thicker, so with the lack of sunlight I think it could work.
I’ve given up on trying to predict what’s going on with the family and the murders, but still enjoying reading all of y’alls theories.
Also re: pace I wouldn’t mind combining 8 and 9 into a single week, especially since 40 pages isn’t much more than the 31 from week 6, but since there were a decent number of people who didn’t want to increase the pace, I don’t mind keeping our current schedule either. Currently trying not to read ahead because it makes me less engaged in the forum discussion, but we’ll see if I can hold out as we get closer to the end.
I don’t know, but I wonder if Kurosawa has jumped the shark with his wild speculations this week.
he seems to be basing a lot on the assumption that all of Katabuchi’s memories from when she was 10 are accurate, and that other more mundane explanations are rejected (eg the “need the toilet” hypothesis), and that this house has a hidden child imprisoned because the other houses appear to. So, I’m kind of hoping that he is proven to have barked up the wrong tree…
One question:
Does 隣の部屋 necessarily mean the “next door” room, ie separated just by a single wall?
In an old Japanese house with thin walls, presumably sound travels.
So, could 隣の部屋 be across the corridor?
Again, Kurihara’s theory depends on an assumption that this is excluded…
I agree with everyone. Kurihara’s theories were already in baseless speculation territory last week, it got worse and worse in this chapter, and I was getting a bit frustrated with the fact that the other two just nod along and never point out any of the glaring weak points.
Either that, or I want a reveal that Kurihara was involved in these events and already knew what happened. I’ll be very disappointed if this wild guesswork lattice just turns out to be true.
And tbh, even if it’s true for some plausible reason, I don’t get how the murderer managed to carry You-chan out of his room and through the hidden passage without waking him or auntie or making noises that would wake the rest of the house.
Apart from that, very suspicious timing for the alleged phone call from Katabuchi’s mother.
I agree that Kurihara’s theories are wilder than ever and that treating Katabuchi’s memories as perfectly accurate is a weird thing to do. She and the narrator are not being rational with the way they eat up nearly everything he says. What’s making it less frustrating and more funny for me is that I half expect these theories to be debunked at some point and treated like a lesson in blindly believing crazy things. That would probably end up being pretty anti-climactic though, so we’ll see!
So I was already having fun when Kurihara was detailing the elaborate plan to kill ようちゃん, and even more when he suggested that the family was brainwashing their heirs into being murderers. It was finishing up his monologue with 「まあ、憶測にすぎませんが」 that got me to giggle. What a reasonable thing to say after all that.
Within his theories, there is one inconsistency that I was surprised wasn’t pointed out. Kurihara says that the culprit deliberately set up the murder as an accident as a way to keep the family from calling the police but, before that, he says that the aunt is not likely to be the murderer because she alone suggested that they call the police. Only… if she knew that the family wouldn’t call them no matter what, it wouldn’t matter that she made the suggestion. It seems like she didn’t push for it very hard in Katabuchi’s memories. According to Kurihara’s own logic, the aunt shouldn’t have been so easily eliminated as a suspect.
None of them should have been so easily eliminated as a suspect. Grandma got eliminated (as far as I remember) just because she told the family about the noise, but she could easily just have done that to feed them false information about the timing of the murder. The murder child got eliminated just because, grandpa for being too frail and Katabuchi’s mom because she was sleeping in the room where Katabuchi was allegedly lying awake all night. But it’s easy to come up with alternative scenarios where none of that matters. For example, any of them could have unlocked the door for the murder kid at a moment the others didn’t pay attention and given him instructions on how they want the murder done.
That said, if it was the aunt, at least that would explain how they got You-chan into the hidden room so silently (if it was his mother, he would have followed her even if squeezing him through the hidden passage woke him up). It’s hard to tell which of these clues are real clues and which are plotholes.
Btw, I’ve been meaning to ask that for 2 weeks and keep forgetting: Are the sleeping arrangements normal by Japanese standards? In my country, everyone planning such a sleepover would have given one bedroom to the parents and another one to the sisters. I was wondering if maybe that’s also a clue that the father planned it after all. Maybe he made some sort of excuse why his wife couldn’t sleep in his room that night.
Yep, there are certainly many reasons why it would be a sloppy investigation if treated realistically. Too many. It’s part of why I think they’ll turn out to be wrong about all of it.
It’s the self-contradicting nature of the aunt/police point that made it more interesting than the others. A clue that Kurihara is full of it, or an oversight made by the author!?
The least believable thing this week is kurihara’s ability to erase and redraw those thick pencil lines in the plan without leaving a trace.
les meurtriers d'à côté
I had the same question, especially since the suspect #1 ended up being the dad who… sleeps alone across the hall. So why involve all these hidden pathway shenanigans?
Maybe he just had a way to open the door to the empty room, went through there to abduct Bobby, brought him to the 居間 to whack him away from her mom and 片淵さんたち, then brought him back to his room or something while granny was snooping around before finally setting him up in front of the altar.
I mean it’s a bit convoluted but at least it doesn’t involve kids living in walls.
That being said the final conclusion that the dad did is does seem a lot more reasonable regardless of the means, and also the most important part.
I mean think about it: kurihara makes up from whole cloth a story about a killer kid hiding in the walls, and he’s not even involved in the murder they’re trying to solve!
OK, so one of my biggest objections to room number 2 being the family murder room is
Tatami
. There is just no way you are going to get blood stains out of the tatami. So I think that if there were a murder room in this house, it would have to be the bathroom again. In which case, the secret passage would need to somehow connect the hidden room to the bathroom at the front of the house. We’ve had underground rooms already. What about a crawl space in the roof this time? Having thought about that. Maybe the supposed 監禁 room is actually up there and the 仏壇 conceals a staircase or ladder? If so, maybe that is what the cousin fell from?
I was talking about the 居間 on the left, which is what 片淵さん originally believed to be the 隣の部屋 the 祖母 was talking about. I presume such a room wouldn’t have tatamis? I’m unclear what an 居間 would look like in such a house.
Suspects
I think the idea is that the murder kids are always contained and therefore wouldn’t be able to roam through the house and access the main corridor for instance.
The main theory that’s ignored “just because” is if several people are involved and not a lone killer. Kurihara mentions the possibility in passing and moves on.
It is Kurihara’s theory that room 2 was the regular murder room where guests were put to then be attacked by the murder child. But Yochan wasn’t killed there anyway (according to another theory
Oh right I forgot about that. It’s true that this whole setup is really strange and, once again, not supported by anything but kurihara’s wild fanfic. It’s just an empty room with a stuck door.
When Katabuchi first describes You-chan’s death, she mentions black, hardened blood stuck to his head. If he died from a head wound it’d be likely that at least some blood spilled on the ground, but IIRC that wasn’t examined at all in Kurihara’s story.
