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.
The book clearly states that there is a grand piano in the top floor tower room. However if you look at the floor plan it’s very hard to see how you would get one up there – the turn at the top of the stairs is surely too tight to get a piano around, and the lift does not seem big enough either. I know you can take the legs off to move them, but even so… Maybe they used a crane through the balcony door?
Good point. I didn’t even notice. The balcony seems like the only viable route. Or it could be a hint towards some secret in the architecture of the building?
I feel bad for 由里絵. Sounds like she wouldn’t be able to get by by herself in the outside world. A part of me hopes that she is the culprit and that’s all a lie so we don’t suspect her. I’m glad that 三田村 brought it up and the situation is not completely ignored.
Something I didn’t notice until I was most of the way through this week’s reading:
The author makes use of repeated sections and phrases between the “present day” and “past” chapters, to create an echo between them, which I noticed pretty quickly. But there is also a difference. In the “present day” chapters, our narrative viewpoint is the man in the mask, who refers to himself as 私, and we get to know at least some of what he’s thinking. In the “past” chapters, even when we’re focusing on the man in the mask, it’s third person and he’s 彼. I wonder if the author here is doing this simply because he wants more viewpoints for the “in the past” scenes (e.g. being able to show the conversation in the car), or if it’s also a bit of misdirection where what the man in the mask was thinking in the past is being deliberately hidden from us. The latter would argue for him turning out to be the murderer…
I’ve been wondering about this too. The author’s been pushing a “captive princess in the tower” image for her quite hard, and I’m wondering how/if that’ll be turned on it’s head later.
I’ve really enjoyed this effect so far; on one hand I’m liable to lose track of what happened when if too much is repeated, but on the other hand it also makes me feel more enmeshed in the here and now; the two points in time feel much closer than they actually are, and it never really feels like I’m leaving the scene, so to speak.
I’ve been wondering about this, too. Why choose to have a first person narration in the present, and third person in the past? It’s an interesting choice if nothing else.
島田潔 showed up earlier than I expected. I’m curious what role he’ll play in this book; he never felt like the main detective to me in 十角館, so I wonder if he’s going to be more in that role here, or if he’ll be playing the hobbyist bystander again.
The man in the mask honestly has not redeemed himself at all. I get the vibe that if not for being his father’s son none of these men would talk to him. Then again, it seems like none of the men like each that much either…
If I remember correctly 文江, the housekeeper, is the one who either goes missing or dies in the ‘past’, right? And she was also the one scolding 紀一 about smoking. 紀一 also seems kind of weird when his suspiciously young-and-likely-Stockholm’d wife talks to 正木…
He seems too sus too soon so I want to agree with @eefara and @MintTea that maybe our sheltered tower princess will be the murderer
Just because it has been a thing in movies and other stories I read: I suspect the guy in the wheelchair and that he doesn’t actually need the wheelchair and is taking revenge for something. I have absolutely nothing to base this on, though.
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