The Eccentric, the Beauty, and the Detective: Kiriki Junka's Mystery Log Volume 1 Chapter 3

Pre-chapter Eccentricities:

JARO: Japan Advertising Review Organization

Bikkuriman:

Bikkuriman Chocolate:

Herakuraisuto:

Get’s:

2: The Case of the Tears of Blood

Near the end of April came out of season snow. Because of a cold front of the kind only seen once in a few years, the temperature was much lower than usual.

“The weather’s nice, isn’t it, Rouji-kun?”

His ridiculous statement came as he gazed at the dancing snow. Footsteps ran like stitches along the fresh snow on the road as people made their way through it. Over that, however, fell fresh snow that did not melt. Heavy clouds gathered overhead, sending white soldiers as a vanguard to remind man of nature’s power.

I put up my umbrella and gave a suitable response, “Could you say that if you were about to die of cold?”

It had not yet been two weeks since his shocking first day.

Junka was enthusiastic about creating his detective club, and apparently had already submitted his application to a teacher in the staff room, but as the ten members required for club activities hadn’t been even close to gathered, he had been quickly rejected. Well, that much was natural.

Yet Junka was not disheartened. He had founded a detective association in no time. One member he had, but five were required for an association and so he had not been approved. He had come to me, troubled, and I had avoided answering.

It would have been fine to clearly reject such a frivolous association. What had barely managed to catch my interest was his pressing the idea of not moving unless an incident occurred. Essentially, when there wasn’t a case, it was synonymous with the ‘go home’ club, and for that I was supremely grateful. It should have looked better in the eyes of the teachers than merely going home without doing anything at all, or so I figured, but I had yet to come to a final decision.

Junka had his umbrella resting on his shoulder, likely giving himself a wide field of view.

“Is it not magnificent for snow to fall in sakura season? I’d be satisfied even if I died of hypothermia.”

“Do that then.”

“Oh, what a cold thing to say.”

Ignoring his carefree smile, I shrunk into my jacket like a turtle to combat the cold. The chill that entered through the collar would cause people to do that. I should have worn a scarf after all. Junka balled up the snow off of a car parked on the side of the road.

Is he going to throw that?

“Hey, Rouji-kun.”

He moved in a grand motion to throw his snowball at me, and when he went to let it fly, his foot slipped, and he collapsed backward.

“Ouch!”

I burst out in boisterous laughter at the sight of Junka lying on his back on the snow covered street.

“You reap what you sow.”

“…”

Oh, but Junka wasn’t moving at all. His overturned umbrella was stirred by the wind.

“What’s this, Junka? You can’t play dead forever. Hurry up, let’s go.”

Junka, however, did not respond at all. He lay, spread out, unstirred, as he accepted the dancing white petals as they fell. He continued to disappear into the pure landscape of snow without moving a finger.

“Oi, Junka,” worried, I called his name.

He did not respond, but continued in his way to accept the gifts of the snow.

“Junka!”

I couldn’t just sit still, and knelt down, grasping his shoulder in my hand.

“Oi, Junka! Get it together!”

Assailed by the monster known as worry, I shook his body ever stronger. Could he have hit his head and died?

Then, at that time, a snowball struck me in the face.

“I got you, eh?”

The rest of Junka’s body sprang to life along with the proud voice coming from his snow-dusted face. He then stood as if I wasn’t there, and brushed the snow off his body.

“I’m totally soaked now, but it was refreshing to trick you. Ah, I’m refreshed.”

He retrieved his umbrella.

“Did you really think I died? How purehearted. You’re too trusting.”

Shaking, boiling, my voice came out low enough to surprise myself, “If you act like that, I can’t just leave it be.”

Junka didn’t seem to notice.

“You can’t play the victim card after telling me to die of hypothermia, Rouji-kun. I am Kiriki Junka after all. As a potential member of my detective association, I think it’s best for you to learn the personality and eccentricities of your chairman,” he advised.

I breathed deeply to sooth my seething stomach, picked up my umbrella, and set out on my walk once more.

“I can’t stand irritating weirdos like you. Try to accomodate me a little.”

“I’ll consider it.”

I could hear Junka’s teeth chatter as he was wet from his playing dead.

Are you retarded?

That Monday, at 2:00pm, we had a class in the music room.

“It’s this damn cold, but we have to sing?”

Junka took out a snack, for some reason, and suddenly ripped open the package. Peeking inside, I saw what looked to me like chocolate wafers.

“Bikkuriman chocolates, eh?”

Perhaps he didn’t have the nerve to eat snacks on the move, but it appeared his main interest was the sticker included in the package.

Cheeks rosy, he called out in a loud voice, “Yes! Haraheraisuto!”

