Jorge Joestar (Light Novel)

Chapter 2: Nishi Akatsuki

My name is Jorge Joestar. I'm fifteen years old, and live in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. I'm English...but I look and probably am Japanese. For reasons I've never known, my Japanese birth parents were unable to look after me, or never intended to do so; without even giving me a name I was handed over to the authorities, and adopted by the Joestar family. So I was given a name that could be either English or Japanese. According to Japanese law, when I turn eighteen I'll have to pick either Japanese citizenship or English; at the same time, I have to select a formal name. Currently my official name is spelled out in katakana, with no kanji or Roman letter spelling set. The Roman letters in my passport read JOJI JOESTAR, which is super lame. If I go with Japanese citizenship, on my eighteenth birthday I'll have to pick kanji for the name, and currently I'm leaning towards the kanji for 'transferred' and 'child' (譲児) in keeping with the Japanese idea that one's name should describe you. But since I was raised English, trying to act like I'm Japanese now feels like I'm pretending; I'm used to the katakana, and don't really care what my Japanese name is. As far as the English name, despite the strong objections of my family, I'm dead set on Jorge, so I write it like that any time I get the chance. I'm not the least bit Latin, but my friends all call me Jojo, and I get called Detective Jojo a lot. But if I went with George Joestar the nickname Jojo would be impossible. If nothing else, Joji wouldn't cause any problems with the nickname, but if I let any native English speakers read it, they'd never pronounce it right. Joji is a reading by and for Japanese speakers. If details don't add up right I get agitated, and start searching for a better way. This trait has lead to my room being very clean, and made me a great detective. And that very trait is getting up my nose right now. Something had been bothering me for a while, and was coming to a head. This particular itch had been nagging me for the last couple

of years, ever since I solved fifteen locked room mysteries in a row, but two serial killer investigations had distracted me for basically this entire year. But now that I'd successfully caught the triplet dismemberment psycho, Guruguru Majin, and had received word that they'd finally tracked down the serial torturer Nail Peeler after his daring escape six months back I was finally able to relax. I made a full report of my escapades to my father, who – a victim of a particularly misguided attempt at selecting a Japanese sounding name – was named Jonda Joestar. Then I went to bed, and finally remembered the source of my discontent. Specifically, a newspaper article that laid out the locations of the fifteen locked room mysteries on a map of Fukui Prefecture. All the cases had happened in the Northern half of Fukui, in the area called Reihoku. The newspaper article numbered them in the order they'd been committed; in other words, the order the victims died. This made sense from a news perspective, but my immediate thought was that it was totally the wrong approach to these particular cases. The trick to locked room mysteries lies in their discovery. The realization that the room has been locked from the inside is what defines them. The killer's job ends with the discovery. I made a mental map of them numbered in order of discovery.

Something about this map had been tickling the corner of my mind for a while now. My instincts told me this order had meaning. My first thought was that the locations were drifting slowly south. Each of the fifteen cases had a killer, and we'd found no links between the killers, the victims, or any other aspects of the cases. But the cases did occur more or less from north to south, moving like a cold front across the map. Fukui's Reihoku area

wasn't terribly large; fifteen locked room mysteries happening in rapid succession was enough to make you wonder if the urge to commit a locked room murder was somehow communicable. An outbreak of the locked room murder syndrome. I had a vague memory of some expert suggesting as much on the news. Maybe it worked like dismemberment; it was a known fact that once the idea entered the public consciousness that cutting up your victim made it easier to carry, to hide the body, and to throw investigators off the track, we saw a sharp rise in the number of mutilated corpses. But if that was the case, the influence would have spread to the whole country, and the trend would not have died out after only fifteen cases. But it had. As far I knew, in the year since the fifteenth cases, there had been no locked room mysteries at all. This fifteen were an isolated group. They looked like they had no connections...or someone was making them look that way. I opened the mental map again, and stared at it. Was there a pattern that lay beneath the seemingly random spread? Some principle at work? Something beyond the general spread to the south, a boundary, or...border? These were locked room murders; they took place in enclosed areas. If there was some sort of border around each of them? Why had the word border caught my attention? Maps have an outline around them, marking the borders of the location or place depicted. I felt sure the scenes of each crime weren't scattered at random, but carefully placed at appropriate distances, placed as far away from each other as the border allowed. But I couldn't quite see where the boundaries were. Why not? There had been no cases discovered in the city of Takefu, leaving a big white space, and that felt like it was getting in the way of me seeing the pattern. If a sixteenth case had happened there,