C.M.B. volume 41 review

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C.M.B., vol. 41, by Katou Motohiro. Grade: B
Seikatsu Iin (Life Committee, Monthly Shonen Magajin, 2019 #1)
Japanese schools have a "life committee", which is effectively a problem-solving group of students tasked with things like unclogging toilets and replacing burned-out lights. This week, it's Shinra's and Tatsuki's turn, much to Shinra's displeasure. And, it starts out rough, with an altercation between a group of moving company workers and the Gardening club. The workers have been contracted to move the garden and a small wooden weather station, and the students howl about this being done without their consent. Tatsuki's grandfather is the school principal, so she goes to ask him what's happening. He answers that the wooden weather station housing is rotting and becoming dangerous, and no one uses the measuring equipment anymore. And, the garden bed is in the way of a building expansion he wants to make to allow for displaying an expensive new painting he's acquired for the school. He just forgot to notify the students of the project, and because he's busy now, he wants Tatsuki to handle everything.

Of course, the Gardening club vows to fight back, and one of the students kicks a wooden plank with the nails sticking up under the truck as it backs up, causing a flat. The moving company manager sees the student do this and demands the kids take the tire to a gas station for repairs and refilling. As Tatsuki is dealing with all this, Shinra is called to unplug a toilet in the boy's stalls, replace a burned out fluorescent light, clean up muddy footprints in the front hall of the school, and try to deal with a food thief. Eventually, Tatsuki discovers the reason the boys in the club don't want the flower bed moved - the school had been visited by a pretty transfer student from Australia, and she'd given them a packet of flower seeds as a memento. The boys stupidly fought over who would be able to plant the seeds, and they ended up spilling the seeds haphazardly all over the place. Since they have no idea which plants are the Australian girl's, they just want the flower bed left alone. When Shinra learns of this, he gets upset, since these seeds are of an invasive species banned by the Japanese Invasive Species Act. He and two of the other boys have to put on booties and clean suits in order to avoid accidentally spreading the plant seeds further around the school, and find all of the seedlings starting to sprout right now in the flower bed.

Questions: Is this the end of a really long, bad day, or is something else waiting to happen? Are these events all connected in some way? Is there a reason why one of the moving crew decided to take the day off to go play pachinko?

Natural History: Nothing.

Payment: Nothing mentioned.

===== Spoilers =====

Actually, yes, some of this is connected. The missing worker had been the one that had tracked the mud into the school as he made his way to the boy's room. He jammed the toilet with paper badly enough that Shinra had to put up an "Out of Service" sign on the door. The worker then hid in that stall to wait until the school closed. Unfortunately, he'd gotten hungry, and slipped out to grab a couple sandwiches from the desks in one of the classrooms. His plan was to steal the Principal's painting while it remained in unprotected storage. Shinra figures all this out, and the crew is waiting outside the stall when the would-be thief emerges from hiding. To add the final insult, Shinra's classmates tell him "as to be expected from the Life Committee."

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Fuuin Soukitan (Tales of Sealed Castle, Monthly Shonen Magajin, 2019 #2)
Shinra is commissioned by the final heir to the Funagawa banking group family to assist in mapping out one of the abandoned mansions the family owns in order to prepare it for sale. The place is out in the countryside, on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It had been built incorporating both Japanese and Australian architectural elements towards the turn of the century, and is rumored to be the site of a murder, and is therefore haunted. The assessment company's team is headed by Mansaku Sugimoto, and consists of four other workers, including one Tatsuhiko Kusunoki. Tatsuhiko constantly rants about the building being haunted, and how they all need to get out of there now before being cursed, and he gets two of the other workers riled up as well. Mansaku is more pragmatic, and says if they don't work, they don't get paid. They spend the day flying drones over and around the mansion, and using laptop software to draw up the floor plans as they go along.

When they go into the building, they eventually discover a hidden trapdoor leading into a basement. And in the basement is a kind of prison cell, with heavy wooden 2x4s making an interlaced front wall (adding to the murder rumors). The door to the cell has a padlock, and the only key is on the ring given to Mansaku. At the end of the day, Shinra and Tatsuki go to town to stay at a hotel, and the crew plans to sleep near the dining room inside the mansion. Mansaku is the only one that thought ahead to bring food and just enough beer for himself. One member, Yoshio Tsuge, is sent to town to buy cup ramen for the others. Tatsuhiko claims to see a white shadow out in the woods at the base of the mansion and goes out to check. He's followed by Tatsuji Kuromatsu, leaving the last guy, Masaki Natsume, inside (Mansaku got drunk and fell asleep in his sleeping bag). Tatsuhiko falls down the cliff, apparently pushed, and Tatsuji is shoved down the cliff as well and hits his head against a tree. When Masaki hears a noise in the basement, he goes down the stairs to check it out, and is hit from behind. Yoshio returns from town with the food, and encounters both Tatsuhiko and Tatsuji as they work their way back up the cliff. The trio enter the mansion, and see the door open leading to the closet with the trapdoor, and they go downstairs to find Masaki unconscious in the prison cell, the padlock still on the door where Mansaku had left it locked up.

