The book starts to get easier to read but still has a lot of hard stuff into it.
This week spoiler
In the second chapter he found a second 琴柱 or koto bridge, right? Like the string they found did not match the first koto? I want to be sure I got it right.
Also is it me or 金田一耕助 is stuttering a bit?
Last question, what was the thing with the rain shutter? He messed the room so his print would be hard to find but they found some in the bathroom window shutter, right? In the second chapter again. They found where he entered from and also the bamboo hiding spot. The plot thicken
My favorite phrase this week is 無闇矢鱈 (end of 猫の墓 chapter), which the built-in Bing Translate on my Kindle app calls “indiscrent cod”! (: I guess 当て字 can be challenging for the computer …
As I understood it, 金田一 inspected the 琴柱 still ok the 琴, and noticed that there was one that didn’t have the pattern engraved onto it like the rest did. So it’s been exchanged after production, possibly related to the crime, that’s still unclear. Notably, the 琴柱 found in the pile of leaves outside did have the engravings.
Yeah, 金田一 stutters (mostly when he gets excited, the way it’s written). Thus has been mentioned in the text as well, it’s what 吃る means.
The room was messy, but I don’t think they talked about that being related to the prints being found late. Rather, the color of the blood blends into the already read painted walls (or, everything, apparently), and the prints around the door (or shutters?) weren’t visible while it was open.
I’ve another question: before I get into researching the state of the economy and inflation and what have you, maybe someone already knows roughly how much 五千円 would have been worth at the time? It’s how much 銀造 gives 金田一.
There might have been more but I don’t remember. In any case, Thanks for all the book recommendations, 横溝先生.
I didn’t already know but I’m a sucker for trying to figure out a little… The book is set in 1937, and if Wikipedia is to be believed:
Following the silver devaluation of 1873, the yen devalued against the U.S. dollar and the Canadian dollar (since those two countries adhered to a gold standard), and by 1897 the yen was worth only about US$0.50. In that year, Japan adopted a gold exchange standard and hence froze the value of the yen at $0.50.[16] This exchange rate remained in place until Japan left the gold standard in December 1931, after which the yen fell to $0.30 by July 1932 and to $0.20 by 1933.[17] It remained steady at around $0.30 until the start of the Pacific War on December 7, 1941, at which time it fell to $0.23.[18]
So I suppose 5000 * .3 = 1500 1937 dollars = (apparently) ~$29,000 today (or converting back ~3,300,000 yen) (which seems like a lot, huh!)
Definitely a lot more money than what it sounds like today, at least!
(As for the time of the book’s writing, it was coming out in 1946, and sources I can find quickly suggest that that post-war time the yen was either just “unstable” and/or going through inflation at an exchange rate of 50:1 on its way to 360:1 fixed by the occupying American government in 1949)
