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sparklyjojos · 6 years

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Let’s Read & Suffer: Tsukumojuku by Maijō Ōtarō [part 9]

Today’s recap: In which Story 3 starts, Tsukumojuku discovers that a serial killer case from the JDC series is happening in real life, and then decides to go assassinate his own author and creator, because that’s just how meta things get in this book. [tw: mentioned csa, eye horror]

STORY 3 PART 1

“Can you come up for a second, Tsutomu? We need to talk.”

Tsukumojuku looked up from Kandai, Seijitsu and Shoujiki, currently sleeping in their baby bed, and went up the stairs. Emiko ( 栄美子) seemed angry with him about something.

[As an aside, they have a Cairn Terrier called Moppy and it’s adorable.]

Emiko was waiting in the the living room. Once she saw him, she rose from the table, on which Kodansha paperbacks of Cosmic, Joker, Carnival Eve, Carnival, Carnival Day and The Simons' Case were piled up – and next to them, two open A4 envelopes. One of them was the old one Tsukumojuku kept hidden in his bag. The other one was new, and bore their address (Nakahata 35-41, Toyama Town, Aichi Prefecture) and names (Ms. Satou Emiko, Mr. Tsutomu).

Emiko said, “I love you, I really do. But I hate lies. Are you lying to me?”

He answered that he wasn't. (Maybe didn't tell her everything, but didn't lie.)

“Then tell me this: did you know a woman called Azusa? Izumi? Neko, the detective girl?”

He didn't. He only knew one detective, his younger brother Tsutomu, now known as Daibakusho Curry. Daibakusho Curry was the real Tsutomu, while our narrator's real name was just Tsukumojuku, without any surname... Like the Detective God Tsukumo Juku in Seiryoin Ryusui's novels, who made people faint with his beauty and carried with him the fate of dying on the last day of the 20th century (that day had long passed in reality).

The papers in the second envelope were from Seiryoin Ryusui, and bore the title, THE SECOND STORY. The stamp date was January 31st, over a month earlier. In that span of time, Emiko must have read the First Story and the entire JDC series.

Emiko forbid him from reading the new Story before he answered her questions. Did he know these three girls? (“No.”) Were Kandai, Seijitsu and Shoujiki his and Emiko’s children? (“Yes. They are our children. My sweet little triplets.”) Did he get in contact with that Serika or Seshiru people? (“No.”) Any lovers? (“No.”)

...Any other people he loved? (“Kandai, Seijitsu and Shoujiki. Tsutomu. Ms. Suzuki. Mr. Kato. Takashi, Junko, Heisuke and Shiono. Seshiru and Serika. Moppy--”) And he didn’t want to do those perverted things with Serika and Seshiru anymore? (“I don’t want it...”) [I’m not sure if I like Emiko’s phrasing here, and also, er, have I mentioned Tsukumojuku’s FIFTEEN in this part? Yeah, fuck Emiko.]

The questions continue: What would he do if she was gone? (“Search for you.”) If she died? (“I'd be in sorrow.”) And once his sorrow ended? (“I'd start again, me and Kandai, Seijitsu and Shoujiki.”) Would he go for other people? (“I really can't tell. But I love you.”) Would he love her if she was dead? (“Not with love letters or kisses, but quietly cherishing and remembering.”)

[Again, this fragment would be cute and showing just how kind and loving Tsukumojuku is in this novel, but HE’S 15 FOR GOD’S SAKE and really shouldn’t be with presumably-adult Emiko or have children. Hey Emiko, how about you GO FUCK YOURSELF. Just. Fuck you for taking advantage of a back then 13-year-old lost kid on the run from his abusers. ...I won’t go on any more rants in this part because I’d yell every other sentence, so just picture me screeching like a banshee.]

More questions: Did she wound his heart? (“No. My heart is something that will continuously produce affection, I've told you. If it's “wounded”, it's because of a mistake or misunderstanding. If you don't make a mistake or misunderstand, the heart won't be disturbed.” I feel like I’m missing something here). Tsutomu was smart, wasn’t he. (“I'm not. I just know what I don't know, and try to understand other's people point of view, and why they make mistakes or misunderstand. (…) Uncertainty is caused by those, and so the heart is disturbed. And the cause of that “wound” is my own mistake or misunderstanding, so it's not appropriate to say it's other people’s fault.”)

Tsukumojuku asked her to please stop the questions, because they'd only keep going back to the same point, she’d just feel even more wounded, and it’s not like his heart was more resilient or unfeeling than hers.