Questions: Is the house haunted? Is there someone else in there with them? Who is the attacker and what does it want? Is there a secret to the prison cell, and how did Masaki get put in there if the door had been locked and Mansaku had the only key?

Natural History: Nothing much.

Payment: The Funagawa heir offered Shinra a rare pearl to take on the assessment job.

===== Spoilers =====

The wooden prison cell frame beams are interwoven like the straps you see on folding beach chairs. Generally, this would be an impossible puzzle object, since the beams aren't flexible like cloth webbing is. However, this is an example of Japanese chidori (woven) woodworking exemplified by Kumiko Hida. The trick is that the joint cuts are deeper than they look, turning the prison cell frame into a VERY large 3D wood puzzle. If you pull one horizontal bar forward, and push a neighboring horizontal bar back, it creates enough of a gap for 2 of the vertical bars to slide up and leave an opening at the floor that someone could crawl through. The perpetrator is Tatsuhiko, who had recognized the trick when he first saw the prison cell frame. He then tied a rope to a tree near the cliff at the base of the house, and claimed to see a white shadow to get Tatsuji to follow him outside. He grabbed the rope and pretended to fall down the hillside, clambered back up the rope, and pushed Tatsuji down the hill. The idea was to steal the drones and computer equipment for sale later, and hide them in the prison cell overnight. But, Masaki heard him, so Tatsuji knocked him out, locked him in the cell, and moved the gear into the woods. Shinra figures this all out, and Mansaku takes his wrath out on his insubordinate.

Note: All of the workers have kanji for trees in their last names, except for Masaki (which translates to "True Tree").

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Hamaguri-ke no Hitobito (The Hamaguris, Monthly Shonen Magajin, 2019 #3)
Saburou Hamaguri is a retired apartment block ("mansion" in Japanese) owner, who runs several different complexes. He's always been successful, so his adult children had been able to grow up in luxury and free to pursuit their own interests. After Saburou's wife died, he became more of a shut-in, with a very strict routine he would follow each day. Recently, he'd fallen under the spell of a young woman living in a neighboring apartment, Maya (Ma = magic, ya = question mark). After this, one of Saburou's daughters sees her father give money to Maya, and then checks his bank book only to learn he'd taken out $5,000 at a time, several times in the last week. When she confronted her father about this, he just told her "it's my money, I can do what I want with it." The daughter, and the rest of her siblings and their children, go to the police to report a possible crime (scamming an old person), but there's no evidence of anything wrong, and the police claim their hands are tied. Instead, the Hamaguri's latch onto Shinra and Tatsuki after they leave the police department building (Shinra had been helping Det. Kujirazaki on something). The family pours their story out, and Shinra tells them to hire a lawyer.

A few days later, a couple of the family members burst into Shinra's museum to report their father has gone missing. Tatsuki joins them, and tracks Maya down to a cave hidden behind a Shinto shrine out in the mountains. Maya is in the middle of a strange ceremony involving a gold skull and a pair of interlocking wands that indicate she's a member of an ancient banned Buddhist sex cult. Tatsuki reports what she's learned to Kujirazaki, and he follows her out to the shrine, where they now find Saburou's corpse leaning against the cave wall. Kujirazaki calls it in, and forensics determines that he's been dead for a while, probably of natural causes. The speculation is that the old man had decided to follow the cult's premise of Sokushinbutsu (Buddhist mummies), and had crawled into the cave to die. The Hamaguri family attacks Kujirazaki, yelling that this is why they'd been pushing so hard for the police to investigate Maya - It's all the police's fault.

Questions: Is this the end of the story? Can Maya be arrested for assisted suicide? What happens next? Why is Shinra so interested in looking at the old man's smartphone, which has no data on it?

Natural History: Just a discussion of the difference between Sokushinbutsu and Sokushinjoubutsu.

Payment: None mentioned.

