Appraisal at the House of Mirrors

🪞 A house with far too many mirrors

Three months have passed since the death of Sukumo Kiyo, mistress of the Sukumo mansion on the hill. Only ten days remain before the demolition machinery moves in. In your second year at Kajitani & Co., estate clearance and antique buyers, you have been sent in to appraise this house. In the hallways, in the dining room, on the stair landings: mirrors, mirrors, mirrors, every one draped in cloth. The Japanese-bound ledger the deceased left behind, the Mirror Ledger, records the provenance and the "temperament" of each one. The total, it says, is sixty-six. But when you count, there are sixty-seven. Try to determine which mirror is the extra one, and the cross-check somehow never ends. Every morning, exactly one of the tags you were sure you fixed has come loose. The notice the deceased pasted on the storeroom door has five lines. "Look at the mirrors in pairs. Cover them with cloth once the sun goes down. Even if the reflection and the room differ, do not say so aloud." As you read on, you notice, in the full-length mirror in the hallway, a door that should be shut standing slightly open.

Characters

• Sukumo Riko (24): The granddaughter and sole heir. An apparel shop clerk whose creed is that things exist to be used, she finds her grandmother's rules a nuisance. The only thing she remembers about what she saw in this house the summer she was nine is that she cannot remember it.
• Yuge Tatsumi (58): A veteran appraiser specializing in mirrors, called in as backup. Blunt with people, yet he uses polite speech only with mirrors. According to him, a mirror memorizes the faces of a household in a hundred years. That is why secondhand mirrors are cheap.

How to play

As appraisal staff, you work with Yuge to cross-check the sixty-seven mirrors. Read the maker's marks, record the quirks, fix the tags, and finish work an hour before sunset to drape the cloths. As long as you keep the deceased's rules, the appraisal is simply careful work. Draw out Riko's memories of her grandmother, and the entries in the Mirror Ledger gradually take shape. But even when you notice a difference between the mirror and the room, you must not say so aloud. For every word spoken, the house begins to follow the reflection. In the ten days until demolition, can you tell the mirrors that can be taken out from the ones that cannot? On the last page of the Mirror Ledger, the deceased's final words are waiting. If you can count to sixty-six, they may go out. If it is sixty-seven, not yet.