Emiko answered that she just wanted to know if he'd be sad losing her. (He would; having her leave would make him as sad as her dying.) So maybe it’d be better if she had never been there, since then even without her he wouldn’t feel sad?

Tsukumojuku said: “Let's talk about certainty”. In this world, there are events that happened, events that didn't happen, and events that should have happened. Of course, their probability is not 33,333...% each. The events that happened have a probability of 100%, the ones that didn't happen – 0%.

[...I'm pretty sure that's not how statistics work.]

Emiko said that there was surely a lot of possibilities for them to not have met, but Tsukumojuku said that well, they HAD met, and the probability of *something that happened* happening was 100%. So, things that didn't happen then and things that should have happened are now things that couldn't have happened, so are not possibilities at all.

Even if she had said she wouldn’t, Emiko started crying. (Because she was misunderstanding, Tsukumojuku thought. Because she was mistaken about something, because her heart was disturbed. But it's a human thing to make mistakes or misunderstand, and to “wound” oneself in this way.) He didn't want to prolong her confusion, and admitted that there's lots of things he didn't know about, and couldn't help anyone, that it was his fault for making her cry. He repeated once more that there was no possibility that they wouldn't have met.

She finally gave him the envelope and he started reading.

STORY 3 PART 2

The Second Story was lying a lot. In reality, Tsukumojuku had ran away from Nishi Akatsuki straight to Aichi Prefecture and spent two years with Emiko. He had no idea who Azusa, Izumi and Neko were, and his only children were his and Emiko’s triplets.

Still, somebody was following in his footsteps. That someone must have read the First Story and wrote the Second Story, and knew Seshiru and Serika, wherever they were now.

Tsukumojuku asserted that he hadn’t killed those three girls, even if Emiko was worried about “him” having killed a lot of people in the Stories -- since the First Story made it seem like he had murdered the Kobayashis to protect Seshiru and Serika, and all. (But that was just a fake story. The Kobayashis were really still alive.)

But if not him, then who killed them?, Emiko asked and showed him the newspaper.

ANOTHER “PHANTOM CASTLE” MURDER: 27 DEAD NOW

According to the article, Geneijo / “Phantom castle” / “Illusion castle” was a building in Chofu, Tokyo, owned by a self-proclaimed artist, Yanbe Tetsuo (山家徹生). In spring 1957, the Castle had been opened near the Chofu Airport after two years of construction. However, none of the locals remembered it being under construction throughout those two years, as if a giant European-style castle just spontaneously appeared one day. Hence they called it Geneijo: “Illusionary Castle” or “Phantom Castle”. Theories said that it was just mass hysteria, or that the Yanbe guy had used drugs on the population since he hadn't had the permit to build the castle, or that the Yanbe guy was an alien. Nobody was even sure what kind of an artist the owner was.

On February 1st, when Yanbe Tetsuo held a big party in the Castle to announce a mysterious work of his, an incident happened: All the windows and doors were locked, with iron shutters behind them, turning the Castle into one giant locked room. Counting Mr. Yanbe, his servants and the guests, 113 people were trapped. Soon, Mr. Yanbe was found dead, and things only got worse. The Castle was still sealed now, 23 days since the incident, and it was only possible to contact the guests on their phones. While the police was working on getting in, the Castle was built in such a way that nobody could easily go in or out.

Geneijo just happened to also be the plot setting in Seiryoin’s second JDC book, Joker, where it was a Nymphenburg Palace-like castle located in Kyoto. In there, a murderer called “Artist” (written 芸術家) wanted to “master each and every detective story component”, to “complete all the mysteries and plan towards new ones”, or something like that.

JDC was mentioned in the first Story -- that Super Handsome Ajiro Souji guy was the founder and chairman of JDC. So there was definitely some correlation here. Seiryoin knew something. ...Who knew if he wasn't watching Tsukumojuku carefully right in that moment, penning the third story.

–-

Another article caught Tsukumojuku's eye, the one that Emiko had wanted to show him:

NAGOYA: THIRD VICTIM OF THE SERIAL THROAT-CUTTER.

On New Year's Eve, an accountant from Nagoya, Hayashi Izumi (23), was found with her throat cut near her house. The night of 14th January, on the emergency stairs of her house, Sasaki Azusa (21) was found. And the night before now, on February 23rd, a detective agency employee Hirose Neko (19) was killed in her backyard.

“You didn't kill them, did you, Tsutomu?” Emiko asked.

Tsukumojuku pointed out that they were together last night, and even both got up when the triplets were crying. Emiko said that Tsukumojuku would have to explain that to the police, who would want to talk to him, since -- she admitted -- she and Hirose Neko had been cooperating to investigate his background.

