Well, I finished!
End of book spoilers:
The parts about 蒲田 were fairly predictable. It seemed pretty obvious he wasn’t going to be a good person. Although I have to admit I must have read too much BL lately, because my first thought when he came home with 亮 was, “Oh, 亮 brought his boyfriend home and is going to come out.” Then I immediately laughed at myself. The one part of that whole subplot I thought was weird (aside from the catching him just in time part) was that nothing comes up when they are taken for questioning. Wouldn’t the police ask why 夏奈 followed 蒲田 and why she was so obviously fleeing from 亮? The whole thing just seemed to happen and end so quickly.
My initial guess that they were twins was correct, although I thought they were just messing with her rather than scamming her, but that might not be a fine distinction. My end guess is the rather obvious 奏 is 亮. In addition, I was thinking that he left to go murder 孔雀 since she could distinguish between the two of them, but then it didn’t seem like he was gone long enough and I’m not sure he would have enough reason to. They seemed hard pressed to find a way to get rid of one body as it was.
I did read more about 無戸籍者 since this book made me curious. I had no idea that a child born within 300 days of a divorce is by default presumed to be the ex-husband’s kid, and their birth registration will be rejected if a different man’s name is put down (for example a new husband who is actually the father). In case anyone else is interested, this was the article I read, and it talked about domestic violence and how the 戸籍 makes it easy for an abuser to track down their former/current spouse when they give birth. Also, it mentions the rules requiring women to wait a specific amount of time to remarry, only fairly recently revised somewhat (changed from 6 months to 100 days in 2016).
