夜歩く（金田一耕助 Reading Club）

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Welcome to the 夜歩く Reading Thread!

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This book is part of the 金田一耕助 reading club. It is the third ‘main’/novel-length story, but can be read as a stand-alone.

You can buy it here:
Amazon

We will start reading on May 16 2022.
There will be no weekly threads, all discussion will be had in this thread.

Reading Schedule

Week Start Date Chapter Names Page Count
1 May 16 汝夜歩くなかれ ~77
2 May 23 大惨劇 ~92
3 May 30 金田一耕助登場 ~71
4 June 6 もう一人の女 ~63
5 June 13 最後の悲劇 ~25

Thank you @Jfredel78 for providing the page count.

You can mark your participation status here:

  • I am reading this book
  • I have finished this book
  • I plan to read this book
  • I don’t plan to read this book

0 voters

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I finished this week’s reading! (oops, I’ve been jumping the gun assuming it started on a weekend haven’t I…)

I for one am very glad to at long last be introduced at length to another bunch of dysfunctional, elaborately incestuous minor nobility from Chugoku. Y’know, The good stuff!

I wonder if the narrator being another non-Yokomizo novelist means he’s going to murder somebody or be killed by the end - or if he just needed to be unssuccessful for the sake of the plot… I also think it’ll be interesting when Kindaichi shows up – everyone so far seems pretty drastically repellent, albeit in a (mostly) fun to read way! Particularly Hachiya as “pretentious asshole who is definitely going to get killed soon.” I already kinda feel bad for Kindaichi presumably having to deal with everyone while solving whatever kind of murder is going to happen.

There were a handful of interesting place names in Tokyo and a few historical references I looked up, but I don’t really have anything to add about them except “those are place names in Tokyo, and those are historical references.” :sweat_smile:

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Only tangentially related, but I like when specialized vocabulary coincidentally pops up immediately in a different place, and the 珍獣のお医者さん chapter in this month’s Harta happened to be informative about the 古神家’s characteristic affliction:

slight warning for lizard (and a cricket) in medical distress

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It’s been a fun reminder that it’s time to get started on some 横溝 for me, so I certainly don’t mind! :wink:

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:joy: Indeed, haha! I really appreciate all the tangles and complications you can have in one single family… or I guess it’s a bunch of families marrying each other?

I was also happy to see 村正 make an appearance (again?). 横溝 loves his (maybe legendary and/or cursed) swords, and so do I! And it makes sense in a family like this, and it creates some nice tension, haha.

I also wondered about that! It was clear pretty early on, that it wasn’t our official, 金田一 approved writer speaking… Maybe 横溝 really wanted us to experience the stories in first person directly, without having another person as a go between/cleaning up the order we get our information?

Speaking of introductions, I liked the one we got here. Slowly finding out who’s who while they’re talking, and then our narrator going off on a tangent and telling us about his relationship with his ‘friend’, and meanwhile I’m half ‘come on, tell us about that case already’. Haha. It was half vexing, half really interesting. I also, as usual, really appreciate the character descriptions. Especially the contrast between ‘old-school beauty’ and ‘modern beauty’. Who, apparently, look pretty similar to each other, and one of them’s a master make up artist able to make herself look like whatever she pleases? I feel like that’s going to be important later on. :eyes:

:joy:
Yeah, maybe a little bit.

Not super related to the book, but I find it interesting how 横溝 involves illnesses/? (Not sure what you’d call the multiple pupil syndrome in 車井戸はなぜ軋る. It’s not an illness really I don’t think?) to create a certain mood. That’d be much more controversial today…

Speaking of, I found this article when I looked it up. Apparently, this illness was consideres pretty much a thing of the past, but has begun showing up more again. Presumably because people don’t spent enough time out in the sun or creating a balanced diet.

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this family is crazy

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Oh I dunno… seems like a pretty normal family get together! :upside_down_face:

At the end of chapter 2 we’ve got a whole lot of bizarre circumstances all set up, the next title promises Kindaichi, we’re heading to Okayama, and I spot a bunch of train routes to have fun googling! What more could you ask for!

Boy I really have no idea what could be going on at this stage. My only attempt at a a called shot of a guess is maybe both of them were killed and the body is from one and the head from the other. But I couldn’t begin to speculate on what implications that would even have on the mystery… My hair isn’t もじゃもじゃ enough to connect these dots yet!