The information Emiko got about him reached all the way to Kyoto. She even met Ms. Suzuki herself, though they didn't have a lot of time to talk. To be sure Ms. Suzuki wouldn't find Tsukumojuku, Emiko lied and said she was making research for a book on child abuse. Apparently Ms. Suzuki was talking about him using names like Kandai, Seijitsu or Shoujiki. So why would Tsukumojuku name his children that?

“Because I didn't know any other names.” (It’s true: no other names would come to his mind when the children were born.)

Emiko called him an idiot, and started to insinuate that it’s bad that they have triplets, and that it all was a mistake, and when he tried to say something, yelled “Shut up, Tsukumojuku”.

Of course. She knew that name now. She asked about its origin. According to Tsukumojuku, Mr. Heisuke [Mr Kato’s father] had said that it was the name of God.

“Oh? Like the Detective God, then? Are you really living in a novel? Take it seriously, won’t you! It’s real life here, we have to pay insurance and bills, and money just tends to vanish when you have to provide for three kids! And yet you're telling me their father is some “Tsukumojuku” guy who is a “Detective God” from some bullshit novel by some bullshit “Seiryoin Ryusui” sending us bullshit packages!”

They argued some more, Tsukumojuku asked if she wanted him out of the house (she didn’t), and then he proposed they could change the kids' names.

Emiko threw both Stories to the ground, yelling that she wanted him to distinguish between the reality she lived in and fiction, to distinguish what's real and what's not. Then she threw the newspaper on the ground, yelling that this here, too! These [the murder cases] were things that were supposed to be fake, but were really happening, how fucking funny was that!, and that she didn't want any of this to come into their lives. (Here she swept the JDC books off the table too.) She didn't want these incomprehensible novels to come into their lives! There was one thing she wanted, really – that Seiryoin Ryusui to die!

...But hey, Tsutomu, she said. You’re smart, aren’t you? Wouldn’t you be able to find and catch and kill Seiryoin? To distinguish between fiction and reality once and for all?

Tsukumojuku didn't understand, but he realized that by saying that he wouldn't get anywhere with her, so he said, “I understand.”

He'd have to catch that Seiryoin and kill him.

They went to another room, where she cried, and apologized for blaming him for all this. He answered that he shouldn't have named the kids the way he did, but she said that these were actually fine names, y’know.

Tsukumojuku thought to himself that maybe if the names he was called in childhood were better (or “were fixed” somehow), then he would never become “Tsukumojuku”, and wouldn't name his kids like he did... but things that have happened have happened, and so there wasn't another possibility.

Emiko asked him to take off his sunglasses, and assured it'd be fine – and once he took them off, she without looking reached and took his eyeballs out.

“Does it hurt?”

“It hurts.”

“Ms. Suzuki took them out, didn't she. Can you see?”

“I can see.” Indeed, he could see through the removed eyes.

“Poor Tsutomu.” She returned the eyes and predictably fainted upon seeing them in place. Tsukumojuku tucked her in their bed, then put on his sunglasses, took his duffel coat, and went out.

He would make Emiko's wish come true.

---

IMPRESSIONS

I’d love to see the discussion about this book that must have happened between Maijo Otaro and Seiryoin. “So in my book I take one of your most beloved OCs and put him through underage eroguro abuse hell and then make him try to kill you.” “Oh shit dude that sounds dope”

It’s only the third Story and Tsukumojuku is already starting to put the word “wound” in quotation marks. Knowing what having a Wound meant in Jorge Joestar, I have A Very Bad Feeling About This. (Not that I’d be surprised if he had already developed one -- maybe his magical removable eyes are a part of it?)

hey what the fuck is with this novel and adult women preying on the teenage protagonist, can we like. not. (Sure, I understand that this is to show how he genuinely thinks this is how good relationships work because he’d grown up isolated and severely abused, but. Jesus. Somebody help him, please.)

>>>>NEXT PART>>>>

#sparkly reads tsukumojuku #long post #maijo and jdc stuff #csa tw

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sparklyjojos · 6 years

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Let’s Read & Suffer: Tsukumojuku by Maijō Ōtarō [part 13]

Today`s recap: In which we unexpectedly jump from the Third to the Fifth Story, and in the resulting confusion talk a lot about dreams and privileged death. (tw: discussion of suicide)

STORY 5 PART 1

Tsukumojuku and his wife Rie were living in Chofu, close to the Illusionary Castle. As the case was still in progress, they could hear the trapped victims’ screams and pleading for help from inside the Castle all the time. But what once had been hard to bear, after half a year was now treated by everyone in the neighborhood as just annoying. Just another normal day. [In fact, the Story begins with Tsukumojuku and Rie casually unpacking groceries while screams echo through the town, and Rie is more focused on forgetting to buy beans than anything else.]

