怪人二十面相 🦹 (IBC) - Week 3

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怪人二十面相 :supervillain:
Intermediate Book Club
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Week 3 January 17th, 2026
Chapter(s) 5+6+7 池の中 + 樹上の怪人 + 壮二君のゆくえ
Audio version [1] video 3
Previous week Week 2
Next week Week 4

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

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怪人二十面相 :supervillain: (Intermediate Book Club) [ongoing, week 9/15]
怪人二十面相 :supervillain: (Intermediate Book Club) [ongoing, week 9/15]
怪人二十面相 :supervillain: (IBC) - Week 4
怪人二十面相 :supervillain: (IBC) - Week 2
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5 池の中

Hmmm… the thief could have bought himself more time in so many ways. I don’t understand why he didn’t immobilise the dad in some way (like the sleeping pills mentioned in a different theft). Then the father couldn’t have called for help immediately. I need the chapter with the thief’s perspective, maybe he just likes the thrill of cutting things close.

The author is lamenting where is Jun…, I want to think Jun got stuck in the trap and not the thief, but the dog would have cried out and the description was pretty clear about the thief extracting himself from the trap. There is more to unravel with the dog…

So far we have a slightly incomplete observation narration (not omniscient), as if the narrator is telling us what he sees in the gloom.

I love the description of Matuno discovering the thief in the pond. It captures that feeling of discovering something audacious or unlikely, and not quite coming around to believing it, even as more and more evidence confirms it until the very last moment (there’s a mucky hand… surely not… connected… to a mucky person!).

6 樹上の怪人

How will the incomplete observation narrator deal with details we shouldn’t see? Imagine yourself what happened, lol, that is something I haven’t seen yet. I’m imagining the thief somehow knocks Matuno out and disguises himself as the driver, but this stretches belief a bit because the others would surely notice a difference in height, build, facial features, voice, etc. So I’ll imagine he keeps an advanced disguise kit to hand. And what about the real poor Matuno, he’s got to show up soon… and we find out he ended up a tree :joy:

Poor dog got killed, oh no!

And now to find out where the thief went…

7 壮二君のゆくえ

I was not expecting a hostage situation. The full consequences of the trap are now clear. Although to be fair, the thief may have easily found a different excuse to demand additional ‘compensation’. I’m imagining the thief makes the family worry, but meanwhile 壮二君 is fine and doing the 1930s equivalent of playing video games.

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Finished this week’s reading in one go. It truly does feel a lot like a children’s story :smiley: . The actors feel a little stupid at some points. Still no master detective 明智 to be found. Next week’s chapter is called 少年探偵 so I expect some more clever protagonists to make an appearance soon.

5

I was so annoyed by 松野. I nearly tried to slap some sense into him through the pages. How the **** do you not be more careful if you are hunting a master thief and find a bamboo through which “something” breathes -.-…

But I googled 海坊主 and omg is that a cute 妖怪. Definitely now one of my favorites :smiley: . 海坊主 - Wikipedia

6

:sob:
He put the body 3 meters into the tree. Boy must he be strong. It took 4 people to get him back down from there.

I’m somewhat interested in the ethymology of 猿轡ーさるぐつわ. I probably have to look up what it has to do with monkeys.

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I’m not as sure as you are about that. It seems to me the thief is pretty vain and the boy did prevent his perfect crime. I could imagine that he actually locked him up just out of spite.

Reading the letter I 100% expect him to be one of the 3 “associates” he sends to collect the buddha statue.

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4

Embrace the predictably and occasionally odd decisions :sweat_smile:

ch 5

That statue in the article is so fun, nice find!

ch 6

Yes, wondering even with high strength how that worked out. I had been hoping for a hilarious story where the thief somehow tricked him into climbing up himself

ch 7

:eyes: that is an idea, you may be on to something. I need to let go of the gentlemen thief image :sweat_smile: I’ve read pretty tame children’s books up to now, this is my first hostage situation

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Week 3 audiobook report.
Chapter 5 started nicely, I could follow everything. Then a black hole teleported me 10 minutes later and I have no idea of what happened in between. Didn’t understood much after that, due to having lost the context.
Need to build up more on the capacity to focus for a longer period :upside_down_face:

I still can’t forgive that :frowning: :frowning:

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audiobook black hole ch 6

this is all from memory, but I think it’s entirely understandable that there was 10 minutes of what the heck?

I think this would have been hard to follow if it wasn’t fresh in your mind. At the beginning of Ch 6, that’s when the thief just got dragged out of the pond. But the author chose to make a pretty dramatic break in the story telling and basically says you can imagine what happened. Then in continues the story telling following Matuno (the driver), but there are enough clues and if you’re reading it’s probably slow enough that you figure out almost immediately, this is not Matuno, but the thief disguised as Matuno. But in an audiobook… that would be quite a quick jump to make if you missed a couple of words and there is no time to think.

Then after following Matuno and a lot of “back at the residence” decisions with new characters (various police chiefs if I remember right, so another black hole of names and titles), I think that’s when they find the thief (but really Matuno) up the tree. Out of everything we read so far, I’d say that was the hardest chapter from a semi-blind audiobook perspective :joy:

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Week 3

Thanks for the summary!! So I hope I can understand something next week :smiley:
Yeah even though I understand sometimes whole sentences, the details really get lost and it’s too bad for the story. So this is definitely not a “I’m reading the book that way” but more a “this is part of my listening practice”!

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This book moves fast so it’s pretty entertaining, but also the most obvious things keep happening which makes it all feel relatively low stakes.

