怪人二十面相 🦹 (IBC) - Week 13

怪人二十面相 :supervillain:
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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 ↩︎

3 Likes

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

6 Likes

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:

5 Likes

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!

4 Likes

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

4 Likes

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.

3 Likes

Keep on reading, week 14 :slight_smile:

3 Likes