More than 180 people had been killed in the Castle. While all reports claimed around 200 people had been trapped to begin with, this didn’t add up, since there was at least 100 of them left alive inside. New people (or their bodies) had to be brought in somehow, but nobody could find any secret entrance. In that half a year, there was a lot of disappearances reported all throughout the country, which probably had something to do with the new bodies.

[Like in the previous story, the first person killed was Yanbe, the Castle’s owner, and soon after that Seiryoin Ryusui's body was found in a locked room.]

Tsukumojuku and Rie finished with the groceries, went upstairs to the bedroom where Kandai, Seijitsu and Shoujiki were sleeping, and returned to reading “The Fourth Story”.

[Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first time slip, where the characters are reading a Story that the reader hadn’t seen yet. Expect things to get... a little confusing.]

In the Fourth Story he himself, “the great detective Tsukumojuku”, was trapped in the Castle and tried to solve the case. His final conclusion was that the 333 people who had been trapped in the Castle, as well as the Castle itself, were nothing more than an illusion, a dream, and none of the related events happened in reality. As “the great detective Tsukumojuku” himself pointed out, him coming to this conclusion probably meant that the “case” would end soon. And since it was just a dream, there was no need to explain how impossible murders could happen. Nobody really died, so there was no reason to catch anyone. The murderous Artist was “the great detective Tsukumojuku” himself [because it was him, his imagination, that created those murders]. But apparently even though the case and the Story both came to an end, the dream itself did not.

(Tsukumojuku thought about how he was also, right now, captured by the illusion of the Story, detaching himself from reality to live inside the narration.

He thought that maybe his reality was all a dream, too... but then it’d be just as strong as real life, so there would be no reason to come back to reality. Well, let's just act like this “dream” is reality, then, and live in it happily. And if this was a dream, maybe there's no reason to care about the Castle murders, right?)

Rie wasn’t very happy with the “all just a dream” conclusion to the Fourth Story, as that’s not exactly a solution the reader had a fair chance to come up with. No doubt Rie had wanted to get hints to help with the real Castle case, too; she’d always felt strong sympathy for the trapped people. One night she even tried to convince Tsukumojuku that he should go to the Castle and solve the case -- if he's actually a “Tsukumojuku”, wouldn’t it be his role?

It surely wouldn’t, he thought. He wasn't a great detective, and had nothing to do with Seiryoin's weird tales. While Stories 1-3 had really familiar content, they contained a lot of lies too. Sure, Tsukumojuku was Way Too Beautiful, and Tsutomu was his brother not by blood, and Seshiru and Serika had killed Yurika, Naoko, and Junko and ran away. But the mitate concerning Genesis and the Book of Revelation were all lies. And none of this “old man yelling Hallelujah from inside a corpse” business.

From the Second Story, the mysterious phone call and the “Armageddon” thing both really happened. But all the stuff with the burned victim being mitate for “men burned by the sun's fire” [note: in Revelations the burning sun is the 4th plague], Yuuko in a bloody bathtub being mitate for “water turned into blood” [2nd plague], and the three women being killed for the “Adam and Eve” shtick -- all of it wasn't real.

In the Third Story, Okubo's serial murders being mitate for “reaping of the Earth by the Angels”, and “Seshiru” killing his younger brother “Tsukumojuku” being mitate for “Cain and Abel” [note: remember that they had switched names at the end of that Story and that’s why this mitate works], and the last line that resembled the God's curse on Cain – all of it was also not real.

As for the Fourth Story, if there was mitate for the Castle murders at all, it might have been “War in Heaven”, or maybe “Noah's Ark” (perhaps the criminal was trying to kill everyone but two people or something?), or maybe “Babel Tower”, he had no clue.

There was also an unsettling revelation in the Fourth Story: if you wrote down the name “Tsukumojuku” in kanji, read it as three nines connected into one number by the “ten” kanji (so 9, 9 and 9 got you 999), and then flipped it upside down, you'd get 666, the number of the Beast. Which was obviously some serious bullshit. Tsukumojuku wasn’t an Antichrist or anything, and last time he checked he had no ten horns or seven heads. All this stuff about a “Mark of the Beast” was also bonkers.

He was just a normal, if a way too beautiful human being. Not a great detective. There were so many things he didn't know. He didn't even understand why all the mitate of the Old Testament was put there in the Stories.

