"Wide Character format" most likely means it's encoded using UCS-2le. You're treating it as if it was encoded using iso-latin-1. Just decode it. 

open(my $log_fh, '<:encoding(UCS-2le)', $log_qfn)
   or die("Can't open log file \"$log_qfn\": $!\n");

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In reply to Re: Reading wide character string from a file by ikegami
in thread Reading wide character string from a file by dsrZ

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