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Nanase’s truck might be the same one that crashes into the monster in the previous chapter. And it feels like the detective hasn't done jack in regards to solving the mystery. My hope was that the second volume would serve as an answer arc to the many mysteries in the previous volume. Unfortunately, we don't really get any explicit answers to much of anything.
One thing I'm curious about is the significance of Nanase's teddy bear. Recall there's a teddy bear with her often. It's the only member of the audience during the sex show in chapter 16. The protagonist wakes up holding one at the start of chapter 11. Interestingly, the guy who hires the detective in chapter 10 has a very similar teddy bear.
If anyone's wondering about chronology, things are definitely out of order. It's at the end of chapter 3 when Misato asks for Hitomi to be disciplined, and the protagonist arrives home to be greeted by Nanase. So we know Hitomi is being used as a sex slave from then on. If we saw her in chapters 4-18, then her appearance must either be a fantasy or take place in the past (or possibly even a mix of both as we saw Futaba turn into a monster in chapter 17).
As for Nanase being off the island during scenes with the detective, perhaps those events are taking place in a parallel world. Remember that we see the masked man who hires the detective watching a pornographic film featuring several of the manga's female characters, three of whom have penises. The girls we see with Rokurou do not have penises though. So the actors in the film cannot be the same ones Rokurou interacts with. Also recall Nanase easily kills a bunch of armed men who want info on an unidentified man, possibly Rokurou. And isn’t it silly that Nanase suddenly becomes a trucker?
Page 86 (vol. 2): a bunch of unidentified hands clapping (Nanase watering a rabbit tea party)
Page 137 (vol. 2): unidentified hands again (protagonist saving Hitomi)
Didn't find any such panel in the first volume, but a chapter in it tells us the mother has a video of herself being violated by her son.
So everything at the mansion could possibly have been recorded, and the unidentified hands belong to the audience: the masked individuals we saw at the very end. The women being visibly pregnant would mean the recording is at least several months old.
For a less literal interpretation of the read, a user on MangaDex found the following message on a porn site.
It's a metaphor for relationships. The mansion where all the women live is within the dude's mind. His mother, his sister, and girls he has had past relationships with, exaggerated as sexual, are in there. They dislike Hitomi because she's the actual girl Rokurou has settled with and they're unhappy with being replaced as the object of his affection. He's most likely in a coma from falling off a cliff into the ocean but that too could be a metaphor. The blonde detective and maid are most likely his subconscious defense mechanisms or something similar to that. It's very reasonable and a wonderful level of artistry for hentai
The final line, "Wake up Rokurou," would support the idea that our guy is in a coma. Though I'm not sure why the line comes from a radio, which also has lines on page 65 (chapter 13).
I already mentioned this in a previous thread, but here's what appears in the margin on the last page of chapter 16: 参考資料 (reference material)「Little Women (若草物語)」L・M・オルコット (Louisa May Alcott). Will this manga make more sense if we read that novel? Lol. That’s not the only text that’s referenced by the way. Notice the stuff on the back of the second volume?
That is a quote from Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “The rational is real, and the real is rational.” I suspect we need an understanding of Hegel’s philosophy to make sense of chapter 13. There’s stuff on the back of the first volume as well.
That is a quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?: “Only friends can set out a plane of immanence as a ground from which idols have been cleared.”
Since the page at the end of the second volume wasn’t translated, I’ve included a machine translation of it (DeepL). Google OCR made some errors, but this is probably the best we’ve got until someone who actually knows Japanese translates it.
I am aware that "there is nothing outside the text of a good work" is a key proposition of the postmodern North, led by Jacques Derrida, but of course it has been posited as opposed to materialist Marxist criticism, which holds that the superstructure of art, literature, and expression is defined by a substructure of economic and industrial institutions, and biographical criticism, which holds that every element of a work reflects the author's personal experience. This is, of course, a reasonable interpretation, but it does not mean that a work of art is not a work of art.
It's also important to note that there's a distinction between romanticism and stasis criticism. It is enough to point out that Romantic criticism pursues the one and only absolute interpretation of the author's true intentions, while Western criticism does not pursue such an interpretation. Of course, this dynamic of "form" can be applied beyond the framework of individual works, even to the relationships between works that cannot be called forms if they are contained within the framework of works. If we extend this argument, it would also apply to our individual appearances talking about the work in such a form, and even to appearances seemingly unrelated to the work. It would not be an exaggeration to say that all the places where language and symbolic representation are woven together (this is also the place where expression and interpretation meet) are "texts" (in which case each work is a part of the "text"). If this is the case, then this is the case.) If this is the case, then this "rakshto" would overlap with Jacques Lacan's "imagining the symbolic world" (not to mention that at this point Roland Barthes’ "death of the author" would be possible).
I hope that the discussion so far will answer the question of what kind of system will be used to weave the "rakust" together.
I hope that this discussion will answer the question, "What will be the system for weaving the rakshasa? The distinction between "rakshasa" and "rakshasa" may be important for the rasiqazis, but it is not so important here.
The distinction between the symbolic world and the imaginary world may be important to the Rashikazi, but it is not so important here, so I will skip it). Now that we have come this far, all we have to do is to Now that we have come this far, it is clear what we must do. The first proposition should be transformed into its logical counterpart, as in this book. The first proposition should be transformed as a logical counterpart to this one: "Everything is in the Tecmato.”
Lastly, there’s one more chapter related to this story in a separate volume. “Island Bangai-hen: Rokurou to Maid.” But I’m not sure if there’s an English translation of it.
If anyone wants to see an earlier form of the story, look at the version of the chapters that were originally published in Comic Tenma. The chapter featuring Nanase’s crazy story is shorter. The guy who hires the detective looks different and is watching a different pornographic video. The family photo contains Hitomi. (This is not an exhaustive list of the differences.)
