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Section 1
## Character Introductions
Taiwan edition, reposted from the Wooden Club Academy Source / scan / OCR: kratti First proofread: kratti Marie: A housekeeper wandering from one Kōno household to the next! Behind the cute looks, her tongue is pure venom. Her trademark look is twin braids with a deep-blue dress. Watch out—when those braids start to glow, something strange is about to happen?! Measurements: 82, 58, 84. Sōsuke Oyamada: A lecherous masochist who lives for being dressed down by his boss, Tsubaki. He is, in fact, a detective with a real talent for cracking cases (?). Once he learns who Marie really is, he begs her to help him work cases. Get mixed up with Marie and disaster follows! Every day is an ordeal of broom beatings, signs dropping out of the sky, and worse. Ayano Tsubakigi: Alias, “the Camellia Princess of the Hachiōji Prefectural Police.” A beautiful inspector, still single at thirty-nine, who can never quite let go of her fixation on marriage. She has a terrible habit: the moment she learns a suspect is single, her casework slows to a crawl! Her charms are rimless glasses and lovely legs! She is a sadist…!
## The Magician and the Inverted Room
1 “If you’re going to kill someone, beating them to death is best. It’s the simplest method, and it doesn’t take any time.” A low, weighty voice filled the reception room. Jirō Minami, a middle-aged man in a threadbare shirt, pressed the point again. “So we settle it by beating them to death. No objections, right?” At that, the two hard-faced people seated with him both nodded. One of them, Kengo Takahashi, sleeves rolled up, said with a grave face: “But just beating them to death isn’t enough, is it? We still have to work at throwing the police off. For example—” “A locked room!” Keiichi Shimao, in a dark-blue jacket, cut in. “A locked-room murder is best. You do it in a sealed space no one can break into. That is the ultimate perfect crime—” “Hold on, Shimao.” Takahashi broke in. “A locked room is too unrealistic. I think what you really want is a solid alibi. Say the murder happens in Shinjuku while the killer is far away in Hachiōji—something like that—” “That is unbearably dull!” Shimao slapped the table. “And breaking an alibi is not, at bottom, something you can handle with footage.” “What did you say!” Takahashi shot to his feet. “Nobody’s thinking about some damn footage when they’re killing someone!” Takahashi and Shimao faced off, arguing until they were red in the face. Jirō Minami watched the two of them at his ease and said with certainty, “Footage matters. After all, this is a movie.” A murder on screen ought to be vivid and beautiful to begin with. Jirō’s low voice filled the reception room again, and the two men locked in argument, as if they had heard the gospel, at once bowed their heads in meek—
## The Magician and the Lost Button
1 On the wooden floor, at least thirty women in brightly colored athletic wear. From middle-aged women to young ones, the ages spread wide. They nearly filled the large room, and to the beat of the music they kept swinging their bodies hard. Leading them was Kenzō Izumida, a muscular man of forty in a tank top, thick through the arms, solid with muscle. He exercised right along with them, barking and driving them on like a demon of an officer. “No resting! Push a little harder! Come on, one, two, one, two—yes, that’s good.” At his count the women’s breathing grew shorter and shorter, and a peculiar heat hung in the air around them. Astonishing fat-heat—Kenzō wiped away the sweat dripping down and murmured it under his breath. Fat-heat. That is the common name for the damp, warm, killing “heat” a woman’s whole body gives off when she is trying to slim down, trying to burn off extra fat, repeating effort that gets her nowhere. “All right, one, two, one, two—hips! Legs! Hips! Legs! Yes, just like that!” Kenzō’s fiery coaching went on. He was not merely a trainer. He was also the owner of this “Fitness Laboratory,” and he had designed a great many slimming routines; he was a well-known diet expert pushing exercise hard. His books and workout DVDs, in a dieting craze that went on and on like an idiot, sold and sold like a fool. Among them he also played the demon coach “Director Izumida,” and the super-extreme, brutally harsh (or, you might say, nearly impossible to actually do) slimming-workout DV…
## The Magician and the Two Signatures
1 In the dim room there was no talking. No music, and no laughter. There was only the sound of breathing, regular and repeated. And the rustle of paper against a pen. A man sat at a desk. Before him were a notebook and a New Year’s card. A single lamp, not very bright, lit the area around his hands. His right hand held a fountain pen and wrote without stopping on the open page. The nib went shhh, shhh, shhh, like fluent, harmonious music, and now and then scratched kak, kak, kak, carving out a light melody. Little by little the notebook page filled with black ink. When at last the whole page was packed with writing, the man let out a tired sigh. “Not bad… but it still isn’t perfect…” He turned a page with his fingertips, stared at the blank sheet before him, gathered himself, and took up the pen again. In the dim room, the friction of paper and pen sounded once more. His hand never hesitated. Accurate as a machine, he wrote on and on. In no time the white page was occupied by black characters again— Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa, Teruhiko Yagawa… 2 The first time in his life Kōichi Matsuura ever performed an impression, he imitated “homeroom teacher Fujimoto tearing into Yoshida for forgetting his homework.” Looking back, that may have been the greatest turning point of his life. At the time Kōichi was in his second year of junior high, an unremarkable presence in the classroom, and what on earth…
## The Magician and the Pinch Hitter’s Alibi
1 It was a night in late July. In the very center of metropolitan Tokyo, where the day’s heat had not yet fully cooled— At Jingu Stadium, the baseball holy ground spread across Jingu Gaien, under harsh floodlights, a certain Swallows club and the Tamagawa Gōke team were locked in a fierce game. The stands were about sixty percent full: fans with megaphones in one hand, office workers just off the clock, couples ignoring the game and heating up on their own. Among them, the Hachiōji Police’s pride, the star of the next generation, Sōsuke Oyamada, sat in the left-field stands with Detective Wakasugi, the star of the generation after that. “Hey, senpai. Let’s get beer. Beer! Beer! Beer!” “All right, all right, I already said yes, so stop clapping! I’m in favor of beer, but I am not treating you.” Sōsuke, blunt as ever, gave Detective Wakasugi—who had his eye on Sōsuke’s wallet—a preventive shot, then raised a hand to the part-timer hawking beer. “Ah, hey, wait, mister, bee—” “Whoa, no, no!” Detective Wakasugi hurriedly pulled Sōsuke’s raised hand down. “Senpai, what are you thinking? Why would you buy beer from a guy like that!” “Huh!? A guy like that? You know that part-timer?” “What!? Why would I know a guy like that?” What Detective Wakasugi said made no sense at all. Still, having called a stranger “a guy like that,” Detective Wakasugi pressed on as if doubling down and delivered his theory. “Senpai, look. This Jingu Stadium, besides a pile of idiots who live and die for the game, has a whole lot of…”