I was about to comment about the last chapter then I realized I ended up reading the first 3 chapters instead of two. Funnily enough the 3rd chapter is the one I enjoyed the most because I felt like the story started picking up but no spoilers.
It felt weirdly exciting to see real place names instead of made up words and places as this is the first thing I’ve read that takes place in modern day Japan. According to the reviews we might all become Japanese Railway experts by the end of the novel due to the supposed high amount of train timetables that might come later lol.
Overall a chill first week, even though the novel is altogether quite short compared to light novel standards (seriously… this should be called light, not the 25 volume 150k characters series.)
Excited to see the dots connect in later chapters. (´・ω・)
Well, for suitable values of modern – it’s set in the 1950s
I half want to recommend the trailer for the 1958 film version (it’s on the IMDB page for the film) if you want a mental picture of what Japan at the time looked like, but it has a few spoilers in it, especially towards the end. If you’re not super spoiler averse you could watch the first two minutes (up to about the point where they show a map).
Just finished this week’s reading. I suspect we’re expected to suspect 安田, but there is too little to go off right now to draw any real conclusions. I’m sure we’ll learn more about the 汚職 later though
Fun entry into the story. I’m enjoying reading this in paperback, something about a physical book just makes my brain feel so quiet.
It’s been a while since I’ve read a novel this high level in Japanese (recently I’ve been sticking to around 30) so I need to look up more words/reread parts but so far.
The mystery has my attention so far! But hearing that solving this will take understanding train timetables worried me a bit lol
(I have ADHD so my impaired executive function makes it harder to 段取り)
I had so little time recently that I read this in such a fragmented way that I’d already forgotten about him
But now that you say that, let’s speculate
What tripped me up a bit was the sentence 「小雪」は、彼を大事にしておけばよかった。very early on. I did not directly find anything in the text that referred to how he was not treated well or valued by the inn - so maybe this is a bit of a foreshadowing? Maybe he was not treated well by Toki because he was in love with her but she had rejected him? Maybe he knew she was going to Fukuoka, and so he took the two girls along to the train station to make them witness how Toki boarded the train with a man? Maybe he was already planning to kill the couple at that point but wanted to demonstrate to the girls his coolness in order to create something like a mental alibi (if that makes sense)? In any case, it’s getting interesting!
