犬神家の一族(金田一耕助 Reading Club)

Chapter 2 notes

Funny thing, 菊’s one word I quickly found myself opting for writing the Japanese each time…

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Incidentally, do we know/have a good guess at the pronunciation of 猿蔵’s name? I think he’s about the only character who didn’t get furigana at point of first use. I have been going with えんぞう

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I wasn’t 100% sure either but was leaning towards something with さる in it since it would feel meaner.
I checked the cast of characters on the wikipedia page for the book and it’s lists it as さるぞう.

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Your drawing of Suketake is perfection

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This possibility seemed way too easy, so I’m glad they eliminated it right away (even if the explanation was a bit mean…)

Chapter 2: We don’t really have a non-Kindaichi protagonist this time around, so I’m not sure where the story is going to go. I like it so far though.

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Chapter 3 thoughts:

There’s a line in this chapter that makes me think Yokomizo doesn’t understand his own scenario, about how much old Inugami doted on Tamayo:
佐兵衛翁の遺言状を見ても、亡くなった翁が、いかに珠世を愛していたかわかるのである。
That will is not something you write if you’re fond of Tamayo! Who would drop somebody they cared about into that position of being forced to choose to marry one of three dudes the old guy obviously felt were useless or else give up any inheritance and be left penniless, and where suddenly half a dozen people have a strong motive to murder you? No, if the old man loved her he’d have left her 20% of the cash no strings attached, or something similar.

Prediction 1: all 3 of Tamayo’s husband-candidates are going to die, in symbolic ways that line up with 斧琴菊 – this one being 菊.

Prediction 2: (I was pretty confident about this one right up to the last sentence of the chapter :-)) Sukekiyo will continue to act very suspiciously and refuse to prove his identity, up until he dies, at which point they’ll take a handprint from the corpse and it will turn out he was the real son all along…

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Orrrr you love someone but you’re a horrible person and hate everyone else in your family more than you love them
Honestly I feel like Yokomizo just writes really awful characters. I don’t know if he himself was a skeeve or if he just wrote that way, but ever since 夜歩く I’ve been side-eyeing him hard. Like here, the cousins presumably want to win over Tamayo, so Suketake decides to rape her??? You can’t just not rape the person who can decide your future???

Also, Tamayo called Saruzou “あれ” (twice!), right? That’s super-duper rude and condescending, isn’t it? Or is there a not-quite-as-bad use case that I’m not aware of?

The end of the chapter also kinda throws a monkey wrench into this, but idea I had on the Sukekiyo question is that Matsuko and/or Sukekiyo is the killer, Sukekiyo is real, but they are intentionally acting suspicious so everyone thinks that Sukekiyo is an imposter, and then when Suketake and Suketomo die and Sukekiyo doesn’t everyone thinks it’s because Sukekiyo is an imposter rather than because Matsuko/Sukekiyo is the killer

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Mmm, it definitely sounded that way to me, but on the other hand nuances of pronouns is definitely something that can shift over 75 years, so maybe if you were an upper class person who grew up pre-WW2 it wasn’t quite the same implication?

Amusingly, Daijisen says あれ can be a 1st, 2nd or 3rd person pronoun…

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Chapter 3 Notes


The 菊畑 scene makes me feel better about the overly self-indulgent extra fancy ~ultra HD~ copy of the Kon Ichikawa movie adaptation of this I bought… I bet it’d look real good!

For me personally, about the characterizations, I’d say with Kindaichi we’re pretty firmly in Columbo territory where it’s a lot of “humble unassuming detective unravels the schemes of various unsympathetic rich people,” and so the noble families in question being extraordinarily dysfunctional is a lot of the fun/point I think.

Everyone in the story I think unanimously agrees the old man’s choice of will was extraordinarily mean-spirited and disastrous, and I suppose we’ll see whether that’s simply because he was a controlling industrialist who thought he could force his preferred inheritance scheme on his surrogate daughter and brush away any chance of disagreement (which does seem in character to me), or if there was some deeper motivation.
And the 展望台 scene seems to me like one we may learn more about later, with the way the reported timelines were so established… I don’t feel like I’m ready to take anyone’s described actions or motivations at face value yet. Handing over the watch in the middle of the night when he’d only be able to check it with the lawyer the next day also seems strange. As described, it doesn’t seem like an interaction that would have to take place secretly at night (unless she was covering for something else and had to describe it that way because they found her brooch).

