We are following the below schedule (page counts may vary based on your medium):
Week
Up to
Approximate Pages
Percent
End page
Week 6 - Mar 4
Read through end of chapter 3
50
73%
207
I will generally copy this information over thread to thread each week for ease of finding - you can always expect the schedule at the top of any weekly thread
Law and Order
Any reveals, for the current chapters must be behind spoilers or detail curtains. When we get further in you don’t need to hide details that were revealed in previous chapters.
Questions on vocab, grammar, nuance, and the like are both welcome and encouraged. If you’re not sure if it’s a spoiler, assume it is and use one of the above options to hide the text.
You are encouraged to speculate and guess wildly
Be kind about other peoples’ wild guesses
Even if you don’t read the chapter(s) in time, you are still encouraged to post in the thread for that reading once you have finished it. I advise not reading ahead in the threads as you may see spoilers.
To gauge participation - a poll!
Are you reading week 6 of 黒い森の記憶?
Yes, I’m planning to read along/am reading along this week
Looks like I was right about the car being deliberately dumped by the vagabond…
So is 待田 a real detective after all? It certainly seems like he must be after the events at the end of this chapter, so I think the suggestion he was a fake was a red herring the author threw us.
I had the definite feeling that that scene with the vagabond just so happening to be leaving the police station at the same time and just happening to drop that conspicuous key holder has to be a setup. So that suggests that the vagabond and probably also 板谷’s wife and son are also undercover officers trying to get evidence on the old man.
The fake/real detective was a good double bluff, wasn’t it? I had started suspecting that he was real but from another prefecture before it was revealed - he just knew way too much about police investigations to be an outsider.
I have finished the book (sorry, couldn’t resist), but I remember being (mild spoilers for this week only:) surprised at how little was revealed in this penultimate chapter. The author really keeps his cards close to his chest in this one.
Hmm, I don’t get the feeling that the 板谷 family is involved with the police. I really do think that it’s just a medical family and the father/husband was just killed. I do however think the vagabond is sus, or if not, an incredibly stupid person. A key holder shaped like an actual human heart is very conspicuous!
I’m curious what was found by the officers with shovels. Also we still have no reason for the girl rape/murders! Unless by some twisted logic the wronged father is also raping the girls as revenge, which to me seems a bit too far.
This just popped into my head while writing this - how old is the vagabond, do we know roughly? Maybe he’s the sender of the packages.
I was going to guess “absolutely nothing”, but rereading the bit where the old man fills in the hole, it definitely says he put in the 死体の包み, so there’s no wiggle room in the wording where it could turn out that really he put in a big bag of garbage instead.
I reread it so many times, trying to make sure there wasn’t any misunderstanding, like he put something else in the hole, or he put the body in a completely different hole, or who knows what else.
Yes, that was a good call, hadn’t seen that at all.
Yes, I totally believe this by now. That was a nice setup by the author!
I wondered about that as well. Maybe he spilled the beans to the police and they are using him as bait now? I don’t buy his „I had no place to go“ given he was a hobo
But then again, why would they need to do that when the hobo already reported on the murder? They can simply arrest and question the old man, no?
Or maybe the hobo is just plain stupid, as cat suggested…
Actually given their reaction, I can’t help but think they really found nothing… Anything else would be pretty unprofessional. And so far, the police has not been pictured as being dumb, so that doesn’t compute…
One thing that struck me as interesting was that the old man and the victim’s wife acknowledged that they know each other. Does this mean the old man is the doctor after all? Or did they just bump into each other in the hospital (and he is still the brother)? I‘m curious to see whether our detective might drop a remark that the wife then corrects, or something?
Which basically leaves us with the questions of who sends the parcels, who kills the girls, and where did the corpse go…
I read that as she had seen the real doctor before (decades ago) and the old man played it off as “whoops I forgot, cause I am senile”.
Definitely believing the whole brother impersonation theory.
About the hole, I am not sure but did the author actually mention explicitly which hole the body was dropped into? I suspect he is trolling again and there is a second hole somewhere.
Law and Order 
but if you suspend disbelief it’s quite fun.
