Strange Pictures

Chapter 3’s title page features a line drawing of a mountain scene. The background of the drawing is marked off into a grid pattern.

Yoshiharu Miura is an art teacher. He works hard to be a good teacher, friend, and family man, but sometimes he likes to go off by himself to hike and camp on a mountain near his home. On one such trip in 1992, he is murdered. Along with his battered body, the police find a drawing of the view from his vantage point on the mountain.

When the student leader of the school art club that Miura supervised is interviewed, she says that Miura was a hot-tempered man who was widely disliked at school. Miura’s wife confesses that she and her husband were not close, as she disliked Miura’s domineering and insensitive parenting of their son. Even Miura’s long-time friend, Toyokawa, has little good to say about the man. Miura, he says, was arrogant and self-involved. Miura used the fact that he had gotten Toyokawa work at the school to pressure Toyokawa into always going along with whatever Miura wanted to do.

Three years later, a young newspaper employee, Shunsuke Iwata, finally persuades his boss,