While most of the explanations in the book I can get behind, there are a couple of things that I found hard to digest. I find it quite implausible that somebody can recognize a person they haven’t seen in decades so clearly as Michiko did. She would have only met them a handful of times even before, and to remember features of a person so clearly to recognize them in a crowd decades later, and with so much conviction that hearing no from that person doesn’t dissuade you sounds very implausible.

The explanation in the book is a mole, and I for one don’t buy it. Moles are not that uncommon, and if this specific mole was such an outright distinguishing feature, why would someone in Tadao Asai’s shoes not get rid of it? I’m not talking about plastic surgery, that’s going too far, but you can surely get it clipped off… Even if not that, you can grow facial hair (it would mask the mole, the mole is positioned below the left ear) and start keeping a bald hairstyle to look very different from what you did before.

Tadao already had murdered a person before after being recognized! Why would he not take precautions for that to not happen again? This is probably my biggest gripe with the book.

I had initially liked how the two cases were connected by a common mapping of months to bridges. I thought it would be a banger of a clue that I had no idea what to make of. This is the kind of stuff I love to read, stuff that is fresh and new. But I was disappointed by the explanation for that too. After Hiromi became famous and they decided to move their meetings to bridges, they still needed to contact each other to know when to meet…

It would have made sense if the meeting times were also on a schedule, but they weren’t. If you’re going to communicate with each other on a cell phone as to when to meet, you might as well decide on the location too on the phone. What is the mapping of month to bridge serving other than another clue for the police? Had the mapping not existed, the two cases (Michiko’s murder, and Yuriko’s death) wouldn’t even have been connected together. Kaga wouldn’t have picked up the case, the book wouldn’t exist 😂

If we discount these two things, then everything else is very well explained. The book has got a nice pace to it once it picks up, but like I said before, there are oh so many characters. And then characters also using false names, so it is a lot to keep track of.