Six months earlier the owner of the island was brutally murdered alongside his wife and housekeepers, and the case remains unsolved. Seven students, members of their university's mystery club, decide to spend a week-long vacation on Tsunojima Island off the coast of Japan. The second English-language edition was published in December 2020 by Pushkin Press, and in July 2021 the manga adaptation, illustrated by Hiro Kiyohara, was announced for publication in America. Locked Room International published the first English-language edition of the novel in 2015. The Decagon House Murders belongs to the honkaku subgenre of mystery fiction. Borrowing its basic plot structure from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (Christie's book is directly referenced by some of the characters at several points), it tells the story of a group of seven university students who travel to a deserted island that was the scene of a grisly mass murder six months earlier, where events soon turn ominous. Otherwise, he could have just gone to the police and confessed normally.The Decagon House Murders ( 十角館の殺人, Jūkakukan no satsujin) is a 1987 Japanese mystery novel, the debut work of author Yukito Ayatsuji. It was the killer's way of leaving the 'judgement' in anyone's hands but his own.

And now Shimada can make the final judgement about what to do with this information: use it expose the killer's crime, or leave it buried forever. The answer was 'no', so he asks a child to hand the bottle to other man (who I assume is Shimada). then that would mean he was in the wrong.Īnd so when he finds the bottle again, at the very end, he figured it was life's way of answering his question about whether his actions were just or not. However, if the bottle was to return to this land. If the bottle disappeared forever, then it would mean that his judgement was right. So the sea, fate, god however you want to call it, was asked to make that judgement instead. He thinks judgement is in order, but it's not a human's place to make that judgement- and a mere human will never become a god either. The text refers to it as his 'conscience' or 'a letter of confession'. The killer wrote his murder plans on a few sheets of paper, just to put it in the green bottle and throw it into the sea. (view spoiler) [This is my interpretation, but feel free to take it with a pinch of salt.

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