His first appearance (as Yuzuki’s stepfather)
is with kana only as キヨツグ (kindle location 778). Much later when Yoshie says that he is Fumino’s nephew we get his kanji writing 清次.
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@Boodil I keep remembering the discussion we had a few months ago where you told me that, unlike me, you thought that it was easier to deal with real kanji Japanese names rather than the full katakana made-up names that are common in fantasy works.
I stand my ground on this one. I’ll take absurd katakana over whatever this nonsense is. Just mash your face into the keyboard and make it a name. マハっタザナーナラ様. Perfect, I love it.
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清次
Ah, you’re right. I misread / misremembered what she was saying exactly in that part.
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Aah, so I’m not crazy at least. What’s weird is that most if not all names before that had the furigana on them, including yoshie. Maybe they fixed that in the digital edition but didn’t reprint.
EDIT: although apparently this is the 50th edition that was printed in May of this year so it’s not like they didn’t have the opportunity…
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That wasn’t me, I was on your side in that discussion all along. I remember citing セーラー服 as an example for a book where I would have been totally lost and doomed to forever look up kanji only to realize they are names without the character name index we had on top of every weekly thread. I think the people who were anti-katakana in that thread were mostly advanced readers with god-tier kanji skills.
This section of the book needs more family trees. Seriously.
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Ah my apologies.
I know, right? I’m at the wedding part and I’m fighting for dear life. I can’t remember how half of these people are related to one another.
From the same author who felt that this was necessary a chapter ago:
Thanks bro.
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Thank you for sharing the family trees! I started making notes of names and relations on my own, but I find myself referring back to your chart frequently this week. It’s very useful 
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At some point I stopped trying to figure out precisely who’s who because I figured with this level of plot shenanigans it didn’t really matter 
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Did I miss a new marriage? Just tell me who with whom.
I think you should just submit your work to the editor for the next edition.
that letter
運転しながら「はたしてこれは何罪になるのだろう」と考えていました。［…］しかし、私には他の選択肢がありませんでした。
Seriously mate? No other choice than to marry the girl killer then earn the trust of her abductive family for four years while taking care of a caged child only to convince them to let you build a killer house so that you can move there and locate a heavily indebted 片淵家 descendent that you slowly befriend over the course of weeks if not months until he trusts you and you offer to pay his debts and give him cash if he plays along and then when he accepts you go scouting the suicide forest for a fresh body but you don’t find one but then you hear that the council president of a nearby town went missing so you get into his home where you find his body that you proceed to bring back home in order to stage a ritualistic murder.
Yeah no I mean when you put it this way it makes total sense.
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Nah, you didn’t miss anything. It’s just that, like @simias implied, there was such a sharp drop between the earlier part of the book where everything was so densely illustrated that the book practically read itself and this last part, where we’re supposed to remember a large cast of characters introduced only very briefly without any visual aid. If these people were rooms, every second page would be a floor plan with the people taking the stage conveniently circled.
Keita's story
My satisfaction with the solution so far would be far greater if “I was madly in love with the only girl who stood up for me when I was bullied in highschool and wanted to marry her even if it meant putting up with her psychotic mobster family, so now I’m stuck in a situation where I have to hope I’ll conveniently stumble over dead bodies so that I can cut their hands off.” were the weakest of the motivations we get among the people involved in this mess rather than the second strongest (right after Kiyotsugu’s “I was in it for the money that mysteriously never runs out even though the family business got run into the ground by my incompetent grandfather in the 20s and his heir is a hyper-superstitious shut-in incapable of restarting it”.)
That’s true, at least. I also enjoyed the scene where the junior Katabuchi’s are having a tearful family moment as the parents realize that Touya is already bonding with his little step-brother and then Kiyotsugu comes in and tries to take him away. My brain keeps coming up with different scenarios for what might have happened afterwards.
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These plot summaries are great 
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Ok I finally finished this week’s section. Am I glad that we didn’t speed up after all, because this is not the light, conversational, fast-paced text we had in the first two chapters.
