I finally finished this week’s section. Here are my thoughts:
Warning : much long, so spoiler
I am annoyed that all the clues we were given in the 間取り図 part of the book with crazy 栗原 should have led us at least partly in the right direction to an explanation of why the floor layouts were such. Eg., loving parents of vampire child… But key pieces of information (all?) don’t come out until the Yoshie（喜江) infodump.
Like, why left hand? Why room with no windows? why hidden passageways so no one sees the child? Why do they keep building weird houses and moving? So many mysterious questions, making it exciting to try & figure out how they all fit together.
Well, it turns out the key pieces of info are in (1) the details of the death of Ushio (潮), the pitiful house servant/wife of great grampa Souichiro (宗一郎), (2) the battle over succession rights of Souichiro’s successful half brother Seikichi (清吉) and (3) a job relocation (??). NONE of which were hinted at until mom reaches out to estranged daughter. whaaat.
1 - I guess the Left Hand ritual was supposed to mimic how poor Ushio lived & died, following the betrayal by her incestuous husband. She locked herself up in a room (were there no windows? did she lock herself up for 10 years? I don’t remember), and she slit her left hand & it nearly was severed… recessive genetics from incest explain a kid born with no left hand. Ok that makes sense.
- Scheming sisters (wife #2 Shidzuko 志津子, and her fake priestess sister Rankyō 蘭鏡/Miyako美也子), in order to beat out all the other wives in inheriting the vast fortune of half-brother, use the tragedy in the other branch of the Katabuchi family to concoct a ritual that would result in all (?) the other offspring heirs of Seikichi to be murdered (the left hand ceremony was supposed to be done 4 times once for each year from 10-13, for 4 murders, right?). So yay! Scheming sisters win, and their male child is the sole heir to Seikichi’s fortune.
So…wouldn’t the sisters want the ritual performed just once? I mean, if the incestuous side of the Katabuchi’s have any more children missing a left hand, they would end up killing the descendants of wife #2 Shidzuko, no? Did I get this wrong? Maybe they were more savvy about genetics and knew there were low odds of it happening again? Was the knowledge of the ritual passed down to wife #2 Shidzuko’s descendants so they could be on the lookout for murderers? hmm. Ayano and Keita were given a list of top 100 genetically appropriate victims from the Seikichi side of the family. Maybe there were lots of other wives’s offspring left, but were not in direct line to inherit…or were most of these descendants from wife #2? hmm.
- why did they move from Saitama to Tokyo? Why was the Saitama house burned down? Was it to make sure no one knew they were doing something bad? NO! It was because of the job relocation (転勤）of the nephew/enforcer Kiyotsugu (清次) (who we also knew nothing about until Yoshie infodump) . I guess job relocations are quite common in Japan. I’ve heard they are used sometimes to push disliked employees out by transferring them to far flung places so they will just quit. But in this case, Kiyotsugu seems to be a good employee, because Tokyo seems like an upgrade in job location…? I digress.
And the last few random thoughts are:
there have been only 2 children missing left hands in the Katabuchi family since the Ushio suicide. The first (Momota) died young. At this point, I don’t know Touya’s fate after the Left Hand service is complete. Maybe Momota was ultimately killed by the Katabuchis to tie up loose ends and make sure the murders aren’t revealed to the public. Maybe that will be Touya’s fate too…And why did the scheming sisters decide a child closest in age to the missing-left-hand child has to be a guardian & make the kid murder? Just out of hatred for the main Katabuchi family? Doesn’t seem connected to anything in the backstory.
Despite - or maybe thanks to - the plot, I am really enjoying this (my first) book club. I especially enjoy following along with all your comments.
last night and read the rest of the book, so I’ll stop speculating here to avoid giving indirect spoilers about which topics will come up again next week.
