What an ending! If all chapters are like this, with a little “main” resolution but also dropping little nods towards a bigger picture, I’m going to have a lot of fun with this book.
My speculation was completely wrong, but I’m still eyeing that doll very suspiciously since none of the characters even attempted to explain it after dismissing the twin theory.
For now, I’m also veering towards the family being involved in (or threatened with doing) some shady stuff.
If EVERY house ends up being connected to the bigger plot this way, it’s also going to feel a bit unrealistic.
But then again, I guess they wouldn’t be 変な家 if they didn’t, eh.
Our protagonist actually did something proactive in the plot, look at that character development!
Some new proper names I found (I may be wrong on the pronunciation?):
美崎 (みさき) - Company who built the house
春日・裕之介 (かすが・ゆうのすけ） - 8 year old elementary school student who was killed by a truck backing out of the construction site.
池田さん - employee of home builder Misaki who worked on the Negishi house
Week 2: out goes my Week 1 conspiracy theory....
…and I have no idea what my new conspiracy theory would be…
First Negishi-san says oh my twin died and that’s why my mom hates/overprotects me. I agree, it sounded like kind of a far-fetched theory.
But now with the newly uncovered facts from the news article & interview with Ikeda-san we know:
Negishi-san is not a twin (mom was expecting one daughter)
a local boy (Yunosuke) was killed by one of the trucks working on the house Jan. 30, 1990
the corridor was left intact for earthquake sturdiness (boring but good idea!)
parents changed the entrance location so they don’t all have to enter where the boy was killed & have a daily reminder of the tragedy (not because they believed in ghosts)
mom secretly approaches the home builder to have Negishi’s room torn down (doesn’t sound very earthquake proof to do that!). They gave her an estimate, but it was never carried out
So…broken doll is a threat from Yunosuke’s parents? Mom is afraid for the safety of her only child due to these threats? Mom died of stress from threats of revenge? Money she had stashed away was to pay to demolish the room? I was waiting for the Writer to ask Ikeda-san how much the demolition estimate was, but noooooo, Writer doesn’t ask.
We are left hanging, so I guess we will find out down the road what in the tarnation is going on!
They also muse that it could be because they were worried about their daughter using this exit and running directly into traffic, being traumatized by the accident.
Why would this be important?
Regarding the destruction of the room, my only hypothesis so far is that something is buried underneath, although if it were that I don’t think you would need to completely destroy the room to gain access.
Alternatively she wanted to have a greater 庭 to put something in it.
ooh this is a great hypothesis. The boy was killed while the house was still being completed. So could the grieving parents have put something under the room as revenge or to harm Negishi-san?
Honestly I think I would be extremely disappointed if there doesn’t turn out to be some far-fetched occult-adjacent explanation for all this! Please let the doll be some voodoo thing! And let there be even MORE voodoo things under the house!!
I’m on board for the crazy occult explanation! Let’s gooo! Negoshi’s mother realizes the victim’s parents are digging a tunnel under the house to lead to Negishi-san’s room to plot kidnapping or revenge. Or they secretly BURIED their dead son under the Negishi’s room and the mom found out and that’s why she wants the room destroyed
They buried the dead son under the room, and his restless spirit possessed Yayoi. The mom was so tired of listening to her crawl up the walls at night that she wanted to demolish the walls of the room. No walls, no crawling
When the chapter started with a murder, I was a bit surprised as I assumed it will start with a plan again.
When they started talking, I found it funny that the cleaning guy just found the plan on the internet.
Anyways, I thought it was an interesting approach to try to find a reason for the murder off the floor plan. TBH, when I looked at it, I found it strange too. Especially the second floor, when you have to cross other rooms to go anywhere.
I thought that you will feel quite observed. Maybe this feeling of observation has contributed to it?
And as we read this book, we are all in for wild theories: wild guess, we have again an overprotective mother here who wouldn’t even let their kids enjoy a little bit of privacy. To break out, the son decided to get rid of them.
Or: they all have a very weird cult and they want to ensure everybody follows the rituals along. The son murdered them to break out of it since the rooms are designed in a way that others will notice when you try to escape.
Okay, it’s suspicious that corpse cleaner dude was able to get the floor plans easily and gave his reasoning as ‘they were on the internet,’ even though writer dude wasn’t able to find them.