I feel like one detail that I bet is going to come up in some kind of twist eventually is that like, prison in the woods Naoki kept a woman in according to Hachiya? Somehow even amid the decapitated corpse pieces that was maybe the most suspicious detail especially since it didn’t come up at all again this chapter… Although looking back (to make sure I wasn’t misremembering), the dialogue makes a point of showing Hachiya just heard a woman crying in a locked room in the woods, and someone take her away, and it was Yachiyo who told him it had to do with Naoki… so maybe that was a lie and Yashiro does know Naoki’s affairs as well as he thinks he does?

Also, Yashiro really needs to practice better password creation. Like come on guy, you coulda picked any three kana and you picked the name of one of the main people you were supposed to be making sure definitely couldn’t get in there. Maybe if you exercised more creativity your mystery novels would sell better am I right!!

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STATUS: HALFWAY THROUGH CHAPTER 1

I’m still on Chapter 1, but I’m doing my best to catch up. After reading all of 殺人鬼 in two weeks, I ended up with almost no time to read this past week. Maybe we should have started with 夜歩くafter all.

That being said, I am enjoying the start of it, although the convoluted feudal family tree was slow going as always. I like where this is going though.

I also think it’s notable how physical disabilities and/or mental illness are such a recurring theme through pretty much all of the Yokomizo stories and novels we’ve read so far. It took me awhile to even figure out what 佝僂 referred to. Obviously that wouldn’t be a politically correct term today, especially since Yokomizo uses it to evoke a creepy feeling of dread. But it works! That part where he described the letter and photo that accompanied it was bone-chilling. The doubling aspect with 蜂屋 and 守衛 opens up some pretty interesting possibilities as well.

(Sorry if these thoughts are painfully outdated for you already. :sweat_smile:)

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No worries! All The posts for the other novels were outdated by about a year from my perspective and I enjoyed those plenty! :sweat_smile:

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After a sprint like that, I’d also need a little bit of a break, other commitments not withstanding. If there’s just no time, that’s just how it is!
In that light, having a bit of a break for S&M is probably really going to be good for at least my long term motivation.

Yeah, exactly. But that is how people who were different were treated in large parts of the world, and still isn’t really overcome today. I like to think people wouldn’t automatically (possibly spoilers for some chapter 2 remarks on this topic? I don’t remember when this was mentioned)ascribe particularly gruesome acts of violence/creepy behaviour to them anymore, at least…

:joy:
Your guess is as good as mine! I also think both are probably dead (I don’t think our resident shoddy mystery writer’s guess that 蜂屋 is just faking his クル for… fame? infamy? is correct. But what do I even know. :joy:

Everything is so convoluted and I’m loving it.

Two things that stood out to me this chapter:
Early on, the night 寅太 spends on the couch in 直記’s room before the body is discovered. In the morning, after having fallen asleep, our narrator muses how 直記 wasn’t able to leave the room while he was sleeping in front of the door. It might be true, but that raised a bunch of red flags for me and made me super aware of 直記 as a possible culprit/involved person. There’s a pretty big window, it might not be impossible to use that to get in and out.

Then a little bit later, our narrator remarks how similar drunk 鉄之進 and drunk 直記 are. Maybe that just struck me as odd because the one above made me hyperaware, but man does 寅太 describe 直記 as not a good person a lot.
Also, 直記 thinks 八千代 is 鉄之進’s daughter partly because they share their sleepwalking tendencies. 直記 is also his kid - who’s to say he doesn’t also sleepwalk? Say, out of his open window while our narrator is sleeping, for example?

Anyway, the more we learn, the more 八千代 seems like merely a puppet/not voluntarily part of the plot to me. I wonder if that’s our narrator’s bias, something we’re merely supposed to think, or truth.

I also had a :man_facepalming: moment when I read that. Really, that’s what you went with? :joy:

But next week we meet 金田一! I wonder how he’ll react to yet another mystery writer, and whether he’ll compare him to the one he knows?

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Chapter 2 done.

I thought Hachiya was suspicious at first, because someone was trying to kill him, but (since he’s a guy and not a girl) he ended up the victim, rather than a killer. …The events of Ch2 notwithstanding. Even with Morie’s head, I don’t think Hachiya will be getting to the end of the book alive (if he’s even still alive now).

Anyway, with Hachiya out of the way, Naoki is next on my hit list. Sure, let me be out of the house exactly when someone apparently tried to get Tetsunoshin to kill Hachiya, and then bring a witness who will vouch for both me and Muramasa on the night the murder happens. Suuuuuuuuuure. (For the first point, he could have taken Muramasa out before he left, and just nobody noticed it until Tetsunoshin found it. For the third… my best guess is that Muramasa was not used in the murder, and Naoki palmed a blood pack that he could smear on Muramasa as he drew it, creating the illusion it was used in the night when it really was safely locked up. For the second point… idk, window is possible as @Belerith suggested but that feels like a pretty flimsy alibi then.)

