あるいは: “Perhaps”

Introduction

In a certain 2014 Japanese mystery novel, the protagonist, and his amicable sidekick muse over the fact that an anonymous tip to the police said that there "may be a dead body" (「死体したいがあるかもしれない」), and that it should be investigated. Now, this is a smart pair of detectives, and so you can imagine my surprise when the result of their intellectual probing did not include the (in my opinion, very likely) possibility that the use of かもしれない was simply a result of the note having been written by a learner of Japanese who was confused by the number of possible ways to say "maybe", and the confusing way in which many of them function.

Needless to say, the letter I wrote to the author has not received a response.