Itsumi Shiraishi, the Literature Club's President, is dead.
Murder? Suicide? Nobody knows. Rumors are flying that one of the six other members of the Literature Club is her killer.
A week after Itsumi's death, the Literature Club has a meeting. In order to memorialize Itsumi, they follow the club's tradition of "mystery stew," wherein they sit in the dark and eat from a potluck dish that everyone contributes to, and read short stories that they wrote themselves.
The theme of their stories: which of them murdered Itsumi, and why?
The novel was first published in 2013, and was translated into English in 2018. It was also adapted into a movie, of the same name, in 2017.
This novel contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Itsumi's father is portrayed as this in some of the stories, slapping and berating her. Itsumi's story reveals that incident really did happen, followed by him forcing her to get an abortion.
- The Ace: Itsumi was beautiful, smart, popular, and kind, and all of the other members of the Literature Club, as well as the rest of the school, looked up to her. At least, that's how it seems on the surface...
- Alpha Bitch: Itsumi, as the most popular girl in school, headmaster's daughter, and president of the exclusive Literature Club. Whether or not she is a Lovable Alpha Bitch changes between each character's point of view.
- Bottle Episode: The entire novel takes place over the course of a single evening in the Literature Club's salon.
- Delicate and Sickly:
- One detail everyone can manage to agree upon is that Itsumi was mysteriously ill in the months before her death, though the explanations for what caused it range from stress to poisoning to witchcraft. Itsumi was actually pregnant.
- Sayuri, by her own admission, has been sickly ever since childhood and frequently has to miss school.
- Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: All of the members of the Literature Club are cute Catholic schoolgirls, and each story accuses a different member of actually being the murderer due to some dark secret. In the end, everyone has some kind of secret that they are protecting, but Itsumi and Sayuri turn out to be the cruelest of them all.
- Faking the Dead: Zigzagged. Itsumi faked her suicide with Sayuri's assistance in order to get revenge on the rest of the club members, as revealed in the penultimate chapter. The very final chapter reveals that Sayuri then murdered her for real.
- Flower Motifs: Lily of the valley, which Itsumi apparently died holding. Each girl's story involves her interpretation of what the flower means and how it relates to Itsumi's killer. Itsumi's own story reveals that it represented her aborted daughter, whom she blamed the other club members for killing.
- Hot Teacher: Mr. Hojo, the school's Japanese teacher and the Literature Club sponsor, is a good-looking man in his mid-20's whom all the girls admire. Especially, Itsumi, who takes it a step further.
- I'm a Humanitarian: And at the very end, Sayuri reveals that the secret ingredient of tonight's mystery stew was Itsumi's body.
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The story opens with Sayuri thanking the rest of the club for gathering on a stormy night, during which they will share their theories about how and why Itsumi died.
- The Man Behind the Man: Sayuri is regarded by the other girls as being this to Itsumi, taking care of the fine details of running a club while Itsumi is the popular face. Sayuri also fills this role in a much more sinister context, arranging to help fake Itsumi's death in order to get revenge on the other girls.
- Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Itsumi and Sayuri were best friends from childhood, and Sayuri often remarks on Itsumi's beauty and her admiration for Itsumi. Her desire to keep Itsumi beautiful, the way Sayuri admired her, is what drives her to kill Itsumi. Shiyo also claims to have had this sort of relationship with Itsumi, while Diana had an actual romantic crush on her.
- "Rashomon"-Style: Each chapter of the novel is a different club member's tale of how they met Itsumi, the events they claim to have witnessed leading up to her death, and who they believe killed her and why.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: Stated to have happened on previous occasions, since the rules of mystery stew only state that ingredients must be sanitary, not necessarily edible. The most-cited example is when a member snuck a Chanel watch into the stew on a previous occasion. Itsumi's ultimate goal was to poison the entire club save Sayuri, in order to get revenge on them for revealing her affair with Mr. Hojo to her father, but Sayuri ended up poisoning Itsumi's tea instead.
- Teacher/Student Romance: A variation occurs in Mirei's chapter, where she accuses Sonoko of having an affair with Itsumi's father, the headmaster, and killing Itsumi to cover it up. Itsumi turns out to be having an affair with Mr. Hojo.
- Unreliable Narrator: As is typical for a "Rashomon"-Style plot, the girls' versions of events range from self-serving interpretations of what happened to outright lies, until Itsumi and Sayuri reveal what really happened. Even after The Reveal, it's not known how much anyone was telling the truth.