Everybody is so intensely condescending of 猿蔵 (to the point of his real name being forgotten) that I would imagine that’s going to come to some kind of head too. It seems to me at least like a potential flag that 珠世 isn’t any less cruel than the others (along with how it’s been underlined a couple of times that Kindaichi is having to be careful to not underestimate her).

I suppose all that’s only speculation though!

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Nothing I particularly wanted to say about chapter 4 except that the overused phrase of the chapter is 大きく目を見はった :wink:

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I meant to post a short update á la ‘Finally started the book, woop’ when I finished chapter 1… But then all the spoilers seemed too fun! So here I am a couple days later, fresh of chapter 2. I’ll try to catch up over the weekend, but here’s my impressions so far!

I’m really having a lot of fun. I’m not sure if it’s the longer break we had in between or if the tone of the writing is different, but it feels kind of lighthearted somehow and very smooth to read.

My pet theory: 猿蔵 is 静馬. 菊乃 is really 翁 and 春世’s kid that she gave birth to while she was away from the shrine for a couple years. The flowers are important to the shrine, and the 犬神家. It makes sense she’d name her after them. So when the 翁 and 菊乃 had a kid, being so closely related, it resulted in a somewhat slow kid that didn’t inherit his parents’ beauty. Now 猿蔵 and 珠世 are working together to get the 財産. :eyes::eyes:

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And the book continues to revel in tropes in chapter 4. Well, except for doing to opposite of a headless corpse. Obviously the fingerprints were going to come back as a match–otherwise Matsuko wouldn’t have allowed it. But I wonder if there’s some trick that they played there? (And that’s why Sukekiyo wiped off his fingerprints from the desk in that scene of him alone, since ‘normally’ his fingerprints won’t/wouldn’t match.)

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I was wondering if there could somehow be two people with masks, one Sukekiyo and one not. It would be pretty tricky to have an extra person hidden in the house, though…

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Chapter 4 Notes

I was speculating maybe the hypothetical extra person isn’t in the house, but the guy at the inn, and there’s been a switch or two between them. I guess I don’t know if that squares with the address given and 松子’s reaction to it though… Maybe she isn’t as in on whatever scheme 佐清 is pulling as it seems like she would be?
It does seem potentially relevant anyway that we’ve seen that 佐清 is really disfigured, and that he presumably has the same handprint as past 佐清, but we haven’t seen those things confirmed at the same time.

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Hello everyone!

This is my first book club and pretty much the first forum posting to on WaniKani, aside from the JLPT Results thread.

I wanted to jump straight in with the cool kids in the advanced reading club.

I’ll try reading 20 pages a day in hopes of catching up. I hope we all get along!

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Welcome, and I hope you enjoy the book – I’m liking it a lot so far.

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This is the first time I’ve been apart of anything like this, so I’m not entirely sure what to say but I’m up to page 30.

I’ve seen someone mention it before, but I’ve also noticed the author seems to have a liking for “さておき”. Seriously, he loves that phrase… Also, I like that the author occasionally substitutes 水 for 潮 at certain points in chapter 1, such as 潮底 and 潮心. At least, I assume that’s what he’s doing, it reminds me of Ginga no Tetsudou no Yoru, where the author would often substitute 大 for 巨. I don’t know, I guess weird, off the cuff Kanji usage is cool to me.
Speaking of, Ginga is literally the only other Japanese novel that I’ve read, so I’m glad to see there aren’t any page spanning sentences in this novel so far!

That’s all for my thoughts up to now! I hope I did all right!

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Welcome!! Hope you enjoy!

My recollection is that in those instances he was using 湖, not 潮 (since everything takes place around a lake)

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Right you are! I’ve seen 潮水 before in Ginga so my brain must have automatically gone to that Kanji.

Slightly embarrassing, but thank you for correcting me! Being a part of the book club is already showing its merits, aha

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Chapter five:

Well, Suketake has revealed his true colours; I trust he will turn out to have received his comeuppance in the next chapter. (If so, that will be two dudes in a row who’ve attempted to assault Tamayo and ended up dead.)

I think I tend to subconsciously expect that these books follow Kindaichi’s point of view, so that we see the clues he does and solve the mystery along with him, so sections like the one at the end of the book that show us events that Kindaichi doesn’t get to know about catch me by surprise…

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