変な家2 🏠🔍 Book Club ・ Ongoing

Japanese Language Book Clubs
201
Week 11

Oh no no kanji, everybody panic! Thankfully wasn’t that hard. The kid is definitely the one mentioned in the last chapter.
He seemed to have been treated kinda shittily even before being brought to “Eiji san”'s house…

Isn’t removing the room probably a way to have it resemble the cult’s headquarters, if he really is the member from Ch10?

Maybe they get told that’s what they need to do for 聖母様’s powers to help, and that oh so happens to involve asking a certain construction company to make the necessary renovations by giving them $$$$…
And in the 神殿, the grandma was literally sitting in the “heart” of the human shaped building, so putting the broken doll in a specific spot in the house is probably meant to evoke that.

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Cult stuff up to week 11

Yeah, that general idea is why I went back and tried to find out if this might have worked out for the room Negishi’s mom tried to have removed in Ch 1…I couldn’t find a way to make this work, but maybe I missed something. Same in this chapter - I think it should theoretically be possible to work out what the floorplan of the uncle’s house looks like from Naruki’s description, but I couldn’t get a clear picture in my head. There seemed to be too many rooms described as next to the dining room and looking out over the flowerbed.

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W11

Wholesome chapter :smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Playing those old Final Fantasy games in full kana has prepared me for this, it wasn’t a big deal. The idea of the kid managing to keep a diary through all this feels a bit contrived but whatever, it’s 変な家 after all.

I hope that there’s more to the room removal than “it’s just a random thing this cult does”.

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Week 12
Start date 8 Aug
Chapter 部屋を繋ぐ糸電話
End phrase end of chapter
Pages 193-218
Page count 25
How is the reading going?
  • I am reading along :house::magnifying_glass_tilted_left:
  • I am catching up :flexed_biceps:t2:
  • I am dropping this book :person_gesturing_no:t3:
0 voters
205
Week 12 - Chapter 8

Aah, a “normal” chapter again :slight_smile:
Interesting expressions of the week:

  • 愛想尽あいそづかし: no longer being fond of someone / spiteful words or acts showing that one is disgusted with someone
  • 見切みきり発車はっしゃ: starting a train (or bus, etc.) before all the passengers are on board / making a snap decision / starting an action without considering objections to it any longer

Curious case, brings more questions than answers!

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Week 11 (Ch. 7 - おじさんの家

:sob:…why did the mom and her boyfriend (pimp?) want to take Naruki back from おじさん？ I lept to the conclusion that Eiji is a pimp because Mom seems to work at night a lot and Eiji beats/controls her… → echoing the theme of a child born from a mother who sinned from the last chapter…

Also, Naruki sleeping in the closet at Eiji-san’s apartment reminded me of Ch. 2 津原 family’s 16 y.o. living in a closet… (did that mom also commit some kind of sin?)

Re: おじさん’s house. So the diary extracts kept mentioning this 花壇 which I understood to mean flowerbed. You can see the 花壇 from various windows in the house. What’s so important about this? It also mentions seeing a road on one side and a river on the other. And at the end of a long hallway a tiny creepy doll room (家の心臓）… おじさん specifically says 「だから、鍵をかけたらダメだよ」Q: why shouldn’t you lock the door to that room? :thinking:

The room with the エアロバイク that looked like a bike （動かない自転車） - Naruki went into this room the first time with his Uncle. The room connecting to the bike room had a view onto a river. The second time Naruki visited the bike room, he decides to pedal the non-moving bike. Then he goes into the connecting room and discovers it’s not a room anymore - just a roaring river. My first thought was his action of pedaling on the stationary bike was similar to Uki turning the water mill wheel, causing a wall in the adjacent room to move so that it became an open space.

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Here is my best effort, which is probably distorted and/or wrong:

おじさんの家の間取り図

The doors are blue, windows are orange

おじさんの家
おじさんの家1092×1212 79.3 KB

208
Week 10

Just finished week 10. I love that everyone here is posting their theories and cross-posting about other chapters and I came here to comment: shopping and sleeping cult!

209
week 11

Wait, that must be it :joy: Good job thinking of that, I was just like ‘huh, weird [flips page]’

210
Week 12

Okay, so we got a lot of information at the end of this one!

First of all, the main ‘mystery’-

It seemed pretty obvious to me that the dad was in the neighbor’s house. But there must be more going on than just ‘he was making an alibi,’ we still don’t know what motive he would have for killing them, or why he had been in their house several times before. She says that they talked on the paper cup phone only 4 or 5 times, so we can be sure he was in the other house all those times. I suppose they were doing cult activities, but a quick skim of our proper nouns list didn’t seem to bring up any 松江’s. Hmmmm. :thinking:

Ok, for the end, we learn that his new house had a flowerbed in front and he did some strange construction, was in a picture with the dead little boy eating omurice, and died in 1994. He must be the ‘uncle,’ then. 1994 is when our reporter investigated the living goddess cult, so that tracks for him being the crazy guy that yelled at the goddess, then we can assume he killed himself right after. But how was he related to the little boy?

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Week 12

Wild premise in this chapter. I got a couple of doubts regarding the feasibility of a murder where you have to douse someone in kerosene and set them on fire while talking on a string phone, but I guess I’ll just have to suspend my disbelief.

