💧 Final Week | 水車館の殺人 🩸 | Mystery Book Club

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Welcome to the reading club for 水車館の殺人!

水車館の殺人

Home Thread | week 7

Reading Schedule

Week Chapter(s) (MT) Page Range (MT) Total # Pages (cat) Total # Pages
Week 8 第十四章 355-420 66 50

Discussion Guidelines

  • Spoilers should always be hidden using spoiler blur.
  • When discussing a specific section, please mention where you are in the book, ideally by chapter so people reading different versions have a clear point of reference.
  • Feel free to read ahead if it’s exciting, but please refrain from spoiling ahead of the appropriate week.
  • If you have a question about grammar, vocab, cultural things, etc - ask! That’s a welcome part of the discussion too, and other readers will be happy to help.
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Loved the twist, felt very vindicated about Yurie being involved, thought the ending with the painting was overly dramatic and kind of hilarious, but out of everything the point that caught my attention was Masaki being careful to shower in cold water so the blood wouldn’t clog the drain?! I was like, are the proteins in blood like the proteins in eggs? Will you get scrambled blood?
Anyways, much like the previous book in this series where I googled poison facts for you all, I went and googled “does hot water make blood curdle?” and “does hot water cause blood to coagulate?” and best I can tell the answer is ‘no, probably not’. Obviously not a commonly asked question, and so the best answer I could find was from instructions on making blood pudding and you had to let the blood sit for a bit (which did the initial coagulating) and then add salt as you heat it slowly - not rinse it straight down a drain.

So all this to say Masaki could have taken a warm shower.

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Well, I was right about Masaki and that there was a reason why the “past” and “present” chapters handled wheelchair guy differently, but I missed a lot of the rest of it. Reading through I did think that mostly the author gave us fair chances, so if I’d cared to think through the consequences of “Masaki did it” then I could probably have deduced some of the other parts of the answer.

Overall, though, I found this book was a bit too concentrated on the “puzzle box” aspect of mysteries. The characters mostly felt like they were there to move around on a game board in carefully set patterns, and most of them were paper thin. I know that the 解説 says that partly the 新本格 movement is about atmosphere and aesthetics and so having an implausible cast locked in a mysterious mansion on a stormy night is a deliberate choice, but even so I think there could have been a touch more three dimensionality here. For instance the Kindaichi mysteries are full of rather implausible setups, but the characters are nonetheless convincing and the setting is also tied to a particular time and place, not totally unmoored from reality like this one.

I didn’t dislike the book (it was usually the club pick I turned to first, and it definitely beats 理由 for being an interesting read), but I probably won’t read anything else by this author – it seems like we just don’t have that much in common in what we think is the best part of a mystery story.

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Ngl, I was a bit amused that my random guess - based purely on previously encountered tropes - that it’s the dude in the wheelchair and he is not actually disabled, came true. :rofl:

:scream: that surprises me… granted I haven’t read the latest chapters for the BC yet, but I am in the opposite camp. :see_no_evil:

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It surprises me too, since I generally like Miyabe’s books, but I’m finding the structure she’s chosen for this one means it just drags on so slowly and never gets to the point. Without the club pace to keep me moving forwards I think I’d probably have stopped partway through again.

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I figured some of it out, but there was still a twist to surprise me. The clues were there, if I had cared more about solving the mystery myself I probably could have.

The characters were on the weaker side. For the longest time 大石, 森, and 三田村 were practically the same character to me. 正木 only really got distinguished because of his “death”, if I hadn’t known about that I probably wouldn’t have suspected him :joy:
I think I would have liked the story more if I could have told the characters apart based on their personality traits and not just their job or what happens to them. I didn’t really care for any of them in the end, so it didn’t matter to me who lived and who died.

The motive was a bit disappointing. 正木 dismembered someone, you’d think it would be a bit more personal.

Overall, while I did enjoy the book, I’m not in a hurry to read more of the series.

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Oh really? To me one was the bumbling sleazy businessman, one was a nervous old man, and one wad a handsome but slightly :sparkles: questionable :sparkles: doctor. I had the whole cast all pictured in my head :sweat_smile:

I think I’m probably the only person in the club who is gonna keep reading this series :rofl: I heard the one about the clock tower (I think? I’d know it by the cover) is particularly good.

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I do want to get back to finishing 水車館. :sweat_smile: The holidays just ended up being a bad time for me, I think.

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