I do enjoy the writing style though, I like it when the narrator is being cheeky.

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9

I had to rewind several times especially in chapter 6. Starting with the title, I had no idea what じゅじょう could be… then looked at the kanji, and all became clear.

Chapter 7

In my mind, 荘二君 and 明智 somehow ended up the same character. It’s a silly idea, but I kind of expect 荘二君 to escape the thief, solve the case all by himself, then take up the pen name 明智. Setting up the trap felt like he has sixth sense, which could make him be an ideal detective.

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That’s a great idea with 荘二君! :laughing: that would have made a nice origin story

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chapter 7

I also didn’t expect the hostage situation! And also he killed a dog, it is one of the worst crimes you could commit :enraged_face: So at this point I hope they’ll catch him soon!

I thought there would cleaner crimes, but there’s no such a thing as a perfect crime, isn’t it?

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Yeah the dog killing is a good example of what I was talking above: when the author brings up that the dog is mysteriously not taking part in the search, it caught my attention and though it would have some kind of smart resolution.

Then 2 chapters later we learn that the thief just poisoned it ahead of time, so it’s dead.

Ah. Well. Sure.

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Week 4 is live!

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I finally finished Week 3’s reading. I still had to look up a lot of words and until I read the comments for this week, there were some things I didn’t realize I had misunderstood (thank you for posting the comments!).

BUT, I felt like I had a good reading “flow” going for awhile, which was exciting.

Week 3 thoughts

I feel the same way, as I am still imagining someone like Arsene Lupin as the thief, but since he poisoned the dog and then kidnapped Souji-kun, he seems a lot meaner. The narrator did point out at the beginning that Twenty Faces didn’t hurt people, but still, he killed the dog!

And speaking of the dog, I think I read the dog’s name as ジョン so I assumed it was “John.” I thought it was a funny name for a dog and wondered how common it was in Japan… but maybe that wasn’t the dog’s name?

I wouldn’t be surprised!

The phrase I liked learning was 袋のねずみ which is translated as “trapped with no way of escape” or “cornered” It’s easy to imagine a rat or mouse caught in a bag. This was used to describe Twenty Faces predicament when he was trapped inside the garden walls and his pursuers were coming at him from all directions.

It took me a long time to figure out what 節のない竹切れ meant. I only know the kanji 節 to mean “season.” But after googling, I learned that it means a piece of bamboo that has no knots in it. A bamboo tube with no knots would be necessary if Twenty Faces planned on breathing through it.

I was also curious about why a monkey had anything to do with a gag. But at jisho.org 猿 （さる）has a number of definitions, including 4. sliding wooden bolt (for holding a door or window shut) So maybe it’s the device and not the animal that’s connected to this word? :thinking:

[…inevitably, my answer only created another question, which is “why is a sliding wooden bolt called a monkey??” I ran back to google and found an explanation where the old wooden sliding doors would have a bolt that would slide shut, locking the door. The wooden bolt mechanism kind of hangs onto the door face and apparently resembles a monkey for that reason. Here is a video of the sliding door bolt … kind of looks like a monkey?

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Such a nice feeling! :blush:

week 3 discussion

Ooh that’s probably what made that image get stuck in my mind, too

I read it as ジュン but I checked, you’re right it’s ジョン! No idea, searching for ジョン 犬 is entertaining, there is a performer who dresses up as a dog to sing :sweat_smile:

That’s so tough when you have a strong meaning that is totally on another plane. I got lucky on that one and had come across it in the context of bamboo nodes (with pictures) in the first survival escape book club (jungle theme) a while ago. Jungles have bamboo, which was news to me. In that context (survival, looking for clean water), the book explained how the nodes could be helpful for finding rain water trapped in bamboo. So in this book that helped to instantly understand if you want to breathe through it you don’t want nodes/ knots

:joy: nice rabbit hole, I love it when people post these things. It’s pretty funny to go from gag to monkey to wooden door latch video. It looks like a pain…

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That survival escape book club would have saved me so much time figuring out what that meant. I had this idea that it was some variety of bamboo that has no season, like, it grows in all seasons :sweat_smile:

Ha! I did the same thing- searched for ジョン犬 and surprisingly I learned that the famous dog Hachiko (immortalized at Shibuya station) lived with two other dogs, one of which was an English Pointer named John :grinning_face:

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I find that the most general idea behind this kanji is an “inflection point”, that is a point where something that was constant until now becomes something else. The opposite of まま basically. A node, a joint, a knot, an occasion, an opportunity. Even the seasonal aspect can be tied to this I guess.

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This explanation makes it so clear to me now, why 節 can be used for both season and knots. Thank you @simias !

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By the way according to the Wiktionary the bamboo meaning (as used here in the novel) was the original meaning, the rest grew from there:

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 / 形声, OC *ʔsiːɡ): semantic ⺮ (“bamboo”) + phonetic 即 (OC *ʔsɯɡ). It represents the “node” of bamboo, and by extension, signifies a segment or boundary.

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The bamboo radical in 節 is a big clue (i missed) that the “node/joint” was the original definition, and it evolved to other figurative knots or inflection points like seasons.

Interesting etymology, although I don’t quite understand the role of the radical 即 . from the link it seems that 即 has a phonetic role (in Chinese…?). this is very unfamiliar territory for me, although i would love to learn more about how pictographs became kanji. The Naxi people in China still maintain a pictograph writing system Dongba, which is still used by some poets/authors. It is beautiful.

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