死仮面(金田一耕助 Reading Club)

Part 2:

  • Seems too obvious for 慎吾 to be the mystery man.
  • We don’t directly see the mystery man actually hurt anybody, do we? :thinking:
  • Could it be 圭介 after all? And the man who disappears in the house is someone else who was hiding there and doesn’t want to be found? The two stranglings could have happened before the fight in the window…
  • The opening narration/confession from 慎吾 is definitely missing something important.

I had the same thought about the ink, though for now I’m assuming that it was just some artistic license.

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I definitely feel like 圭介 and 里枝 are the most suspicious acting people at this point, their behavior just keeps coming off oddly stilted to me.
But I’m also at the point when I trust no one except perhaps 澄子 :joy:

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I finished the main story :sunglasses:

  • It was a fun read overall. I think the shorter length helped the pacing a lot.
  • This and 八つ墓村 both had interesting backstories, but they felt underused to me. In this case, the intro had this weird vibe, but ultimately it was just… made up. I was also hoping the death masks would feature more.
  • It’s weird how the will-reading scene completely gave away the villains.
  • Keisuke making… sounds… on his own is a funny thought. Kimiko face-planting into some wet cement is pretty good (unintentional) slapstick too.
  • Some solid guesses in this thread :+1:
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I just finished the main story this evening as well!

Right?! I was reading that like, “no, but seriously? she just…fell there and left a mark and they just left it?”

The ending felt a little too…inspirational for me? Also 澄子 finding out her mom was a murderer and so was her half-aunt and being told, “You’ll make this school proud again!” was er, hard to swallow. There is something truly ridiculous about this writing style, but I still like it :joy:

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Sounds like a great setup for a manga though. A young girl, rebuilding the honor of a school she owns while simultaneously attending it, solving crazy mysteries, and consulting with a famous detective :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I was waiting for the reveal that it was Sumiko all along, somehow…

It also felt weird how so much was from Sumiko’s view where Natsuyo was this kind, intelligent, beautiful, efficient, effective headmistresses (also a congresswoman, right? I didn’t misread/misunderstand that part, right?? B/c I thought she was supposed to be a congresswoman and then it just was all about her being the headmistress of some random school) that was also Sumiko’s loving, generous surrogate parent… all the while we have this backstory that Natsuyo horrifically abused (and, as it turns out, killed) her half-sister.

It was… fine I guess? Felt almost like a redux of 夜歩く with all the mentions of limps and sleepwalking. Also now the abused women were being abused by other women instead of by men so… progress?

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I don’t remember the congress bit at all :thinking: I may have just blanked on it. I can totally see myself glazing over when any government talk comes up.

Also strong agree on 澄子’s love for a woman who was honestly pretty terrible was kind of hard to read. I think if they’d addressed the conflicting emotions it could have been pretty deep, but it was kind of hand waved off as ‘but then she was killed in turn by her other half sister so we should be sad for her. also she maybe was remorseful for killing 君子 based on her obsessive sleepwalking’. :roll_eyes:

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Page 32 of my paperback says 参議院に出ております. I’m not 100% sure if that means she was a member, or something else.

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I have an ebook so did a quick search.


“川島夏代といえば、ひょっとすると、あの参議院議員の……?」
「そうなんです。私もはじめは同姓異人ではないかと思っていたが、所番地もちゃんとあっているんです。いったい、マーケットの奥で死んだ女、殺人犯のキャバレーの踊り子と、あの有名な婦人とのあいだに、どのような関係があるのかと思ってね”

and later

“参議院議員で有名な女流教育家、川島女子学園の経営者で、婦人雑誌などの有力な寄稿家、手八丁口八丁といわれる女丈夫”

So I guess she is/was! It seems like just another thing thrown in to indicate to us how awe-inspiring and wonderful this abusive murderer was :joy:

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A few more random thoughts:

  • It felt weird to me that Keisuke’s and Rie’s trips weren’t mentioned until the very end. “Yes they had jobs that required them to live at this school. But they also just happened to be on trips away during the important bits that we decided weren’t worth mentioning until after the fact.”
  • Why did Natsuyo react so strongly to the bust? I know Kimiko’s corpse was stashed inside the base, but… when Natsuyo hid Kimiko’s corpse, she knew it was the bust’s base, didn’t she? So why did she act so shocked when it was then used as the bust’s base? Maybe it was just for the book to be dramatic and b/c it served as a constant reminder of he guilt but still feels weird.
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I liked this story:

it had some fun scenes in it and I liked the interactions between Kindaichi and Sumiko. But I agree there are some kinda dubious bits of plotting too…

For instance it seems like the villains’ plans depended really heavily on Keisuke’s acting ability - letting the police arrest you in order to spin them a yarn is a massive risk. What if they pressure a confession out of you, or even are just less lax in their security and don’t give you a chance to escape? Going back and forth between Okayama and some conference is one thing, being in a cell when you should be at school is quite another.

