This reads to me like Miyabe telling us what she wants the book to be about – not so much the murders, and more tracing the huge web of connections that radiate out from them to all these more or less tangentially related people.
Finished week 1. I’m really enjoying the audiobook so far; I like the narrator’s voice and accent. It’s interesting, I’ve heard a few cuts here and there, where they presumably had to re-record working, but the most surprising was for a single word in the middle of a sentence, haha.
We’re starting to get a better idea of the timeline. The ラジカセ incident was in January, and the new family started to appear around March. So we know that there was at least some amount of planning going into this move.
I really wonder what the big deal with the garbage incident was. If it’s evidence of some sort of crime, you wouldn’t task your child with throwing it away in the buildings garbage area. Normally you’d break it before getting rid of it somewhere that won’t be linked to you, right? But going to the effort of breaking it after throwing it away makes me think that there was something Shizuko was trying to hide. Maybe it wasn’t something huge, so initially she didn’t go through the effort of destroying the evidence, but when she realised that it might get picked up she decided to make sure that that wouldn’t happen. Or maybe she just doesn’t want people to have what “belongs to her”, even if all she is doing with it is throwing it away.
Finished week 2! It’s a good thing I’m enjoying the author’s writing style so far; she (?) writes with an incredible level of detail, and I’m curious how long this book would be if a more average writer (in terms of writing style) wrote it instead.
I wish I had more to talk about, but I’m not sure what I would comment on in the story so far; information is still very slowly being given out. I guess we’ll be following the police and their pace of information-gathering? Which makes me wonder if these murders will be solved.
Yes, the author is female. If you like the style, there is actually more 宮部みゆき - Wikipedia
She is a very prolific writer and one of my language partners told me that she also read a lot of her books in her youth. The downside is that many of her books are only available as paperback…
I just did the entirety of this week’s assignment in one day and I gotta say it’s not a book that lends itself to that at all When it’s flowing, it’s flowing, and I’m interested and following along avidly. Then…we get a bunch of details that I couldn’t care less about and I’m forcing myself not to zone out
I took more name notes if they help anyone:
names
ch 3
片倉義文・かたくらよしふみ・42歳・片倉ハウスの経営者
片倉幸恵・かたくらさちえ・義文の妻・40歳
ch4
井出康文・いでやすふみ・マンションの管理部長・42歳
北畠敦子・きたばたけあつこ・2024号室・41歳
智恵子・敦子の母・67歳
宮崎信吾・みやざきしんご・2010号室・14歳・小糸孝宏の知り合い
木暮美佳・こぐれみか。19階に住む・高校一年生
篠田いずみ・しのだいずみ・中学2年生・810号室
田中琢己・たなかたくみ・パーク建設のマンション事業部長・40歳
I personally have already referred back to my notes a few times to remember who is who
Yeah this scene was confusing - you’d assume that anything incriminating in the player would be removed and disposed of, no need to chuck the entire machine. Also the boy apologizing for his mom made me so sad. I assume he knows she’s under some kind of stress / unusual circumstance which is why he made the apology he did. Then again, maybe she’s having a sort of mental break?
I just read chapter 5 and it has been my favorite chapter so far
I love that we were introduced to a whole new cast of characters and circumstances and yet the story flowed so effortlessly and frankly was a lot more fun to read than most of the preceding chapters. Lots of family details but it didn’t feel bogged down at all.
I currently think that her baby daddy killed the others and she killed him because she was scared. It seems unlikely she would be scared if she had gone there with intent to kill, right?
There was something a bit odd in the audiobook: very last page of the chapter, there was a whole section, maybe 20 seconds or so, in between the book lines
“姉さん、あのなあー”
and (major spoiler)
“あたし、祐司さんを殺した” と、宝井綾子は言った。
that wasn’t there in the book.
Confused me so much when I got there and suddenly lost track of where I was on the page.
Weird, I didn’t notice that at all do you have the audible version? (it’s also possible I just didn’t notice because sometimes I read ahead of the narrator)
I’ll need to glance at which particular printing I have of the book when I get home after work, but it’s got this cover; I’ll have to take a picture of the end of that chapter as well. And yep, I’ve been listening to the Audible US audiobook.
Yeah, dang, that’s like a good two paragraphs excised between printings. I wonder when the cuts happened? I’ll have to keep an eye out and report on any others I find.