Actually, we can’t. Kasahara herself speculates that her father swapped out the string for a longer one before the last call, so he was probably really in his own bedroom during the earlier ones. Maybe the first calls served to get her used to talking to him on the string phone so that he could be sure she’d call him the night he needed an alibi.

Now, how does this tie in with the main mystery? Judging from the title of next week’s chapter, we’ll get the perspective of the murdered neighbors next, so I’d really love to just keep reading and get answers but have to hold out for 5 more days. So, let’s pass the time with some more speculation:

Kasahara’s father was the man Naruki called “uncle”, but it now seems likely that he wasn’t his uncle by blood, since Kasahara didn’t know of Naruki or his mother’s existence. Judging from his tantrum at the church, Kasahara Sr. was hoping that the cult would save Naruki and grew angry at them when he died. After that, he killed himself. So it seems that even though he was a scumbag, he really cared about Naruki. Could Naruki have been his illegitimate son? That could tie into the whole “children of sin” spiel by the Holy Mother. Maybe it’s part of the cult’s beliefs that you have to sacrifice a room from your house to purge the taint of extra-marital conception from your child to keep them from harm. This only makes sense if Negishi from C1 is also the result of an affair, of course. But if she is, that would explain her mother’s overprotective but distant behavior, and why she secretly saved up money to remove a room.

As for Kasahara Sr’s murder motive, I guess we’ll just have to wait for next week.

212
Off topic

Playing Ace Attorney now, can’t wait to see what’s the 見取り図 (not exactly a 間取り図 but still) and to see if 変な家 has prepared me properly for this case!

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Edit: funny, it even does look like with someone with only one arm xD

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possible future collaboration between Shu Takumi and Uketsu :thinking:

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Week 12

Fun chapter, and we are officially halfway through the book!
But I’m a bit sad that these last couple chapters haven’t actually involved much floorplan mystery solving.
At this point I also think that the boy who died was the illegitimate son of Kasahara’s dad. The idea that the cult targets people involved in extramarital affairs feels pretty on point.

215
W12

A very goofy but fun chapter, quality 変な家. The idea of the dad murdering someone while attempting to keep the cup string taught (but not pulling hard enough that the other end will be yanked from the child’s hands) is peak slapstick.

At first I though that the link between the stories would be subtle and well hidden but I don’t think this author deals in subtlety. “Hey btw the kid from the previous two chapter? I saw a picture of him in the stuff of my father, who killed himself in a weird ritual involving a spooky doll. I wonder if it means something??”.

216

FYI - I just updated the proper noun list to include Ch 8 characters

Week 12 - Ch 8 部屋をつなぐ糸電話

I am managing to keep up with the reading (woo!) and I always run to the comments to see everyone’s speculations :smiley:

I missed that part, so I’m glad you mentioned it.

I was thinking 笠原’s father fits the rich-guy-lady-killer profile similar to the original Showa era affair between Azuma and Okinu-san. So he kills the parents of Hiroki to prevent them from harming the boy (who is a product of the affair). Then he tries to help the next son Naruki (also product of an affair) but fails. I noticed he kills himself with sleeping pills, which seems to follow the ritual at the 再生の館 where you sleep to be reborn…

Also the 松江家の夫さん is described as often taking ヒロキくん to concerts at his church (is this “church” the Shopping & Sleeping Cult? :thinking:)

Again a mention of the flowerbed…what’s with the flowerbed…

I also liked learning this expression and would like to do a little research to find outmore about the origin, because I don’t quite understand how 見切り (edge) and 発車 (departure) ends up being “snap decision”. I see 見切り is also used in:

  • 見切りを付ける - to wash one’s hands of something
  • 見切り線ー boundary, edge, breakline
  • 見切り品 - bargain sale
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I’m thinking that it comes from the meaning of 見切り that is “giving up” and 発車 “departure of a vehicle”, you give up waiting on the rest of the passengers and just start the train (my thinking is heavily influenced by this definition I had for the expression: 1. starting a train (or bus, etc.) before all the passengers are on board)
Now, why is 見切り giving up, is a good question too I guess…

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見切り

Jisho lists “abandonment” as the first possible meaning for 見切り, so now it kind of has this shape in my brain where that meaning merges with the meaning of the individual kanji. A visible cut → an abrupt abandonment of something.

Btw, so cool that we’re having some language-related discussion again! I’m always too lazy to post language questions and observations and instead read just for speed and fun too often, so I’m worrying that I’m not learning as much as I could from this.

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見切り発車

“abandonment” makes more sense. So basically before you have a good look at something, you just cut to the chase (見切り）and act/decide. Like you aren’t looking long enough to get a full sense of what you’re looking at before you act.

So 見切り発車 is as @Akashelia described, rather than some kind of orderly process of boarding passengers on your train & deciding where you are going, you just cut to the chase and depart.

Also makes sense 見切り売り - bargain sale (snap sale?) 見切りつける - abandon analysing the problem & just wash your hands…

I have the opposite problem where I start wondering-wandering while reading and I end up taking forever to read a single page… :sob:

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I know that one too well, I’m often getting lost on Wikipedia / Google maps or the like! But it’s fun! :smiley: