If 40-50 pages a week is OK we could roll the prologue and chapter 1 into one week, and chapter 9 and the ending into one week, and otherwise do a chapter a week ? Or I can look for split points, eg in chapter 8 which is the longest.
Combining the prologue and ch1 as well as ch9 and the ending sounds good to me.
We’ve had crazy long chapters before, and this time there’s a lot of shorter weeks as well, so I don’t think it’ll be necessary to further split even chapter 8… That said, if anyone would like to do that, I’m certainly not against it!
I’ve been enjoying taking notes on books with complicated setups lately, to the point that I’d give it a shot on the next suitable book I read in English. It’s just fun to keep track of the information provided and know that you’ve got it in your back pocket if you need it or don’t pick the book back up again until later than you were expecting.
Youtube has the appropriate soundtrack to read along to:
Prologue thoughts:
I do like a good deathbed scene. I wonder if the story is going to play out before the will is read, or after? That “in a year, if the guy doesn’t get back from Burma” is a good long time to leave everybody stewing…
I think the author has started a paragraph with それはさておき seven times in the first 35 pages…
Also I did not know that 溺れる has a wider meaning than English ‘to drown’, encompassing also struggling in the water but surviving.
EDIT to add Chapter 1 thoughts since the forum doesn’t allow four consecutive posts:
Yokomizo clearly liked that “killer puts a single poisoned item into a boxful of things” trick from 8 Graves, because he’s recycled it here.
Overall I liked this chapter as an opening to the book – it’s set up the scenario, we had a bit of action with the boat scene, one murder already, and soon we’ll get to find out exactly what kind of daft scheme the old man put into his will…
I wonder if maybe that’s an edition difference? In my notes for the (whole) prologue I believe I put the kana for all the characters that got furigana on my first usage in my edition, and only those characters, and it seems like that was most of them. so it’d be interesting if yours was missing some of them. (my edition is the physical one with the bland big kanji cover)
I’m enjoying it! There’s a couple aesthetic elements (not related to the details of the mystery) about this book that I’ve absorbed from things like movie posters and references and so far they haven’t shown up directly but I’m enjoying an odd kind of foreshadowing. I expect they’ll make me excitedly go “出た!”
I’m curious to read more since it sounds like we’re going to hear the details of the will. I wonder if there’s more strange murder-inducing clauses in there… it seems like it would be too straightforward if it all goes to Tamayo when uh, the sisters seem more set up for a sequence of murders…
Yokomizo is really hamming up how awful, terrible, horrible this will is, but it worked for me – it felt like a suspenseful chapter despite it basically being the reading of a will and some other background info. The conditions set up some convoluted incentives for everybody.
The masked guy is super-suspicious; my theory is he’s actually the mysterious Shizuma. (Didn’t Yokomizo do “somebody comes back from the war but is unrecognizeable” in another book too?)
Actually I got overwhelmed reading four books at a time, which made February my least productive reading month in recent memory. I think I need to focus on finishing one or two of my other books first to get my motivation level back up. Maybe I’ll try to catch up at some point if I get a chance though.
Took me a bit to get rolling but I finished the Prologue and Chapter 1. I like it so far. It looks like Kindaichi will actually have an active role this time around .
Yeah, the book is kinda weird/interesting so far, it’s extraordinarily tropey, but it’s addressing them head-on rather than acting coy. Specifically, immediately suspecting Tamayo of faking the attacks on herself and theorizing that Saruzou is Shizuma. Those seem like the most reasonable options, but since they’ve been brought up they can’t be right, right…? Anyway, comparing Sukekiyo’s handprint obviously can’t go smoothly. The possibility of Shizuma being Sukekiyo might come up when they explore that…
(Started now, though) Kind of interesting how half the names don’t have kana