Ch2 made me a bit sus of Yomota (how he was conveniently there to witness Testunoshin’s sleepwalking), maybe he’s not as stupid as everyone believes…

Moving to Okayama is certainly interesting. A complete setting shift in the middle of a mystery is pretty uncommon. I’m reminded of The Egyptian Cross Mystery–and the headless corpse certainly adds to that.

There’s a lot of weird discrete pieces moving around (the identical bullet wounds and two sleepwalkers), so I’m interested to see at the end how much is coincidence, how much is clever planning, and how much is the culprit being an omnipotent god.

Also this feels like it might be the most dysfunctional family I’ve ever see in a mystery novel. Like, dysfunctional families are a common trope, but I feel like the dysfunction is overstated many times. Here it’s pretty bad though. And maybe they’re not the most dysfunctional as a group, but there’s a super high and consistent level of individual dysfunction (ie every single one has their own little way that they are deeply screwed up)

…I don’t know what クル looks like and I’m too scared to look it up :<

Anyway, fun fact to commemorate the halfway point: this book shares its name with John Dickson Carr’s debut work!

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Status update: I have about 40 pages left in Chapter 2. Over 100 pages in less than a week… I’m doing my best here.

So far this is easily the most gruesome Yokomizo book so far. Which is good news for me, copious negative disability stereotypes notwithstanding.

Can’t wait to see what’s hidden behind those spoiler tags and participate in the discussion. By then you’ll probably all be finished with Chapter 3. :sweat_smile:

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I at least won’t have time to read ahead over the weekend at least, so I’ll start reading chapter 3 from Monday or, since that will be a busy day, probably Tuesday. :smiley: Looking forward to being on the same page again~

It certainly felt flimsy to me! The point you raised about how timely 直記’s ‘alibi’ was brought in to visit (and he used our narrator not only for his nightly alibi, but also to ‘prove’ his inability to get to the ‘murder weapon’ (which, I can believe it is the murder weapon, but who knows at this point) seems very suspicious to me too. Maybe the fact that the ‘very safe password’ ended up written on the wall of the crime scene could play a role too…?

Regarding the safe, I don’t think it’s unlikely that there’s a master password, because what do you do when the one who set the password dies for whatever reason, or is just plain unavailable at a time you really need what’s inside? Since it’s 直記’s safe, he’d know it of course.
(I’m not too well informed about actual safes - is it common practice to have to cut them open in such cases?)

It’s also suspicious how everything seems to point towards 鉄之進, who we know 直記 doesn’t much like und who 直記 points fingers at at pretty much every opportunity.

It didn’t seem terribly horrifying to me, more sad considering the causes. I only saw pictures of kids though, and well, I suppose we’re more used to not thinking of differences as a sign of something bad/otherworldly today? Not that I think you need to look it up, just saying. ^^

Ooh, that’s a good fact. I don’t believe I’ve read any of his works, so it went right on my list, thanks. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I just stumbled upon this ‘creepy Japanese koto and flute music’ compilation on youtube - fits the horror house theme of this book to a T, I’d say! Too bad we’re about to change locations in chapter 3. :joy:

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I read 1 and 2 back to back, now 夜歩く is paused, and I’ll start ch3 on Monday. Don’t want to get behind or ahead schedule! :stuck_out_tongue:

Oh yeah, that occurred to me too. I’m just hoping it’s not the answer because it’s pretty lame (and that if muramasa actually is the murder weapon, the way it got out of the safe is a bit more clever than “lied about a master password/key”)

He’s known as ‘the master of the locked room,’ so his characters and dialogue can be a bit odd but the plotting/tricks are great. If you want to check him out some of his best books (imo) are The Judas Window, He Who Whispers, The Problem of the Green Capsule (probably one of the most hilarious set-ups in any murder mystery), The Tragedy of X, and The Arabian Nights Murder. (I’d also recommend reading the original English and can’t vouch for any of the translations, but do as you will.)

Pretty snazzy. Somehow I doubt moving to a creepy little isolated village is going to change the fittingness of the music :stuck_out_tongue: Dw, I’m sure you’ll be able to bust it out again for 八つ墓村 as well. (And if you want a full-blown j-horror x murder mystery book, check out 厭魅の如き憑くもの)

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Haha, it would be kinda lame, wouldn’t it? Sometimes reading older works can be funny like that though. Maybe something like that wasn’t quite so obvious 70 years ago?
In any case, I’m sure there’s a whole world of feudalistically inspired motivations 金田一 can uncover still untold, at least. :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the recommendations! I also prefer consuming media in its original language when I can. :slight_smile:

Well, wenn you put it like that, haha.

