“This place only looks like an apartment, but it isn’t one really.”

“This place only looks like an apartment, but it isn’t one really.” Matsumiya’s private description of Mutsuo Koshikawa’s room makes its contradiction the point: the room has the outward form of a home, yet offers none of the ordinary signs of a life settled within it. Its bleakness also becomes a clue, linking Matsumiya’s impression of the room to his suspicion that the Kosuge and Shinkoiwa cases share something in common.

The Room and Its Absence of a Future

Matsumiya reaches the judgment while surveying the single room in the Kosuge apartment. He finds no sign that Koshikawa had hopes or dreams for the future; the room instead suggests someone prepared to die at any time. Even its bare practical details reinforce that impression: Koshikawa kept no stocks of food or other household necessities and did not own a refrigerator. The place reads less as a home arranged for ongoing life than as a space occupied with as little investment as possible.

The comparison that follows makes this deprivation visible. To Matsumiya, the room resembles the shacks homeless people build from blue canvas sheeting. He imagines Koshikawa living there with his breath held and his head down, doing everything he could to avoid notice. The apartment’s apparent domestic identity therefore conflicts with the way its inhabitant seems to have used it: not as a secure home, but as a place of near-invisibility.

From Impression to Investigative Clue

The phrase begins as Matsumiya’s inward response to the room, not as a conclusion established by forensic proof. Nevertheless, the impression carries investigative weight. It is why he feels sure that the Kosuge case and the Shinkoiwa case have something in common. The room’s emotional atmosphere becomes a point of comparison between cases, even as Matsumiya recognizes that instinct alone cannot make a policeman’s work reliable and resolves to concentrate on the investigation at hand.

Later, Matsumiya tries to explain the same perception to his cousin, Kyoichiro Kaga. He hesitates over whether to tell Kaga about the feeling he had on entering Koshikawa’s small apartment, concerned that it might sound like the pose of a veteran relying on intuition. He tells him anyway, describing the absence of hope and dreams and the strange sense that the place was at once an apartment and not an apartment at all. He again compares its cramped space to a blue-tarpaulin-covered homeless shack, this time stressing the sadness that permeated it.

Repetition and Meaning

The return to the description shows Matsumiya struggling to make an inchoate response intelligible. He tells Kaga that he got the same feeling from both places, then admits he may not be making himself clear. Kaga listens thoughtfully. The wording thus marks a distinction between what Matsumiya senses and what he can yet demonstrate: the room offers him a pattern worth pursuing, but not a complete explanation.

The expression’s central paradox carries that pattern. An apartment conventionally promises shelter and ordinary domestic continuity; this one looks like such a place while conveying neither hope nor belonging. The contrast lets the investigation register a hidden life through its surroundings: the scant possessions, the absence of a refrigerator, and the imagined blue-tarp shack all make concealment tangible. Repeated when Matsumiya reports his impression to Kaga, the phrase moves from private intuition into a shared investigative question, without ceasing to be a feeling that still needs evidence.