Week six starts today!
We are reading chapter 7, which is 40 pages in my copy.
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Looking forward to hearing the thoughts on chapter 7. I was struggling with that one. 
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Chapter 7: I guess it makes sense to show us how the “get your auctioned property back” scheme works through a successful example, but the chapter felt like another long diversionary meander away from the actual story. I’m guessing the three people who were in the game store are also the ones in the flat (with their elderly mother having moved in too by that point) – the descriptions sound similar.
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Just finished chapter 7 as well
Wow that was a lot of tedious detail. I think that entire chapter could have been condensed into 20 pages and I would have gotten just as much out of it.I get the purpose of why we were introduced to these characters and what they went through, but there was just way too much unnecessary detail and fluff.
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Similar to 水車館の殺人, I think I’ll be taking a break from this book for the rest of the month. I’m not so far behind that it would take too much time to catch up, but I’d like to focus my time on other stuff for the time being. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on discussion here still, though!
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Chapter 8: this reads to me rather as if the author transcribed an interview she had with an expert in the course of doing the research for the novel. (There’s a section in 火車 | L34 that has a similar vibe.)
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Week eight starts today!
We are reading chapters 10 and 11, which add up to 38 pages in my copy. We should pass through the halfway mark somewhere in this week’s section.
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Finished 8 and 9 late, but am now almost back on schedule.
I 100% agree that it sounded like a straight interview. I was admittedly very bored during that chapter. It felt rather repetitive.
Ch 9:
This also felt repetitive. I feel like the story is starting to lose a bit of its steam and I hope we get back on track soon.
I’ll add 8+9’s character notes, but really not much that seems too important at this point. I think we’ve probably been introduced to all the main characters by now and the rest are just for color.
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Oddly, I kind of preferred it. It put me a bit into a nonfiction reading mood where I’m reading an expert describing something complicated they want to communicate…
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Finished 10+11, will update the character sheet shortly but again nobody important seems to be being introduced at this point
I’m begging the author to move the plot a bit 
The level of detail I have about their lives while simultaneously not moving the story forward is amazing. It was somewhat interesting to find out about the family dynamics, but ultimately since we (fairly certainly) know that 石田 didn’t do it, I don’t really feel that invested in his arguments with his teen children
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Honestly, I kept yawning so much that I ended up skimming the chapter. I don’t know how this is relevant for the larger story. Just give me some character information and development of the case… 
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Chapter 9+10 were more to my liking as we are back with actual people rather than some info dump.
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Week nine starts today!
This is the halfway mark by calendar time: 8 weeks down, 8 still to go. We’re reading chapter 12, which is 30 pages in my copy.
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Chapter 12… 
finally some plot development. 
I am very greatful to cat for the character references… 
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Unless I missed it Chapter 12 had no new characters introduced, so nothing added to the wiki.
This girl has the worst case of ‘I can fix him’ I’ve ever seen. I guess she eventually succeeded, depending on your definition of ‘fix’. To be honest though he doesn’t strike me as that much of a deadbeat just for knocking her up because he was seemingly straight with her from the start about not wanting a kid and even went so far as to make it clear to the whole family what they could expect of him. Curious if he also suggested abortion to her (assuming he did given his reaction overall). Like I wouldn’t call him an upstanding character, but it’s also not ‘swore he’d be a dad and then ditched her after the kid was born’ level shittyness either 
We now have the cliffhanger of who those people in the apartment are…again.
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Chapters 9 + 10
Not really a comment about the plot, but it is wild how different my and the characters ways of thinking are as times. Like that bit about “betraying” a company by quitting after 10 years, or the focus on how famous a university is, rather than the curriculum.
I feel you. Like, I get that all of them have backstories. But I’m here to read a mystery, I don’t need to hear about that time A stubbed his toe in elementary school. I’m looking forward to when everything gets wrapped up, let’s see how many of the seemingly innocuous details are actually important.
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This one I can understand; here in the UK mostly university degrees matter because they affect how easy it is to get your first job, but after that nobody cares much at all (as long as you have one). And there’s definitely a difference between “can get into a really top end university” (東大 in this case, vs somewhere that sounds like it’s a very long way down the pecking order) and the rest when somebody’s evaluating your CV for the first job out of college – plus in general the top unis do teach better and in more depth, which is why they have their reputation. And it’s not like he was choosing on curriculum either – he just got this specific admiration for one particular professor and nothing else mattered to him. I can totally see how this would come across to his parents as screwing up his future options for an unserious seeming reason.
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Chapter 13
We finally get names for the victims, except not really. How many fake outs has that been so far? 3? They weren’t the family that officially lived there, they weren’t the family of the sort of deadbeat dad, and now it turns out they used fake names.
I felt sorry for Takahiro. Poor kid, I hope he gets therapy. But oh man, Shizuko lost what little empathy I managed to feel for her. And I still don’t quite get what went through her head during the ラジカセ incident.
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