Chapter 19

Chapter 19 is the nineteenth chapter of the Dead Mount Death Play manga.

Official Blurb
Phantom Solitaire takes the stage! Will this magician with a mission find a means to pull off the greatest trick imaginable?

Summary
In the hours following Phantom Solitaire's escape, Tsubaki Iwanome re-briefs Comps-3 on Solitaire's criminal start and some of the most notable crimes of Solitaire's criminal career leading up to Solitaire's arrest at Iwanome's hands. After the briefing, Fumiyo Yamada beckons Iwanome and his colleagues over to a televised news broadcast that, despite the police's gag order on the subject, is covering Solitaire's prison breakout.

Corpse God shows off his new antique radio to Takumi Kuruya, Misaki Sakimiya, and Miyabi Hosorogi before tuning it to a random news channel, which reports that a male suspected of arson died en route to a police station when the two police cars escorting him spontaneously combusted. The deceased suspect is Know, who set fire to the Shinoyama manor.

The radio segment changes to a breaking news story on Solitaire's escape and with it the female announcer to a male announcer—who, as the Comps-3 officers realize via the televised coverage, is none other than Solitaire himself, looking like a new man with his updated haircut and wardrobe. Solitaire announces that his comeback performance will be in a week's time. Iwanome and Kōzaburō Arase speculate that The Grocer assisted Solitaire by buying broadcasting rights across Japan.

When night falls, Solitaire enjoys its starry sky from one of Shinjuku's many rooftops—one which he 'happens' to share with Fire-breathing Bug.

Summary
Tsubaki Iwanome arranges an emergency meeting of Materials Compiling Group No.3 in the wake of Tena Sorimura's escape from the Tokyo penitentiary, which occurred earlier that day at 5:30 PM. After clarifying that Sorimura vanished right in front of his and Arase's eyes, he reviews Sorimura's criminal history.

Sorimura committed his first crime three years ago by stealing a museum's painting and leaving it in front of Studio Alta in a covered, air-conditioned case. His supposed motive? Giving Shinjuku's YouTubers "juicy material." Iwanome dismisses this as baloney. Of all the myriad crimes that followed, an especially striking one saw Sorimura camouflage a governmental office building by painting its exterior in a single night, causing onlookers to think the building had vanished. His supposed motive? To show residents that the Tokyo sky was larger than what they gave it credit for. Iwanome dismisses this as nonsense.

Cases also attributable to Sorimura include the Jumbo Jet Teleport and Shinjuku Imperial Garden Dream Fireworks incidents—but these are not the one that made Sorimura a worldwide name: that would be his kidnapping of Prime Minister Yumenosuke, and his subsequent kidnapping of all the opposing parties' leaders over the course of a single day. In a live broadcast, Sorimura had claimed that politics did not motivate his actions. When the prime minister was released that night, he told reporters and staff that he had returned to his senses while reading the manga "Gogo! Pudding Empire" in a manga café.

That Sorimura would turn himself in to police custody at the height of his criminal career, when the globe's attention was his for manipulating, was a baffling thought. Yet surrender himself to Iwanome he had, utterly despondent in having failed to attract the attention of "real deal" magicians and supernatural entities. All he has ever wanted, he had claimed, was to prove the realness of real illusions, and to be accepted by the 'real deal' as "one of their own." Worldwide attention? Bah, humbug.

Fluent in chuunibyou, Iwanome had translated Solitaire's justification for his criminal career as a "middle-school fantasy." Solitaire validates the accuracy of his translation: indeed, all of his antics he had done to make the dreams of the "imaginary middle-school student" caged in his heart come true. Iwanome promptly arrested him. The degree to which Sorimura's claims might have been fact or fiction remains indeterminable, he says, but what is determinable is what makes Sorimura most dangerous—and it is neither his above-average physical prowess nor exceptional skills.

In the Abandoned Building, the Corpse God, who now has ¥18,000 to his name, shows Takumi Kuruya and Misaki Sakimiya an antique 2000-yen radio he bought for information collection purposes. Takumi laments that the original ¥20,000 could have been spent on a cheap tablet instead, but Corpse God explains he would rather avoid devices that require regular fees until he has a regular income with which to afford them. 'Regular income' in this case does not include what spending money Rozan Shinoyama is providing, which Corpse God wants to reserve for emergencies rather than spend his way into Rozan's debt. Miyabi Hosorogi approves. When Takumi is no less underwhelmed by Polka Shinoyama's flip phone, Hosorogi remarks that an otherworlder is probably better off being acclimated to technology by starting with so-called 'outdated' tech. Takumi simply concludes that the Corpse God acts rather like a child for someone over a hundred years old.

