おばちゃんたちのいるところ 👻 (Intermediate Book Club) ・ Week 4

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Week 4 19 November 2022
Story 3
End page 73
Page count 15
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Vocabulary

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Discussion Guidelines

Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
  3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).

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This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.

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2

Another good one. I kept waiting for the twist/bad end, but it never appeared.

This is the rakugo the story is riffing on, according to the back-of-book sources list. The text in the second box below the pictures is explaining the pun in the punchline and providing some other background info.

5 Likes
3

What a wholesome story :blush:

Took me a while to make up my mind about the gender of the main character :sweat_smile: I looked up the name and websites were saying it was a male name, but then more and more details showed up that made me doubt it lol

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4

I too kept waiting for the twist at the end, but it was just a sweet, straightforward love story after all. I’m happy for them. :smiley:

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5

I’m a bit behind, but I’ve finally cleared this week. :partying_face: I enjoyed this story; it was nice and wholesome! Kept waiting for the"gotcha" moment, haha.

Same for me. I think I eventually settled on 繁美 being female, though I guess it’s not really definitively stated anywhere, right?

Thank you as always!

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6

I think I actually liked this one, at least from about halfway through (after Shigemi’s and Hina’s first encounter), because my brain would finally shut up about things I was having difficulty figuring out and/or that didn’t make sense.

Spoilery thoughts/reaction under the cut:

“Skin?? Ma’am, why does your baby bird not have any feathers? Just how young is it and why are you bathing it? It should definitely still be in its nest if it doesn’t have any feathers yet. And what do you mean ‘smooth,’ is bird skin not bumpy? (But then again, maybe that’s only when it’s been plucked…) —Ah, you’re washing a chick (female human) named Hina-chan, not a chick (baby bird).”

^^Basically my thought process the first couple paragraphs.

But also newborn birds are not pretty, and I doubt their skin itself is either, so maybe I should have figured out Hina was human earlier…

Then I thought Hina-chan was a baby or toddler, but then she talked, and she certainly doesn’t sound like a small child. But the narrator did say stuff like her having just learned a word and being smart, so then I thought maybe she was an elementary or middle schooler, but it seems they’re both adults.

But my brain wasn’t allowed rest just yet, because then we get the flashback to Shigemi’s first fishing trip, and she… fishes up an entire, intact human skeleton? I guess the magic that allows Hina-chan to be alive and visit Shigemi at her place at night kept her skeleton whole, because otherwise it would just be a single bone. Or her corpse, but she’s too old for that and this is a river, not a peat bog; that would be even less likely than her whole skeleton.

After that, though, I could enjoy it, especially since there was no twist bad (or even just strange) ending. Like, I’m fine with weird, but the first two stories weren’t my brand of weird. I also started reading Poe the other day, and the three stories I’ve read so far rather put me in mind of the ones in this book…

I even started writing a fic inspired by it lol. It’s been fun so far because the character I chose for Shigemi’s role is kind of a disaster (plus he’s just fun to write and to put him into Situations, like being dragged along fishing when he hates it and fishing up a skeleton and later being visited by the ghost of said skeleton and discovering that being through with dating women does, in his case, mean he’s gay; I don’t write for him enough), and it’s fun combining elements from the story he originally comes from with elements from “Hina-chan.”

When Shigemi and Yoshi-san (the ‘san’ is also a fairly good indication that Shigemi’s a woman, though men do definitely use it for other men, especially for those older or otherwise of higher status than them) break up, Shigemi decides she’s tired of men and Yoshi that he’s tired of women, plus Shigemi corrects Hina from “Shigemi-dono” to “Shigemi-chan,” and with that on top of her default personal pronoun being 私, I’d say that she’s almost certainly a woman.

I’m wondering, am I the only one who saw Shigemi as a woman from the very beginning?

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I too saw her as a woman from the beginning, but did doubt my understanding and double-checked a couple of times throughout the story. On the other hand, it never ever occurred to me that Hina-chan might be a bird. I did initially think child, though.

If I remember correctly, she fishes up some human bones, not an entire skeleton. She even said that the rest of the bones were never found, I think?

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8

Small thing, but I don’t think they were ever in a relationship. They’re just next door neighbours and drinking buddies. The 彼氏 who Shigemi previously lived with and then broke up with before moving here is a different, unnamed, guy.

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9
Replies

Oh, I saw 骸骨, and Shirabe just has it as “skeleton,” so I thought it was the whole thing

Ohhhh, I knew they were neighbors in the present, but I assumed that boyfriend she lived with was Yoshi before they separated on good terms and became neighbors. Probably because the narrative will switch between 彼女 and ひなちゃん for Hina, so I assumed 彼氏 was also 吉さん… This is confusing sometimes.

2 Likes