My Home Hero

The MC and his wife manage hide the fact he killed a yakuza member, but the yakuza become certain something is amiss with the couple. To show they are not fucking around, they abduct both simultaneously.

2020-05

Started reading the manga My Home Hero. What a thriller from the start. This young guy (Kyouichi) who goes spying and picking locks is really scary in a cool way. The other yakuza are scary because you are afraid they will beat the MC (Tetsuo) and his family into pulp and then kill them, but this guy is on another level because he is so professional that you are sure he will see through everything MC tries.

I wonder if Kyouichi will become MC’s nemesis, even though currently he seems to be quite low in the criminal organization hierarchy. I think that would be more interesting than him merely going up the org chart.

I also entertained the thought that MC and Kyouichi might work together (they already started that), when I thought that seemed somehow familiar. Then and it hit me: Death Note. Ever since I read Death Note, actually the first manga I ever read, I haven’t read a single “psychological” thriller remotely like it. I guess at some point I stopped thinking they exist at all, but there are a select few: Monster, 20th Century Boys (both by Urasawa), and probably few others I can’t remember right now.

(Quite rambling and badly edited text incoming)

Reading more My Home Hero. It did come to showdown between Tetsuo and Kyouichi. They revealed Kyouichi’s safe, in which a “proof bag” had suddenly appeared even though no one knew the combination or was able to access it since before when Kyouichi verified there was no such bag inside. After a minute of puzzling, my solution is this: Tetsuo deduced that Takeda, the other middle level boss, was the one who robbed the train (and thus robbed from the organization who was planning to rob it) with Nobuto (the dead guy). Tetsuo then handed Takeda the bag so that he could set up Kyouichi for the robbery and the murder of Nobuto and go free himself. And thus Tetsuo is also cleared of suspicion for the murder. If this is indeed the “trick”, then as writer of this story I would have Kyouichi escape instead of die, thus becoming a true nemesis of Nobuto who undoubtedly will somehow get roped even deeper into the organization business very soon.

Kyouichi is now explaining that very theory to others. Hah, but the videoed Kyouichi opening the safe and then verified the bag was already there. I did have the impression that top level mystery writing is like this, it sets up answers the reader can feel satisfied about thinking on his own, and then delivers the real answer that is something the reader couldn’t think of, perhaps because he was so self-satisfied with already knowing what was going to happen. Stop and think one more minute? Or just read to find out the real answer. If you do the latter, then the author got you. (Assuming here the author didn’t make the mistake of making the real solution way more implausible that the one the reader thought of.)

Even if Karen, Tetsuo’s wife, could have entered the apartment (which Tetsuo couldn’t), she shouldn’t be able to figure the safe combination even though she talked to Kyouichi’s mother before. Before we saw Kyouichi using a ridiculously strong password, so the safe number should be safe too. Replacing the whole safe would be too difficult as well, especially considering it somehow had roughly the same amount of money inside as before.

Takeda could possibly have had the resources to have the safe cracked and the bag planted beforehand. He might even have instructed the videoing of the event to make the illusion stronger.

Ah, fingerprints on the safe’s numeric keys. A ton of less combinations to try out, and nice use of that special flashlight that was previously introduced. Will they add some other detail to narrow the search?

I think you could open my old smartphone’s pattern lock with a similar technique. And I wonder if in the first apartment I lived the numeric lock had no been changed in such a long time that the keys being used were starting wear out. Still, I found it kind of a cheap trick in my book. Any safe of such model would be vulnerable to that attack, so it’s unlikely a security-minded person like Kyouichi would have chosen such a badly designed safe.

Anyway, I think now Tetsuo will come to regret his cruelty and find a way to set Kyouichi free. Since Kyouichi is the main suspect now, it won’t hurt Tetsuo if he is successful. Turns out Kyouichi escaped by himself. Makes sense, he did hurt Tetsuo way more than he helped him.

Reading manga. I stopped liking My Home Hero after Kyouichi went away.