I tilted my head. I knew Herakuraisuto, but it was my first time hearing Haraheraisuto.

“Can you show me the package, Junka?”

Written upon the package I was given was not Bikkuriman, but Bikkuri-san; a cheap imitation, and rather depressing, but I simply watched the elated Junka in silence. That guy was beyond help.

I proceeded along the hallway, gazing out the window at the snowy scene. Hand-written invitations to Junka’s detective association were pasted upon a bulletin board. I took a look at one.

“The detective association has many beautiful women in swimsuits! Assemble, you young men and women! Let us attain victory at a beach volleyball tournament in Guam, land of eternal summer! Get’s!”

It was filled with lies that would get him sued by JARO, regulator of Japan’s advertisements. Aiming for a beach volleyball tournament on the beaches of Guam was obviously fallacious. It even ended with a hard-hitting gag… the point was lost.

Junka was grinning.

“I’m quite proud of those if I do say so myself, but no newcomers have appeared. Why is that?”

The strength drained from my shoulders. While Junka may have possessed unparalleled beauty, he would not stop showing me his eccentricities. Even the girls he had forcefully talked to had pulled away like the tide, and it wasn’t like he was popular with the boys, either. Come to think of it, I was the only one in the class who would directly converse with him.

And that Junka was advancing down the hall with files in hand. Considering the fact that he would retreat in a moonwalk from time to time, everyone gave him significant clearance. What a bother he was.

And so we arrived at the music room.

“Hmm?”

I felt malaise from the aether. Turning on the fluorescent light, I searched every corner of the room. There was a large, two-piece blackboard; a black piano; a stair-shaped desk; and painting after painting of famous composers. That was where I identified the source of the malaise.

“It’s empty…”

“That’s true. Chopin is gone.”

Junka stood beside me and pointed for clarification.

The portraits were lined up approximately 2.5 meters high on an interior wall. One frame displayed thick paper, but no art. Among the paintings, it was the third from the left.

“Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn… There are various sorts, but Chopin is the only one missing. Why?”

“Still, you knew right away that it was Chopin. You’ve got a memory for strange things, eh?”

“You just don’t properly look at things, Rouji-kun.”

The bell rang, the door opened, and a single woman appeared. Shibuyamadai’s music teacher, Hatanaka Sachiko. Not yet thirty, her makeup was applied skillfully and her lipstick was red. It might have been my imagination, but her face looked a little pale.

“Our lesson will now begin.”

We commenced choral practice.

Despite seeming slightly down at the start, colour returned to her cheeks as she lead the students, likely because of her love for music. She had little intensity and was a petite woman, but having graduated from a musical university, her knowledge was profound, and there was definite dignity to how she played the piano.

Time went by in a flash, and the bell rang in the blink of an eye. Hatanaksensei, entranced by the piano, didn’t seem to notice. Several girls went up to her to let her know, and she stopped her fingers with a blush.

“I’m sorry. We’ll end the lesson here, then.”

One after another, the students left the classroom. When I went to leave too, Junka caught the edge of my uniform.

“What?”

“Now is the time for our detective association to shine.”

“I haven’t joined yet.”

Translator's Note:

That line about JARO had its official Japanese title, and then the English acronym, but having “Japan Advertisement Review Agency, JARO,” just seemed off.

I don't render every single instance of 'baka.' Sometimes the sentence works fine without calling somebody a twat. Perhaps, as a Canadian, I feel like all insults are more insulting due to their relative rarity in our use of the English language. Not that we don't swear, we do, and swearing a lot does decrease the impact of using disparaging terms, but it also makes the speaker sound way, way more trashy than otherwise. I'm not aware of how trashy the characters sound in Japanese since they're dialoguing in what looks to me like Tokyo-style generic modern speech. Unfortunately, I learned my Japanese in kansai-ben due to where I worked in Japan when I was there, so the standard dialect always sounds a little off in my mind.

Editor’s Note:

Off to a good start, a missing painting is deffo on the scale of which a school club would operate on, as opposed to say, a murder case, or some kind of supernatural closed room incident.

PS: We're using sensei to denote teachers as opposed to the english Miss, Mrs or Mr because it's nearly impossible to tell the gender of all the teachers they'll come across as we're working off of last names and no pictures and the word sensei does not imply gender. Thus, we'll be turning to the japanese honorific to imbue the text with the same kind of polite speech you get from calling someone with the english prefixes. Whilst you could argue that it's obvious what her gender because we managed to figure out it was a she, and we're using the pronoun she, this does not apply to all teachers in the novel and thus, we're implementing it before it becomes a problem for consistency reasons.

Chapter end