When Haruhi finished, a third silence reigned over the literature club.
The only sound was the rustling as we all read back over Tsuruya’s travelogue, Episode Three.
Having learned from Episode Two, we’d printed out copies for everyone in advance. I felt like we didn’t really need to have it read out loud, but since we’d done the first two that way, Haruhi seemed to think we should to stick to it, and so we all followed along while listening to her rendition. It felt like being in Japanese class, except when it ended, what greeted us wasn’t relief—because Episode Three finally posed the foretold problem. The thing this had all been leading up to.
And I didn’t have the slightest clue what the answer could be. I wasn’t even sure what Tsuruya wanted to get out of all this. Was there a fatal flaw in my reading comprehension skills?
But I clearly wasn’t the only one confused. Haruhi and Koizumi had both adopted contemplative poses, staring at nothing. Even Nagato had put her book down and was staring at the Ep3 booklet.
T had been grumbling about her Japanese reading skills from the get-go, and she’d ignored her booklet entirely, having spent her time fully concentrating on listening to Haruhi’s rendition. Next to her, Asahina had her eyes locked on one point of the page, not moving a muscle.
The club member least likely to read a mystery had locked onto a sentence that I’d clearly read without batting an eye. Had there been something that obviously out of place?
“Shouko?” Haruhi whispered.
“A dying message…or…,” Koizumi muttered.
Seemed like everyone was stuck on different things.
Since the meeting chairman and our chief were both sinking into a sea of thought, nobody was taking charge. Gratingly, the only other person not mulling over something specific was T.
“Aren’t you in the mystery club? Don’t you people solve mysteries for fun?”
“Sometimes,” T said. She pulled the printout closer and started writing on it with a ballpoint pen. “But I’m not in charge of whodunits. It’s outside my wheelhouse. I’ve never once solved one. I’m more the type to just read.”
A reading specialist?
“And this is a problem for the SOS Brigade! As an outsider, all I can do is sit on the sidelines cheering everyone on.”
I looked closer at what she was writing and discovered she was adding furigana to all the kanji in Ep3. Muttering vocab under her breath. Occasionally…
“Kyam, what’s kozaiku mean?”
Like, when you describe a woodworker who’s good with their hands.
“A ploy. An unpolished scheme that will soon be discovered,” Nagato corrected, not looking up.
T nodded to herself. “And this Chinese idiom–looking thing you pronounced fuukoumeibi? What does that string of kanji mean?”
The name of a famously pretty dancer in Luoyang during the Western Han dynasty. The Zizhi Tongjian contains an account of her dazzling beauty.
“‘Picturesque.’ It’s a term of praise, used to describe particularly spectacular landscapes,” Nagato said.
“And hyoutan kara koma is…?”
A gourd so big that you can fit forty shogi pieces in it. People in the Edo era used to carry them around like that so they could play shogi anytime. It evolved to be a term meaning “let’s play a round.”
“A horse from a gourd. A windfall. An example of an unexpected phenomenon. Koma here means ‘horse,’ not ‘piece.’”
While Nagato and I were teaching T some advanced Japanese, Koizumi looked up, selecting one of his vast repertoire of faint smiles and directing it at us.
Well? You solve the thing?
“No.”
So that smile was his way of rebuking us for goofing off when there was a mystery to solve.
“As far as whodunits go, it’s a bit unusual,” he said, pointing at the last page. “It doesn’t ask us to identify the culprit, merely their name. Curious.”
How are those different?
“Perhaps in ordinary writings, they would be equivalent. But given the problem posed here, we must assume otherwise.”
Why?
“‘Why?’” Haruhi repeated, swiveling her chair in our direction. “Because the culprit is patently obvious!”
Then who is it?
“Think for yourself sometimes! Your grades will never improve copying off other people’s answer sheets.”
I wasn’t planning on majoring in detectivology.
“You say that,” Koizumi said, “but surely you have some idea?”
“Yeah, sure,” I admitted. I flipped through the printout. “This dude Tsuruya called the card comedian. The girl’s father’s grandfather’s brother’s heir or whatever.”
“Why do you think that?”
Because the only real characters in this thing are the charming doc and the card comedian. And since the former is the victim, that means the latter must be the culprit. By process of elimination.
“Reverse engineering a solution from a metafiction perspective is generally considered an illegitimate approach…”
Don’t look at me. When did the SOS Brigade do anything the proper way? Our whole MO is defying reason. We’re both in this mess together!
“You have a point there. And the challenge Tsuruya sent us is hardly your standard mystery, is it?”
He glanced toward Haruhi there.
“Kyon’s right,” she said. “The culprit is obvious, so clearly not the problem. That’s why we’re told to figure out the name instead. Very Tsuruya. I like these logical leaps of hers.”
She started tapping the desk with her pencil.
“Mikuru, any tea left? All this reading aloud’s left me parched.”
“Oh, of course!”
Asahina had been staring at one line in Ep3 this whole time, but Haruhi’s voice snapped her out of it.
“Just a moment!”
Slippers pattering, the SOS Brigade’s maid went back to her real job.
I glanced at Nagato, too, and she’d abandoned the printout and resumed her original reading stance.
“…………”
This was Nagato, so it was entirely possible she already knew the answer, but if she did, she showed no signs of it. Was this because she knew we didn’t want to have it blurted out or just…how she always was?
Once again, Koizumi took the wheel.
“Let’s take a look at any passages that might provide a hint of the culprit’s name.”
“Yeah. Starting with the most obvious one,” Haruhi said, clearly on board.
“By that, you mean the dying message?”
“He’s not dead, so that term ain’t right, but whatever. Sure.”
“Fainting message just doesn’t have the same ring to it.”
Nobody cares. Let’s move on.