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I think I've read a book like this. Was there also a bed, and the story was about somebody being chained to it? And maybe something about cricket (not in the same story as the bed)?
Unfortunately, I can't remember the title of the book I'm thinking of — I think it was a vague sort of title, like "A Twist in the Tale" or something, that didn't relate to anything really specific in the story.
Hmm, there could have been a story involving a bed and one involving a cricket, but I can't remember. The title, I think, was something like "The Man Who X", but I'm not sure about that, either.
A genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinkerI've found the book I was thinking of: A Pack of Lies
, by Geraldine McCaughrean. (That's the English title; it might well have been called something different in translation.) I'm pretty confident at this point that it's the book you're looking for, too.
Ah, and here's a Japanese edition of the book: Fushigi o uru otoko
(I don't know what that would be in English).
Oh my gosh, thank you so much! That's the book I was looking for - I even recognise the cover of the Japanese version! (The title means "The Man Who Sells Mysteries", by the way.)
A genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker

This is about a book that I read when I was in elementary school (early- to mid-2000s). It was a library book.
The characters that I can I remember are a girl, her mother, and a man of unknown age. The girl and her mother keep some sort of a second-hand goods shop. They sell several items, and the strange man tells a creepy story about each of them, much to their customers' discomfort.
One of the stories was about a mirror, which belonged to a vain girl who gets switched with her mirror image. Another was about a grandfather's clock which belonged to a superstitious man who locked himself in his house after a fortune teller tells him that he will have bad luck for a certain amount of time and is killed just as that period is about to end by getting crushed by the clock.
One of the things I remember distinctly is the ending. It was a little meta. We see a man typing the story, and he says he doesn't like the ending. Someone says that he should change it if he doesn't like it, and the man goes "ah, of course!" and grabs the signature hat of the strange storyteller (implying that they are the same person) and goes off, much to the bewilderment of the other person, who thought he'll just delete the ending he typed on the computer and write another one.
I read the book in Japanese, but it was translated from another language. I'm pretty sure it's British - if not, from some other European or English-speaking country.
Edited by nemui10pm