Judging from their ages, I’d guess that maybe the current CEO is Mitsuko’s father and the heir is either her brother, half-brother or cousin. I wondered if it’s a clue that no brother was mentioned when she told Hayasaki about how her parents live in a different house, but it’s too early to tell.
That makes more sense. Otherwise the heir would be like ten years old.
Forgot to comment here, I don’t really know what to make of the white heron trapped in the watermill… The purpose of the contraption being to basically torture people/force them to worship the little goddess statue seems way too specific to be a misdirection, and I’m struggling to think of other uses for it… But then why also use it to kill a random animal?
There’s not much floorplan investigation to do here this time, but the chapter title has my attention… In a mousetrap, you use the food put in the center as bait.
In the floor plan, grandma’s room is right in the middle of the floor…
Since 早坂 obviously survived whatever “incident” happened… I wonder if Mitsuko was supposed to “lure” people into the house towards Grandma’s room where she kills them?
But grandma accidentally kills Mitsuko instead? Especially if the closet really leads into grandma’s room… It’s also definitely suspicious that she has both legs and hands covered.
(Unless… it’s grandma who misteriously died?)
This conclusion felt really weak to me. Nothing really made sense.
The general idea of building an intentionally dangerous house to get rid of a pesky elderly relative was fine and fit the general theme of these stories, but the method the Hikuras used felt way too unreliable. Just because she didn’t have her cane doesn’t mean she would fall down the stairs let alone that the fall would be fatal.
When I picture that scene, I don’t understand why grandma would have tried to cross the gap between the right-hand wall and the toilet door. She knew the toilet was occupied, so it would have been way more logical for her to lean against the corridor wall and wait there till Hayasaki comes out.
I half expected Hayasaki to be an unreliable narrator who tried to gloss over the fact that she caused grandma’s death herself (since the toilet door opens outwards, she could have knocked grandma down the stairs with it or something), but the author was really passive in this chapter and didn’t ask her a single critical question, so now I guess we just have to take her word for it.
Speaking of which, I’m also frustrated that none of them ever brought up the weirdness that is having a windowless room in the middle of the floor. This seems like a particularly specialized kind of stupidity on part of the author, because they should be hypersensitized to windowless rooms because of what happened in Book 1. Even if this is brought up again later and we get another reveal about grandma (like maybe she had some sort of extreme sensibility to light, which would explain both the room and the fact that she kept most of her skin covered), it’s still weird that they didn’t bring this up now.
As it is, it doesn’t even make sense in light of the murder method. If the Hikura had given grandma one of the completely normal rooms on the left corridor, she’d have had to cross two staircases instead of one every time she went to the loo, thus doubling the chance for a fatal fall.
The thing with the alibi also doesn’t make sense. Why would Mitsuko even need an alibi? If an elderly person falls down the stairs at arse o’clock in the morning, why would anyone suspect the 13 year old sleeping next door? This whole setup where she made a disposable friend to invite her and wake her up at 5 a.m to play cards makes her seem a gazillion times more sus.
And the walking stick - girl, just stash it in one of the empty rooms instead of fumbling around in the dark in your own room to lock it in the closet. This just risks waking your disposable friend for no reason.
I felt the same way about the conclusion of the chapter. Building a whole house just to get rid of an old woman is completely over the top, including the entire alibi story.
I hope that the end reveals that there is much more to it, and that this book shelf locker is still linked to cult rituals or sth^^
The manga adaptation reached the second book, and the free preview includes half of chapter 2. I always like to see how they illustrate the houses, so I took a peek. The illustration really drives home how small the scale of the blueprint is, it makes everything look even more claustrophobic:
I feel like the author tried to learn from the first book and but go completely wild with the scenarios involved, but as a result he overcorrected a bit. This “murder” is neither smart not interesting. Too many ridiculous coincidences. There’s no way they would expect her to fall specifically down the stairs and, even then, falling down stairs is far from a guaranteed death sentence.