Tsukumojuku had no idea who that “Seiryoin” writing the Stories was (especially since the real Seiryoin had been killed in the Castle), but they didn't seem to be written to hurt him or Rie. If anything, Rie seemed strangely comforted with the fact that the Castle case in the Story was solved by "Tsukumojuku”. Sure, she had a lot of expectations towards the real him because of it, but it wasn't that much of a deal. In fact, they found themselves waiting for the next Story to arrive.

As they were reading, Rie made a snarky but light-hearted comment about how even if she was the one to carry and give birth to their triplets, those various women in the stories took all the credit for her hard work [lol], to which Tsukumojuku answered, “You know all these women were then killed or left behind, right.”

“Well, if we're together, I don't really care about living... But there is always a way to live and to be together.”

And a way to die, Tsukumojuku caught himself thinking

--.

In opposition to the mass death of the World Wars, detective novels are rich in creative devices allowing a character to “die a privileged death”. But is death in these novels really privileged? The real privileged death is the one that comes after a fulfilling life, that family and friends and many strangers care about, that comes when you want it and how you want it. It’s a death how it's “supposed” to happen. It's to live your calm daily life until the end, it's majestic and gentle.

It’s not like anybody would want to be killed with a strange trick in a locked room, or to have some boring mitate done with their corpse, even if it was related to something as popular as the Bible. Nobody would ask for death (even privileged) in the first place. Some would wish to be seen as a mitate / image of God, maybe, but probably not at the price of their lives.

The real privileged death is to die your own death to the last. To die after getting what you want. It’s the dignity of it, the majesty. The sadness of those who lost you. A small wish to live a little longer, perhaps. And good memories. Satisfaction. Confidence. Being proud of your life, and rejoicing at good death.

That's not what happens in detective novels.

Not a lot of dignity is given there. And since the dignity of human death is so weakly felt, it's with an easy heart that the authors kill characters, wound them, toy with them. It’s also why they come up with absurd motives for the criminals, or no motive at all, why they portray the psychological effects of human beings coming in contact with death very lightly or don’t care about it.

At the same time, every detective story contains the possibility of a privileged death happening: there’s always the possibillity that the victim in that story only pretended to be a victim of a murder, and in reality committed suicide, thus dying a satisfying death. But even then, a great detective would inevitably bring the case to an end, eliminating any further privileged deaths.

(...It didn’t sound so bad to die your own death while pretending to be murdered. And it'd be nice to think that this was what had been happening in the real Castle, just a giant performance of sorts, and that since there wasn't a Great Detective Tsukumojuku there to get in people’s way, they could keep on dying how they wanted.

Yeah, it’d be nice, but he didn't actually believe this was the case. The horrified screams coming from the Castle couldn’t have been just a performance.)

IMPRESSIONS

Welcome to the Fifth Story, the one I had to read with a dictionary in one hand and a Bible in the other. There’s a lot of obscure references to Genesis and especially Revelations later. A Lot. In fact, I’d seriously advise the reader of this recap to read the Book of Revelation as prep for this and the next Story.

It’s interesting how in Jorge Joestar the big thing about Tsukumojuku’s name is that flipping the three nine kanji (九) upside down will get you three symbols of Jupiter (♃) = three “powerful gods” = Beyond (aka Technically God)... but in this book the exact same train of logic, but after swapping the kanji with Arabic numbers, will give you the number of the Beast (aka Technically Satan).

From what I observed, Tsukumojuku’s age is always 12+[Story number], which would make him 17 here. [EDIT: the 12+number rule doesn’t actually hold true, as he’s 16 later in the 7th Story. Time is kinda weird in this book.] And of course he’s once again somehow married and has kids with a woman who’s later stated to have graduated from college before they met. Because we can’t have a single not-creepy relationship in this book, apparently. Sigh.

I believe that constrasting the deaths in the World Wars and mystery novels is a reference to Kasei Kiyoshi’s detective novel theory. It states that around the time of great disasters and wars, which are filled with mass senseless death and chaos, the mystery genre flourishes, since the society is sunbconsciously searching for balance and/or escapism, and thus yearns for orderly stories focused on a privileged death of the individual (victim), a death that has some sort of reason behind it and doesn’t happen just by senseless fate. The original theory links it to both World Wars, but it also applies to other conflicts, natural disasters or great economic crashes. It’s not an accident that the first JDC book came out a year after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which is so obvious an inspiration that the Detective Ritual manga outright features it as the backstory setting. (If you can read Japanese, here’s a cool article putting JDC, Tsukumojuku, Disco Wednesdayyy and many others in that context.)

>>>>NEXT PART>>>>

#sparkly reads tsukumojuku #long post #maijo and jdc stuff

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