===== Spoilers =====

The gold skull and interlocking maces hint towards Tachikawa-ryu, an ancient form of Buddhist esotericism founded in 1114 by the monk Ninkan. The problem is, Ninkan taught Sokushinjoubutsu, which means that everyone is a LIVING Buddha. Sokushinbutsu are the mummified priests, and are a completely different thing. So, Maya is a fraud, but so is everything else. Shinra states that one day, about a week ago, Saburou had died at home of a heart attack, without leaving a will. His children panicked at the idea being cut off from the estate, and the oldest daughter came up with the idea of their father being the victim of a con artist. They started pulling money out of their father's account using his ATM card, and then used some of that to hire an actress to play Maya. When the police failed to take the bait, the family targeted Shinra and Tatsuya as having some kind of connection to the cops. The entire thing of Maya worshiping at a shrine in the cave was just an act. Afterward, the family moved Saburou's body from where it had been kept cold to the cave for it to be found. The flaw in the Hamaguri's plan was in mistaking the Tachikawa sect's beliefs for the Buddha mummies group. The proof of the scam is that Saburou was a man of habit, and one habit was to take a long walk every day, and record it on his Fitbit to be downloaded to his phone afterward. This phone app shows that he'd stopped exercising at the time the family claimed he first encountered Maya. Now, it's time for Kujirazaki to yell at the Hamaguris.

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Ito to Shashin (Stone and Photograph, Monthly Shonen Magajin, 2019 #4)
Shinra and Tatsuki are in Peru to visit Machu Picchu, but their trip is interrupted by a hiker who had just been crushed under a stone. The hiker, Alma Molina, from Spain, had been part of a group of female friends that included Viviana Hollis, Elza Duran, and Tina Lee. The group had been hiking the trails, and had stopped for a break near a stone ruins. Elza took a few photos of flowers at the base of something that looks like a stone hut, and Alma said she wanted to take photos next. A few seconds later, a cylindrical stone fell off the roof of the structure and landed on Alma below, crushing her head. The police, and Shinra, investigate the scene, and it doesn't make any sense. The cylinder had originally been standing at the back of the roof, and a large stone bench in the middle of the roof would have prevented it from simply rolling forward to the front of the structure. The assumption by the police is "ghosts of the slain Inca" exacting revenge against tourists. But, Shinra finds half a broken glass bead, and part of a walnut on the roof. He and Tatsuki then interview the friends, and check the photos they've posted to their SNS sites. Mostly, the pictures are of the hobbies the friends have (travel, flowers, etc. Lee is a motorcycle enthusiast, and Viviana is a chef). However, some of the comments on Alma's page are trollish, and she'd been accused of being a thief.

Questions: Does someone have a thing against Alma? Is there a stalker, or are there ghosts? Do the bead and walnut have anything to do with anything? How did the stone cylinder get from the back of the hut roof past the bench thing?

Natural History: Just a mention of the Pocketbook flower, and a little history of the Machu Picchu region.

Payment: Nothing mentioned. Shinra might just be helping out the guide that was going to be taking him on the tour.

===== Spoilers =====

While the photos posted on sites like Facebook by the four women would normally look like just the results of four friends having great times together, a closer examination hints that Alma was an "idea thief." Anything the others did, she'd do too, only trying to do it better. Confronted with the evidence, Elza breaks down and admits that Alma had stolen her ideas, causing her to lose her job and her boyfriend. In revenge, Elza had bought a pair of large glass bead art pieces (shown in one of the Facebook photos) that could be separated into 6 wedge-like shapes. She'd put the wedges on the roof and set the cylinder on the wedge towards the back of the roof. The cylinder would then roll slowly forward, following the path made by the glass beads of the wedges, in a curve that bypassed the bench thing in the middle of the roof. Elza also put a walnut on the roof near the front, so that when the cylinder made a noise while crushing it, she'd have time to take a few pictures of the flowers, which would cause Alma to come up and automatically want to take photos of her own. The final proof is that the half bead fragment Shinra found matches a broken bead on the artwork (it's like a large hexagonal placemat) Elza had in her luggage.

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Summary: Nothing really exciting this time. Life Committee was kind of silly, and Tales of Sealed Castle has a big plot hole (the house has been abandoned for a long time, so there should be dust on the floor of the basement that would have been disturbed by stuff being dragged through the gap in the prison cell frame at floor level). I really liked the design of the interwoven prison cell bars, though. I couldn't really follow the cultural aspects of the Hamaguris story because of the more difficult kanji involved. Stone and Photograph was also a straightforward detective story, but the best part was the artwork of Machu Picchu and the surrounding area. Recommended if you like the series.