I totally blanked on the “congresswoman” bit too! I was totally thinking “surely you misread something” until @pocketcat brought out the quotes…

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Some recent life changes resulting in a shift in priorities meant I didn’t actually start this book until this week - so now I’ll have to catch up with you guys. (As usual, almost.) I look forward to finally getting to read your comments! :slight_smile:

:high_touch:

I finished the 1st weeks part this morning. I agree that the writing feels relatively easy! I’m never too sure if it’s just a change in my perception or if the writing is really that different, but I’m thinking it might make sense to have the difficulty level for this series be by book instead of series on natively after all… I think that could be something to discuss after finishing the whole book, possibly.

Aside from that: Difficult family relationships :heavy_check_mark: suspicious person with a visible ‘disability’ somehow making them more suspicious :heavy_check_mark: - this reminds me of the article @NicoleIsEnough shared in the 人間椅子 thread:

金田一 being もじゃもじゃ :heavy_check_mark:
磯川警部 being a somewhat useful deliverer of information :heavy_check_mark:
Yeah, feels like a 金田一 for sure. :grin:

I don’t know about that… but at least it acknowledges that women can be the aggressor too. :see_no_evil: Though I feel like that has been an often used theme in these books anyway.

On to the rest - if I’m lucky, I just might be able to finish this story with you all at the end of the week! :muscle:

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Yeah, that’s a good call out. I haven’t read any of the other books, but when I saw the 39 on Natively I expected this to be much harder, but it was pretty straight forward writing with a handful of old/unusual words. It remains to be seen how the short story at the end will shake out, but so far I feel like the high rating could be turning away people who are completely capable of reading it.

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I think the setting makes a big difference. E.g. 八つ墓村 was difficult because of the historical background, descriptions of village life, and some tricky dialect stuff - but this book didn’t have any of that.

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I finished the main story today! :partying_face:

It was fun to read one of these ‘in one piece’ (that is, without switching between different books) for a change! I agree that the pacing was helped along by the shorter length. And also just the much less detailed family history and lack of substantial village school politics - and maybe also the general writing style? - made it much smoother to read. Also it feels like we had lots of dialogue, and not much monologuing or descriptions. :thinking:

All in all - I agree that the villain reveal was a bit of a let down, and some of the clues could have been shared with us earlier. But 横溝 has always been not so much about fair play and more about atmospheric family doom. :grin:

But other than that, a very fun read for me. I liked the interactions! And just 金田一 had a lot of screentime, that was nice too.

I’m glad we read this, and am looking forward to the 2nd story as well, for all that it’s not part of this series. Imo the title is quite intriguing!

… before I get into that, I should really catch up with my other bookclubs, though!

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I just finished the main story as well!

This one was a fun read, something which I wouldn’t necessarily say about 八つ墓村, which was longer and more difficult to get through. I agree that the interactions between 金田一 and 澄子 were the highlight. 横溝 puts in more significant female characters than I would expect from a mystery writer of the era, and 澄子 is one of the best so far.

I got hints of 殺人鬼 from the way the story unfolded (especially the part where 澄子 was being chased by the killer), but this was a more effective story overall. Even though the ending contained some pretty big leaps in logic, overall it was easier for me to swallow than the conclusions of 殺人鬼 or 夜歩く. All in all, I would say that 死仮面 is the best of the shorter 金田一 stories so far.

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I started in on the short story and I think I’ve look up more words in the past ~10 pages than I did for the entire rest of the book :exploding_head:

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Well, it appears to basically just be a list of random birds and trees, so… not surprising

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Also words I should probably know, but do not. And a truly helpful dictionary :joy:

Wow, such definition. Much words.

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I’ve been neglecting this book club! so I just went ahead and read the entire book in the last couple of days.

About 死仮面

I felt pretty mild about it! I think the most interesting elements were the girls’ academy setting and the contrast between the prestigious front and the Yokomizo-y family backstory, and stuff like the chase in the dark. It kinda makes me want to see a version where Yokomizo completely leans into that and makes like, a YA adventure mystery with a plucky girl detective protagonist or something where that stuff could be really leaned into. I was reading pretty quickly and wasn’t intensely invested in the mystery, so “it’s probably somehow the guy covered in ink pointedly explaining why he’s covered in ink, right after the culprit got covered in ink” was about the level my mystery-reading brain was operating at :sweat_smile:
Kindaichi’s turning more and more into a pleasant and unassuming mystery-solving dandruff-sprite every day…


About 上海氏の蒐集品 (the whole thing including next week's reading)

I thought this one was significantly more interesting! The prose style seemed like it was going for it a little bit more, and I even kinda liked the bird and tree listing (but I mean I liked the fish scene in Panorama Island… if you like scenes that are just vocabulary lists, hoo boy! There’s a scene for you). I like also how this one connects at lot with the specific time period and post-war construction going up.
Story-wise it reminded me of Drive? or maybe Oldboy? That kind of like… “troubled loner protagonist feels protectiveness towards a young woman he barely knows, ending in violence” type of plot I associate with noir-ish recent movies like that. It’s not… my favorite kind of story in the world, by a longshot. But I think this executes it okay and was an interesting change of pace for this uh, Kindaichi club.

The thing at the very very end is more than a little contrived and predictable, but hey! It’s all in good fun, and the tidiness of that detail offsets the bleakness of the ending otherwise, in a way.

Looking forward to Inugami time at last soon :eyes:

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