How about a riddle? (reuploaded)

[sirtafeb]

<this message was redacted due to OP’s incompetence>

Now transmitting…

There is a japanese magazine. It’s about some japanese local scooby-dooby-tectives, who solve mysteries and such. The certain edition I’m holding in hands is “PUZZLE NOTE - mystery of lost terminal station” and it’s dated by 10 of may 2015. Doesn’t matter how I got it.

It is published by NIKOLI, which is btw a nice puzzle-publisher with a site http://nikoli.co.jp/ and great range of puzzle-magazines solved. Like, really good stuff. What’s a real mystery, there is no signs of “puzzle note” magazine on the site, so you all get no copy (and I get no other issues, which also exist).

Never the less, two years later I bought it and then threw a provocative question here:

This is Q19 (meaning Question 19) of the ones encountered by our heroes. As other questions were mostly as simple as sudokus and such, I SUGGESTED that this one can be solved without additional data. And I was mistaken, woe is me.

As soon as I realised I have failed my fellow wanikanians, I rushed-rushed over the mountains into the long forgotten archives of nikoli publishing, where, under the cloak of the night, I would find an answer to the riddle. And there it was…

But what a bad luck - the answer was corrupted! Nothing left to read, but for some relation to other pages and… food, probably? I belive I know that kanji already. Yet still… so much destroyed.

So I am here to present you page 20, which probably would make this puzzle incredibly easy. Or at least solvable. I don’t know, I didn’t have time to actually solve it and I have 200 hanging review as of now.

If you needed the lore - Takuto is the black-haired (actually blue-haired), Mikio is grey-haired (actually green-haired for anime reasons), both boy-detectives. There are two more. Princess is probably the girl offscreen and she appeared appr. at Q8. With the hedgehog.

That seems to be it. Common plot - they are taken to a challenge by mysterious railroad workers and they travel with style searching for the terminal station. After Q5 they found their first stop and get breakfast to celebrate.

Now I believe I answered all the questions you had in the comments and I open the riddling section. Please scroll down. If there will be doubts after you get an answer I shall clear it asap. Wishing you some 幸運.

[BobaGakusei]

I wasn’t able to solve this puzzle. It might require more Japanese language knowledge.

Some ideas I had

？に入る言葉を当てろ。
Guess the word that fills in the ?.

リンゴ ネギ ＝ ヤマ
むぎ アユ ＝ ハンコ
トマト ウシ ＝ ？

apple onion = mountain
wheat ayu (a type of sweetfish) = hanko (Japanese signature stamps/seals)
tomato cow = ?

I have no idea how these concepts are related.

Another concern I have is that wheat (むぎ) is using hiragana while everything else is katakana.

[Kyasurin]

I can’t add anything to what BobaGakusei said about this riddle, but I would love to help translate stuff if you post it other parts of the magazine page by page.

Edit: Maybe it is some form of goroawase? Check this out if you’ve not see it before.

Goroawase: Japanese Numbers Wordplay

[Belthazar]

That’s a good idea, but I don’t think it’s goroawase. り isn’t really a goroawase syllable. ね certainly isn’t.

I’ve got nothing other than that, though…

[Timelinker]

I spent more than half an hour trying to solve this… I still have no clue

[Leebo]

I briefly showed it to a Japanese person who had no clue.

[Naphthalene]

Was there any other hint in the book?

[rmizuno]

Yeah, I spent way too much time on this. I also showed it to a Japanese person who had no clue.

I also tried searching a bit on google, but to no avail.

[sirtafeb]

I certainly hope I didn’t cover something incredibly important here. But I don’t remember there being any additional data, and I’ll have the magazine with me around tomorrow - will probably take photos of adjacent page, that usually contains plot.

Actually, there are solution pages in the magazine, BUT I restrained them with scotch-tape not to see them unintentionally.

[Syphus]

Is there even perhaps some kind of explanation or name of the puzzle? Also what’s the name of the Magazine?

I’m trying to see a pattern here but Hanko is really tripping me up

[kelth]

Do you see a connection between the other things?

[Gsai]

@kelth

Do you see a connection between the other things?

Fruits and vegetables? Edible things?

[rodrigowaick]

@Gsai

Fruits and vegetables? Edible things?

I guess a cow is technically edible, but considering it a vegetable is a stretch.

[rmizuno]

I was thinking it could be color related, apples, green onions, and mountains, are all, or could be green.

sweetfish eggs are red, as well as hanko and tomato, but cow really throws this off. what color is cow? white? brown? black? also don’t know how wheat fits in. anyway, I think I’m just running out of ideas =P

[Belthazar]

Yeah, I’m pretty much completely grasping at straws. I think you’re going to have to put us out of our mercy and crack the answer section - though you were gonna have to do that anyway, even if we’d been able to work it out. (Though, my money is the answer is just going to be the word without explanation, leaving us even more confused.)

I’ve been looking at the positions of those words on a kana chart, both iroha and gojuon, the kanji that make up the words (though of course トマト doesn’t have any kanji), even the position on the map of towns with those names, and I’ve got nothing. It occurred to me that “Fuji” is a variety of both リンゴ and ヤマ, but I can’t fit ネギ into that, and nothing similar is coming to mind for the second line.

[TamanegiNoKame]

apple onion - mountain ringo-hayashi-ya tamanegi-ma (林 is the rin of ringo- alt reading hayashi.)

wheat sweetfish - seal mugi-mugiko-ko ayu-???

tomato cow/beef - ???

Ok not sure if this makes sense, but this is my thoughts so far. I am stuck on ayu though.

So my guessed pattern would be,

1. add extra part to beginning or end of one of the words to make another common word.

ex. negi → tamanegi mugi-> mugiko
2. find alt reading of kanji of other word.
ringo-林檎-alt reading of 林 is はやし
3. Pluck the reading out for the last one somehow.
Tamanegi and hayashi–> the second sound of both is ya and ma-yama
mugiko gives you the ko, but not sure how to get the han from ayu…

But I cannot find an alt for Ayu so maybe I am just making up things

[Belthazar]

That, and it fails a little in that there’s nothing unique about the changes you made. I could just as easily go ネギ → 長ネギ, and then pick the first syllable in each and form はな.

トマト + うし = とし

[kelth]

Does it have something to do with that faint railway map and the destinations that would be on it?

[BobaGakusei]

I thought it might be related, but I think it’s more likely that the map is for the next page’s puzzle.

[sillysushi]

Could the answer be right inside the magazine itself?

Maybe there’s a page about ヤマ and the words リンゴ and アユ are in that page too. Same case with the second line.