Impressions
So as others have already pointed out by now the plot has jumped the shark, but then the shark also wears water-skis and jumped over a whale. I too get the impression that the overall timeline doesn’t work given the rules of the ritual but frankly I can’t be bothered to figure it out at this point. The ritual itself is so absurd that I feel like it’s a plot hole in and of itself. The motivation and decision making of basically every single person in this book except for perhaps 柚希 is completely baffling and makes no sense.
Like just to pick one random thing: the aunt gets pregnant, is locked in a room for weeks by her step-family in order to prevent her from getting an abortion since she’s carrying a cursed child and she still gets a 2nd child? What the absolute fuck. Like why are any of these people who believe in the curse still making children? Just adopt, guys. It will help with your whole family tree directed graph issues too.
But you know what, this nonsense plot is not even my main issue at this point. Let me sumarize the plot-relevant events that lead to where we are now:
- Yuzuki receives a phone call from her mum and she goes there and then INFODUMP.
That’s it. The first two thirds of the book, including all the plan poring which is the whole conceit of the book, are absolutely irrelevant. They didn’t achieve anything. Whether the theories were right or wrong (and by the look of it, they were all correct) doesn’t matter.
That hidden space behind the kitchen, what is it for? Who gives a crap, just wait for Yoshie to trigger the cutscene bro. It’s on a timer.
I am absolutely baffled. It’s almost like the author got tired of the plan gimmick and decided to write a different book instead that he haphazardly collated at the end of the existing narrative.
I still think that I want to try reading the 2nd book though. Maybe the first time he didn’t really know where he was going with the whole concept, but with more experience it’s possible that he managed to create a sequel that’s more coherent.
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Touya
I got no intention to defend the character’s motives or the overall logic of the book - like I already said, it’s paper thin.
But one correction here: The “cursed” child was her second child. Her older son Youichi was already 7 or 8 at that point (not that I would have known that without the family tree on this thread). Yuzuki’s father killed him because he was supposed to become his brother’s guardian.
Now, crazy gramps and everyone else living in the house at the time…they’re the ones I really don’t understand. Why didn’t they just encourage Misaki to have an abortion rather than preventing it. Instant curse solution!
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I’m not sure if the results so far really warrant that much faith in this author 
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Touya
Ooh, I knew there was something that didn’t add up here timeline-wise, but I just couldn’t be bothered to re-read the previous chapter to remember what happened exactly. In particular I couldn’t figure out how the kid could have been old enough to (supposedly) climb on the altar at this point, but of course if it’s the older brother it makes sense.
But why kill the guardian and not the kid with the maimed hand? Seems like if there’s a kid without a hand the family will still continue with the ritual. My evidence for this is: they did.
I mean honestly until the Yoshie part I was really enjoying myself.
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Me too 
In fact, I’m still enjoying this a lot! I just don’t expect the second book to be any more coherent than this
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speculation for 'afterwards'
I mean there’s a 2nd body that’s still not accounted for, right? The one that was in small pieces. I presume that the Tokio house ended up actually being used for its intended purpose. That said this one was also missing the hand which doesn’t really make sense if they just killed the guy and fled. Unless they kept it as a souvenir.
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Youichi's death
Doing some Kurihara level speculating here, maybe Yuzuki’s father didn’t have the means to unlock the hidden room left of the altar, or maybe Touya had a servant with him in the hidden room because he was too young to be left unattended, so he couldn’t get to Touya, and Youichi was an easier target. Still, his motivation is patchy. The rules specify that other older family members can become guardians, so he must have known that the family would just name a replacement.
Also the concerns we had when we first read Kurihara’s theories about that night haven’t been adressed, either.
I’d like to read the sequel if it’s as heavily illustrated as the earlier parts of this book. I don’t dare hope that the plot will be better, but from a reading practice perspective this was 10/10 and I crave more.
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I also wonder if the sequel is a completely new thing or actually picks up after this one. I kind of hope they restart from a blank slate (maybe bringing back my man Kurihara in a crazy new adventure).
Very mild spoilers for 変な家２'s intro
I looked up the free sample on bookwalker and judging by the intro it seems to be 11 chapters where every chapter is a different house. I can’t tell if there’s any connecting tissue or if it’s effectively a bunch of short stories.
I’m pretty hype.
I didn’t see any mention of 栗原 in the free sample however which is concerning.
Honestly it seems like it could actually be an even better fit for a book club than this one.
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