Yeah, and they didn’t even have doors between rooms which is pretty bad. It’s like when parents punish kids by taking the door off their room.
I’m wondering why the second floor had five rooms, it seems like a lot and is too many to be bedrooms for the family, especially since the grandma didn’t need a room because she was on the ground floor.
Anyone else think our main character is kind of shameless for hitting up a corpse cleaner for murder house floor plans…? Like, damn, maybe them being so hard to find is the universe telling you “it’s none of your business you drama llama” lol.
Although to be fair it’s more like he sucked at Googling
With anybody else, I‘d find it suspicious, too, but the writer is just so daft sometimes. Point in case, the lack of hallways and doors on the second floor stabbed me in the eye the second I saw the blueprint, so I really despaired of him when his first reaction was like, isnt this just like a normal house? Come on, this dude has been analysing blueprints for a living for how many years now?
The people who made the decisions in this house must really have had something weird going on. This is giving me cult vibes again, too.
No mentions of any wooden dolls or other similarities to the first house, yet.
this reminded me a bit of this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO6YOUqiJoN/ ^^
Didn’t the guy who is a now a cleaner used to work for a construction company? Maybe he has access to sites the author doesn’t.
I think it’s the second time I encounter the construct 〈A〉あっての〈B〉in this book and I presume that it means “a B who has A” but I don’t remember seeing that before.
In the first case I felt like we didn’t have enough to work with to make plausible guesses, this time I feel like we have too much!
The staircase is suspicious to me. It feels like most of the issues could be solved by moving the staircase elsewhere (except the doors). What’s in the dead space under the staircase? Note the two 収納 on either side on the far end of the staircase.
Yeah the fact that the author brought that up is strange.
He was a bit trashy in the first book sometimes too IIRC. Seems par for the course for True Crime types…
I just finished reading this week’s section and oh boy are the comments here so good.
week 3
I must have spaced-out this week because I totally missed that common theme. I was thinking it’s bad Feng shui for the entrance to have a straight line of sight into the living room and shouldn’t they put a mirror or rock or something there…
I had no idea 仏さん had that definition, so thank you for pointing that out @soggyboy. I also missed the nuance of あっての which is quite significant (thank you @simias )
I came up with no theory about how the murders were connected with the floorplan design. I basically focused on the part where 飯村さん talked about how the toilet being so close to the living room and kitchen would mean stinky odors would waft into these areas. I laughed at that because it didn’t seem like a scary thing. Also how he was fixated on the north facing bath which would never dry? And the clothing wouldn’t dry on the veranda either? Ok so based on this, here’s my possible theory that the murderer got a mold infection in his brain that made him crazy ?
Then my mind wandered to whether any of these analyses would be useful if I ever bought a house in Japan …
The upstairs is super weird. I could not figure out how to improve the layout . Make the rooms smaller so there is a hallway? I actually saw this design at the Versailles Palace where you walk through all rooms to get around. It was due to the need to have natural light back then, in order to see, so internal unlit hallways wouldn’t work….I like the cult theory where the lack of privacy is to prevent people from escaping.
The one thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the お祖母さん’s room. Both the cleaner and the writer assume her room is the 和室. But I noticed that the news article [edit: police report?] didn’t actually say 和室. It just said 自室 and they also mention her body was found on top of her blanket. So would that mean no bloodstains would show up on the floor for cleaner to confirm her location? Could she have been sleeping in the living room or one of the rooms upstairs? Is this even relevant? Then the murderous boy would have been playing in the 和室 growing up, while mom kept an eye on him while cooking etc
Also, the dad is still alive, right? His wife, younger son and his mother died but not the dad, so maybe we find out more from the dad?
And wouldn’t that Instagram guy be useful for our book club!
It also said that the grandma was on a futon, which seems to imply 和室 and not 洋室 like the other rooms. I certainly wouldn’t put it past the book to be pulling a fast one however, so that’s a good point…
However didn’t the cleaner say that they had to change the floorboards because of the ocean of blood in the grandma’s room? I can’t remember if he said 和室, 自室 or something else when talking about that however.
Please let the doll be some voodoo thing! And let there be even MORE voodoo things under the house!!