The Corpse God plugs in his radio and tunes into a random news channel just in time to hear its female announcer switch from a story on 'body recovery' at a ruins site to an event that occurred in the afternoon: two police cars had spontaneously combusted while transporting a male suspect to a station, resulting in the suspect's death. Curiously, that suspect was arrested on suspicion of arson.

Takumi confirms everyone's suspicions: this was the man who caused the fire at the Shinoyama estate. Misaki asks if the Corpse God can summon his spirit to ask what happened, but the Corpse God explains that tracking down wandering spirits is harder than it is with earthbound spirits. They and the announcer are interrupted by the latter's own announcement of breaking news on Tena Sorimura.

Over at Shinjuku's police station, Fumiyo Yamada beckons Iwanome and others to the television: the local news is discussing Sorimura's escape despite the police issuing a gag order on the media, much to Iwanome's flabbergasted outrage.

The television-cum-radio broadcasts speak so admiringly of Sorimura that Hosorogi calls the news piece a commercial in disguise. Takumi explains to the five years-out-of-touch Hosorogi that Sorimura, who started out as a Shinjuku-based urban legend like Lemmings, is now so famous that few Japanese people; that said, urban legends typically do not receive this level of mass media coverage. Misaki draws their attention back to the news announcer, whose voice has changed from a woman's to a man's.

Iwanome demands the name of the broadcasting station, which proves irrelevant. All the radio and television channels are broadcasting the audio and audiovisual feeds of one gussied-up Phantom Solitaire, who has slicked his hair and donned a suit-and-smile for the camera. Iwanome's answering mirthless smile is rather clenched. "...That prick. You've really done it this time, Solitaire!"

Sorimura announces his return as "The Phantom Solitaire" and a concomitant comeback performance for which he generously gives the police a week's grace period with which to prepare. As this is not a particularly villainous gesture, he tauntingly suggests that the police ought to enjoy the remainder of their lives. Moments pass where Sorimura manages to be the picture of fiendish aplomb, all malevolent grins and dramatic cape gestures, but he undermines the atmosphere in another moment due to flubbing his signature parting phrase. He assures the audience he will decide on an appropriate parting phrase "by next time" before signing off with a plain "good night!"

Static preludes the resumption of the regular news program, its bewildered presenters apologizing for 'technical difficulties.' Arase expresses surprise over Sorimura's apparent ability to hijack the signal, but Iwanome is sure that was the work of "The Grocer," who at minimum probably 'bought' Tokyo's broadcasting right. m he suspects "bought" the broadcasting rights for the city of Tokyo at minimum. Arase points out that "The Grocer" was in his cell that afternoon, to which Iwanome counters that walls are immaterial to him.

In the Grocer's cell, the exterior of which resembles that of a street newsstand, the Grocer mumbles, "Thank you, and come again."

Iwanome opines that this only further demonstrates how "big a handful" Sorimura is, and that he and Lisa Kuraki are of the same ilk. People to whom troublemakers instinctively flock, they who would not associate with each other otherwise.

On a rooftop, Sorimura appraises how a "new [magic-related] opportunity" managed to reach him in prison, where he had willingly, despairingly consigned himself in his failure to encounter real magic. He muses that life is a 'puzzle' and asks Fire-breathing Bug if they concur.

Trivia

 * Yen Press, despite translating Sorimura's moniker as "Mystery Solitaire" in previous chapters, translates it as "Phantom Solitaire" in this chapter's individual and volume release. Phantom Solitaire has continued to be the preferred interpretation.

Referbacks

 * The "body recovery" effort regarding a ruins site mentioned in passing on the radio will be brought up again in Chapter 89, seventy chapters on. Therein, the phenomenon is described as a popular trend where youths have been partaking in "corpse searches" among the ruins of derelict suburban buildings in Shinjuku. According to Takumi, over thirty people have actually gone missing from these buildings over the course of just six months. The chapter sets up Corpse God's likely investigation of these corpse hunts in chapters that follow.