I’m hoping that we’ll revisit this case later and there’ll be more to this. In the meantime, give me more insane serial killers, Ukestsu!
Yeah, that’s basically what I said.
Ugh, idk. This was the first chapter in this volume where I truly started to fear that this is all heading into the same slop territory as the first book - weird people doing weird shit just because they’re superstitious and at the same time dumb as a brick wall.
Like you and @esutasan , I also hope that there will be more reveals about these events later, but given book 1, I don’t dare try to get my hopes up too high.
I agree with you guys about the 筆者’s apparent lack of insight into this floorplan - ie., gramma’s windowless room - He’s not really connecting any dots at all…
早坂’s theory about みつこちゃん killing her gramma and using 早坂 as the alibi (to help her father get rid of gramma) seemed so off to me. I kept thinking gramma is the killing machine here. It’s gramma’s mousetrap. Guests to the house are gramma’s victims. みつこちゃん somehow caught onto this/was roped into getting victims for gramma. Her lie about liking Takurami Pepper Girls (is this a real manga?) was a lure to get 早坂to come.
But then みつこちゃん took a liking to 早坂 and decided she didn’t want gramma to kill her. That’s why she stuck to 早坂 all day even going to the bathroom together. And then forcing her to get up super early to play cards on the last day. But then 早坂 suddenly had to go to the bathroom and went alone…Lo and behold, there’s gramma just outside in the hallway. Why would she tell 早坂 to go to the bathroom before her? and why was she going for the toilet door while 早坂 was still in the toilet? Although 早坂 didn’t hear any sound except for gramma tumbling down the stairs, I think みつこ pushed her down the stairs, trying to save 早坂.
How come みつこ made no sound in the hallway? because there is a secret passage from the adjacent room to the bookcase into みつこ’s room. This secret passage is normally used by gramma to move around undetected by victims. みつこ snuck through the bookcase and popped out in the hallway right behind gramma and launched her down the stairs before she was able to open the toilet door and kill 早坂. Gramma was in the hallway because she was on her way to the secret passage, not because she had to go to the bathroom. That’s also why みつこ locked the bookcase door at night so gramma couldn’t sneak in and kill/abduct sleeping 早坂。
早坂 also said that she felt like someone was watching her when she was trying to open the locked bookcase in the middle of the night. but when she turned around, みつこ was sound asleep. So I thought maybe it’s gramma watching through a peephole at the other end of the room…
Here is the annotated mousetrap floorplan explaining my not-wild-at-all-nor-unsubstantiated theory:
I thought it was Paper Girls but I can’t find anything relevant online.
This exchange was such a mood:
早坂 この家は、お祖母さんを事故に遭わせるために造られたんじゃないでしょうか。
筆者 …………。
Except usually it’s narrator and me, the reader, respectively haha
Or this one:
早坂 ……と、今までは思っていました。
筆者 ……え？
I am also extremely excited we now have our first MS Paint diagram, thanks @Buruberimiruku
I was definitely thinking something along the lines of what your theory here is, that there’s some kind of secret passage behind the bookcase/into gramma’s room. The case as we left it was pretty unsatisfying for all the reasons everyone else said 
Yeah, I was also definitely let down by the end of this chapter. Too vague, the floor plan isn’t actually relevant at all, it all felt like “too many coincidences” (I too was expecting the fact that the door of the toilet swings outwards to come into play or be mentioned at least… )
Maybe this isn’t the first time that Mitsuko chan has pulled this trick, she invited all classmates in turn with the same setup and the one time with 早坂 was when the incident happened…
But yeah, the fact that grandma didn’t simply wait for the narrator to come out of the bathroom is way too nonsensical. They crossed in the hallway, she was going to the bathroom, Wouldn’t she simply wait in the hallway? (And then maybe ask 早坂 for help?)
I guess we still have to find out why grandma had to go, so maybe this case will be brought up again…
I somehow missed reading this comment from last week… agree! agree!
