fucking what

The Samurai Detectives Volume 2: The Killer On The Streets (Penguin Random House eBook Ver)

While it has that subtitle, that's just one of the stories in the book, I suppose the "core" one.

Again, a collection of magazine-serialised short stories by Shotaro Ikenami, in sequential order and following a sort-of overarching narrative across the set. I was incorrect on one thing last time; I guessed that the stories were set in 1779 in the first volume, but the stories here (all explicitly after the ones in volume 1) explicitly mention the rollover of the year into 1779 in this one. Either I or the translator slipped on the starting date of that one retainer's career or his length of service.

Some of the stories in this one are distinctly darker than any of the first volume's, with more graphic scenes and a particularly monstrous perp in one of them, with something of an eye to indicating the growing danger, depravity and darkness on the steets of Edo-era Tokyo, in the late years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Unless Volume 3 does some surprising shifts, it won't make it to the uprisings against and overthrow of Lord Tanuma, for instance, but it does feel like a pretty purposeful shifting towards increased violence and slipping control as the Tokugawa Shogunate enters its final century.

I would say there's more focus on actual detective work in this set than the first set, much more emphasis on Yashichiro the goyokiki being brought in to tail people and post spies and much more reasoning out about identities, but it's still mostly light on the actual detective side of things. It is, much more than the first volume, about following the retired samurai Kohei as he entertains himself in retirement with sticking his nose into incidents that crop up in his vicinity, with the last story of the set, "The Room of Orchids in Fujiro" only happening because he's explicitly bored and chose to spy on a pair using a particular room in a restaurant he caught people plotting in before.