What’s full-blown mean in this case? I like some good thriller/suspense/creepyness, but I’m not good with overly detailed gore/body horror. Better in written form than movie, but still. None of the crime scenes I read about in Japanese so far were too bad, mind. If you’ve read 殺人出産, the last scene went right up to and maybe a bit beyond the limit of my sensibilities. If was fine since it was a pretty short scene, but if it’s a major part of the plot/narration that level of gore would probably turn me off a book.

I do quite like implied horror, if that’s a thing. I remember I read a bunch of r.l. stine as a kid, and the endings were just :ok_hand:. Good times.

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I’m glad you asked, because I have a full review ready to answer!

Haven’t heard of 殺人出産. I never read RL Stine b/c he was too scary :<

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That certainly answered my question, haha. Seemes like it might be right up my alley! I spent a bit too long fluffing up my goodread’s wishlist, but that aside - I refrained from reading your 八つ墓 review for fear of spoilers, but I read a bit of the one about 金田一少年 in the mountain cabin - it should be interesting picking up one of those eventually. I got some of the manga for free on kindle a while back, so I’ll probably start there. :slight_smile:

Your game reviews reminded me of the tragedy that is region locking pre ps3. :sob:

Ah, I see. It’s not a mystery but rather an exploration of a somewhat dystopian society, so it might not fit your reading interest judging by your blog. ^^

:>
I did have some interesting dreams, haha.

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Fortunately I didn’t know Japanese back then, 3DS was the first and last Japanese console I had to buy

Anyway, as long as I’m shilling, I will admit that my blog is just a pale imitation of this one (warning: if you click that link there is a very real chance your to-read list will mutate into an unmanageable monster)

Also I love love LOVE 金田一少年 but do want to throw out a warning that the second manga case (異人館村) blatantly plagiarizes 占星術殺人事件, so skip 異人館村 if you haven’t read 占星術殺人事件.

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I finished chapter 3! (I would slow down to be on schedule but I’m enjoying the weekly weekend reading too much…)

Naoki continues to be the most overtly suspicious I think, with his constantly bringing the narrator along after him and showing him stuff like a magician showing the deck of cards to mark, his nun-related secrets (whatever the heck those are), his occasionally mentioned prison in the woods, and his somehow extremely untrustworthy sounding “that was the first time I hit a woman.”
But it’d take a more careful reader than me to discern if there was a chance for him to sneak a murder in there amid all that 稲妻.

Kindaichi twice having toilet-related 用 to たす makes me slightly wonder (worry?) if that’s gonna be like, another unassuming character trait of his going forward…

I really liked a lot the brief historical explanation for the name 鬼首村! I think my ideal Yokomizo passage is something like “the history of the name Horrific Murder Gorge goes back at least several hundred years and is thought by scholars to possibly relate to a notably destructive flock of crows supposedly occuring sometime in the reign of so-and-so emperor, however…” and so on.

Looking up locations (specific setting discussion for chapter 3, no major spoilers, very minor ones marked)

Looks like the 姫新線 exists exactly as described, from 姫路 to 新見 still today. Oh - duh! That’s why it’s called 姫新線 huh, 姫路 to 新見.
Being a local line, it seems like you wouldn’t tend to user it for long trips down the line, as google tends to recommend larger lines (or the shinkansen) plus transfers for larger journeys.
The other clues that I caught to where they are is that the narrator arrives at K station at least an hour after he sets out from 姫路, there’s 3里 additional distance to get to the manor from the station (which is apparently like 7 miles), and that distance includes walking by “旭川の上流.”

There’s a bunch of K stations on the line, and at first I thought maybe the one in question was the first one going from 姫路 - here it is (with the end of the line circled):

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BUT - that last clue! There’s an 旭川 in 岡山 and it’s here (新見 circled again for reference why not):

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So based on that - it seeks like K station has to be either 古見駅 or 久世駅, they’re the only ones that seem like they’re in the Asahi river’s watershed.
久世駅 is farther upstream (and so presumably deeper into the mountains) so it’s my pick! Which would make the trip post transfer at 姫路 something like this:

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Looking in the surrounding area, no obviously similar place names to the presumably fictional villages jump out at me, but I see a toooon of waterfalls! So that makes me feel like I got the right area.

I wonder how old the station building is… It certainly doesn’t look like it has changed recently to me.

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Just kinda fun to click around mountain roads a little, and pretend Kindaichi is just over there, peeing…

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