Chapter 125: The Ainu

The next morning, Akiwara Yuto sat up from his bed and rubbed his slightly aching head.

After receiving the payment yesterday, he had taken the initiative to invite President Anjiu and five other employees to a high-end restaurant nearby for a premium kaiseki meal.

Although he spent quite a bit of money, it was merely a drop in the bucket compared to his current net worth.

However, during this banquet, the people from Anjiu Bookstore kept toasting him repeatedly, even Satake Maki, who had always appeared very gentle.

Out of consideration for his business partners, Akiwara Yuto had no choice but to drink every toast until he was unconscious.

He had no memory of what happened afterward.

He stood up and patted his face to sober himself up. Just then, he was surprised to find that his bedroom looked as if it had been cleaned; it could truly be called spotless.

It seems it was probably Satake Maki who brought him back last night, right?

In any case, he would thank her properly next time.

Akiwara Yuto stood up, walked down the stairs, took a pack of bread from the refrigerator, and hurriedly finished his breakfast. Immediately after, he put on his outdoor clothes and headed toward the internet cafe.

Twenty minutes later, he sat in front of a cubicle and opened the mystery forum.

To be honest, after gaining a massive influx of traffic from his book reviews, he didn't think much of the roughly 1, 00 views per week that the forum brought in.

Moreover, once this update finished, the buzz would quickly die down, and the post would likely sink to the bottom soon.

But after some thought, Akiwara Yuto decided to see it through to the end; after all, if he left before the work finished serializing, he would feel too sorry for the readers who had been waiting on the forum for his updates.

Having made this decision, he clicked the "Edit Post" button, began typing on the keyboard, and entered the final installment of "The Death of a Mystery Novelist."

According to the detective's account, the female caregiver had already been proven innocent, but the hospital suddenly received a phone call.

The detective gave the female caregiver a look, signaling her to answer the phone. After listening, the female caregiver told everyone it was news about the butler—he was still alive.

Upon hearing this, the eldest grandson suddenly became panicked and flustered.

A memory began to surface in his mind.

After he had swapped the morphine and the medication, he had expected the mystery novelist to die of a morphine overdose, but unexpectedly, the novelist had died by suicide, which left him deeply puzzled.

This was because he had anonymously hired a detective to come and solve the case.

Furthermore, his act of sneaking upstairs to swap the morphine and medication had been discovered by the butler, who had taken the blood reports and other evidence, using them to write a blackmail letter to him.

After learning the truth from the female caregiver, the eldest grandson decided to go all the way: first, he burned down the hospital office, destroying the evidence that proved the female caregiver's innocence; second, he severely wounded the butler, leaving him near death, and stole the documents from him; third, he fabricated an email to lure the female caregiver to the scene of the butler's death and frame her.

But to his surprise, faced with the butler who might have blackmailed her, the female caregiver had chosen to call an ambulance and save him, and the awakened butler would inevitably become the key witness to testify to the eldest grandson's crimes.

The detective looked at the eldest grandson's shocked expression, smiled, and told him that he had already deduced everything, advising him to turn himself in early.

Realizing he had been completely defeated, the eldest grandson flew into a rage, stood up, and threatened the female caregiver: "So what if I did kill him? The person isn't dead anyway, and you have no evidence!"

Just then, the female caregiver suddenly vomited. It turned out she had just lied.

Due to a physiological reaction, she would vomit whenever she lied, so she had been holding it in until now.

The detective laughed. He had already recorded the conversation with his phone, and the lie the female caregiver just told was something he had specifically arranged, with the goal of making the eldest grandson confess his crimes.

Upon realizing all this, the eldest grandson could only kneel on the ground in despair, covering his face with his hands.

After inputting all of this, Akiwara Yuto stood up and prepared to leave.

After this serialization attempt, he planned not to serialize on the forum again; after all, the traffic he could attract there was far less effective than a single book review.

So, it could be considered a failure.

Before closing the webpage, he thought for a moment and added a line at the bottom of the final installment: "Author of this book: Akiwara Yuto."

Then he shut down the computer and left the internet cafe, preparing to go do other work.

Tokyo, Adachi Ward, "Adachi News" Editorial Department.

Sakaguchi Keito was sitting in front of his computer, scrolling incessantly with his mouse, reading through the serialization that Akiwara Yuto considered a failure—"The Death of a Mystery Novelist."

Sakaguchi Keito was a social news reporter, but beyond his identity as a reporter, he was also an Ainu.

The Ainu are the indigenous people of Japan. Many historians believe they originated from the Ezo in northern Honshu, and as of today, there are about 200, 00 of them, mainly distributed in Hokkaido.

Because they are not the majority ethnic group, the Ainu in Japan suffer from significant political, institutional, and cultural discrimination.

During the Meiji era, the shogunate forcibly renamed "Ezo" to "Hokkaido" and moved in large numbers of new immigrants, the Yamato people. For this, they even confiscated a vast amount of land belonging to the Ainu and allocated it to the new immigrants.

Later, under the protests of the Ainu, the government's attitude improved somewhat, but it still defined all Ainu as "former natives," distinguishing them from the mainstream Japanese group, the "Wajin."

This distinction has caused the Ainu to be marginalized by Japanese society to this day, to the point of being classified as "Burakumin," the Japanese outcaste class, and they face severe discrimination in job hunting and daily life.

Sakaguchi Keito sighed. As a graduate of Tokyo University, his original life plan should have been to join a larger newspaper, but due to background checks, he was repeatedly rejected during job searches, leaving him with no choice but to work at "Adachi News," the worst newspaper in Tokyo.

After a moment of silence, he cleared his mind and continued reading "The Death of a Mystery Novelist" on the screen.

This morning, another Ainu compatriot had told him that a novel featuring an Ainu protagonist had appeared online.

This had surprised him greatly!

One must know that due to the status of the Ainu, in recent years, one could hardly find a trace of the Ainu in any cultural work.

So, could the author of this piece be an Ainu?

Sakaguchi Keito frowned and began to think. Just for this reason, no matter how well the other person wrote, he had to support this author.

After all, as a vulnerable group in Japanese society, sticking together for warmth was the way to survive!

Having made this decision, Sakaguchi Keito started from the first installment and began to read it carefully.

But as he read on, he discovered that the brilliance of this story was beyond his imagination!