怪人二十面相 🦹 (IBC) - Week 13

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怪人二十面相 :supervillain:
Intermediate Book Club
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Week 13 March 28th 2026
Chapter(s) 27+28 少年探偵団 + 午後四時
Audio version [1] video 13
Previous week Week 12
Next week Week 14

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  1. female narrator, playlist, 聴いてみよう江戸川乱歩 ↩︎

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27 少年探偵団

Summary

When Akechi doesn’t come back from the fake damsel in distress setup, everyone is worried, especially Kobayashi and Akechi’s wife. After a couple of days 壮二 (the son that was kidnapped earlier) shows up and says he was so inspired by Kobayashi he collected other boys who wanted to be like him and they started a detective club. They all came to Kobayashi to offer their services. Kobayashi doesn’t want to put them in danger, but thinks of ways they could gather clues by interviewing people to help find Akechi.

thoughts

Well that is a cute turn of events. Now I can’t decide between Akai still being an insider and Akechi made a great plan, or Akechi made a big mistake - maybe he had to get in a fix to make an opening for the young detectives club to pull together to save him :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

28 午後四時

Summary

The boy detectives work hard but don’t find any clues as to Akechi’s whereabouts. In the meantime, the thief writes to the newspaper to announce his intention to come at exactly 4pm on the appointed day

The museum arranged maximum security and on the day we have the 館長, then the 総監, and 刑事部長 arrive. They are sitting together waiting for the appointed time to pass. When it does, Akechi reappears and says the museum is empty (everything has been stolen).

thoughts

I’m not sure what to make of this. Mostly it seemed unwise to let in the big vehicles for the 総監, and the whole boys detective side story felt a bit … superfluous? I guess at this point we have to keep reading to the end, this feels like the big finale coming

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Also done with this week. Really not much happened.
I do find it slightly interesting that it was easy in the other cases to kinda know what 二十面相 is doing. Just by following the descriptions. This time around though, I have absolutely no idea how he supposedly pulled the heist of. Plus we still don’t know what 明智 is planning in response.

I hope the resolution will be worth it :smiley:

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It’s gotta be part of the plan! He did warn Kobayashi beforehand that he would be doing something dangerous.

I’m also wondering how the boys’ detective club will play into the finale. I liked this quote when the club was introduced:

むろん学校の勉強やなんかの邪魔にならないようにですよ。

Don’t worry guys, these kids are still doing their homework!

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I don’t seem to have internalised that as well as you and downtimes. For some reason I’m really gunning for the ending where the boy detectives 1-up Akechi :innocent:

That killed me, too :joy: such innocent times when that’s your concern as an author

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I guess it’s down to whether the hero of the story is supposed to be Kobayashi (being a children’s book) or Akechi :thinking: Or maybe it will just be both working together. Akechi has been talked up so much as being a genius 探偵 that I can’t imagine him making such a huge mistake as getting unintentionally kidnapped.

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Keep on reading, week 14 :slight_smile:

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Week 13 finished quicker than I expected (am I reading faster these days?? :face_with_monocle:)

Week 13

I really enjoyed reading about the Boys Detective Club and the earnestness of Souji-kun wanting to help Kobayashi find the master. And all those details like not forgetting to do their homework, and asking Akechi’s wife’s permission before bringing the club members inside the gate. It gave me some nostalgia for the children’s mystery books that got me hooked on reading when I was young. An older neighbor gave me a ton of Nancy Drew & Hardy Boys books along with quite a few Famous Five and Secret Seven books from Enid Blyton. I still remember how exciting they were to read as a kid.

Plot-wise, it’s nice that Kobayashi and Souji-kun formed a search party to find Akechi, but the master did warn him not to worry, so I feel like Kobayashi could have trusted his master more. But then there would be no Boys Detective Club, which is important.

Also, the whole time I was reading, I was trying to figure which person was in disguise. I suspected everyone:

(1) the captive Akechi is not the real master but is someone else
(2) Akai the new apprentice of Twenty Faces is actually Akechi,
(3) Akai the new apprentice is actually a Foreign Affairs buddy of Akechi,
(4) the museum director Kitakouji is actually a real museum director with real academic credentials who also moonlights as the Phantom Thief (now that’s some long-term planning there!) and this theft is his swan song before he retires,
(5) the Police Commissioner who suddenly showed up at the museum is the thief,
(6) the detective who shows up with the commissioner and says he knows Akechi is the thief,
(7) the Akechi detective who appears at the museum is the thief…

THEN I thought → Akechi had the museum move all the art treasures out of the museum before the day of reckoning so even if the thief came, there would be nothing (that’s a bold move!). If that’s the case, then the Akechi who appeared at the museum was in fact the real detective….

So many possibilities…but for now, I’ll go with the Museum Director is the thief. He’s got the expertise to know the most valuable art. And Detective Akechi managed to empty the museum while the Museum Director was out having meetings with the Prime Minister, Affairs of state and other VIPs. The Police Commissioner and head Detective are red herrings because their sudden appearance mirrors what happened at the Hashiba house. The Boys Detective Club are helpful in some way, because if they were not, children all over Japan would be disappointed.

This week my favorite word is 八字ひげ （はちじひげ) = a finely trimmed moustache. This was used to describe the handsome detective that accompanied the Police Commissioner to the museum. It was when all three sat in the museum director’s office counting down the minutes. 「。。。中肉中背で、八字ひげの美しい刑事部長、。。」 It’s not difficult to imagine a 八 shaped moustache.

I love these expressions where the actual shape of the kanji plays a role. In the previous IBC book お探し物は図書室まで, the expression 川の字で寝る was used to describe parents sleeping in bed with the kid in the middle (all three in a row). Another term shared in the book discussion was 大の字で寝る (taking up the whole bed). The only thing I could come up with in English was U-turn.

Anyway, this image includes a fine gentleman with a 八 shaped moustache and a ヤギひげ (goatee)

moustaches
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Love your posts, where do I subscribe?? :smiley:

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Thank you! :smiling_face: as the IBC host you have been automatically signed up! :backhand_index_pointing_left:

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But there are only two parts left, I need to find out where you’re going next :x

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Until I join the next IBC →

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reply

This is amazing, you systematically broke this down in a way that is going to make you love the rest of the book

That’s fun… trying…

T shirt!

:grin::+1:

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ワァー! :clap: I didn’t even think of that despite using the word so much

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There are also X-legs (and in German bow legs are called O-legs).

And there are T-crossings

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Interesting! I only knew the words knock-kneed and bow legs. I didn’t know about X-legs before

Ha! Another I use all the time (well, I use “T-intersection” a lot).