ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 🛵 Volume 2

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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This is a continuation of the Intermediate Book Club reading ヨコハマ買い出し紀行.

We are continuing with one thread per volume. You can read the chapters at your own pace.

Find the Intermediate Book Club here

Link to the ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 Home thread

Volume 2

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Start date: November 27th 2021
Previous part: Week 4
Next part: Volume 3

Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll.
(Please feel free to update your status whenever you like!)

Participation status
  • I am reading along
  • I have finished this volume
  • I have already read the series beyond this volume
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  • I have decided to drop the series
  • I am a tomato, show me the results :durtle_tomato:

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I have just read the first two chapters so far. Some first thoughts:

Interfacing

That’s an… interesting way to implement an interface :stuck_out_tongue: I liked how the first chapter set it up to be reused in the second chapter :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Robot existentialism

I liked their contemplation of the camera lens on page 23. A nice little moment of robot existentialism.

記憶の助け？

I was a little puzzled about how the Owner’s message talks about how Alpha might grow なつかしい and that he is sending the camera as a 記憶の助け (page 14). What is the camera supposed to help her remember to remedy her なつかしい?

By the way, what is the kanji in the middle panel on page 14? In the Book Walker version it’s just an unrecognisable blob for me :slightly_frowning_face:

300枚

Considering how many photos I have in my photo library, she’s not wrong: if she’s not careful, those 300 shots will be gone in no time.

I wonder if the camera (with its cord interface) will come in useful later in the story…

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Yeah, definitely someone’s idea of fanservice, both in-universe and out.

I admit I’m a but unclear as to your confusion. Isn’t looking at photos you’ve taken a common remedy for nostalgia? (Or… a common response to, even if it doesn’t remedy.)

I can take 300 photos in a day quite easily when I’m travelling, but I can fit a lot more than 300 on the data card, so either these photos are a great deal larger, or it completely failed to occur to Ashinano-sensei back in 1995 just how much data storage could grow. Which, I guess, is reasonably fair - the JPEG compression format only just came around in 1992, and MMC cards wouldn’t even be invented until 1997, to be improved by SD cards in 1999.

Though, I guess there are also thematic reasons for limiting the number of photos she can take…

Wait, I just noticed for the first time that it’s a Musashino van that picks her up. So why did she have to come by train?

Ooo, ooo, and one thing I’ve long been wondering: why is it that the follow-on chapter to 午前2/2 is called 午後1/1?

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事

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Ah, sorry, I should have explained better. What I meant is that she would grow nostalgic for the owner and it’s not like the camera comes loaded with pictures of him, right?

Also: SD cards are probably a better format for storing photos than blocks of fudge :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:. But yeah, I still remember the first digital cameras and how quickly their storage filled up (with very low resolution photographs even; 2 million pixels was already a big deal then). And before that you just had film rolls with a minimum of 36 exposures, so 300 already sounded like a lot back then. I don’t think anybody back then could have foreseen how quickly data storage would grow.

Haha, good point!

Me too. When we finished volume 1 I just thought it was a troll: a chapter named 2/2 that ends on a cliffhanger. But that doesn’t work anymore. I thought maybe it’s just “end of the morning” and “start of the afternoon”?

Thanks! I already thought it might be that but somehow I thought that the blob didn’t quite fit (the bottom bit looks a bit like the bottom bit of 亭) so I wasn’t sure.

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Nah, nostalgia is a desire for things of the past rather than a wish to see things in the future. The camera is for Alpha to capture the scenes of the present-day so that in the years to come, when she feels nostalgic, she has said photos to look back on.

Well, Moore’s Law was posited back in 1975, though I wonder if anyone thought it covered data storage in 1995…

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post apocaplyptic logistics? :stuck_out_tongue:

tbh, the van might be giving her a lift to the train station for all we know. it was quite a journey from there in the morning…

what does the 2/2 and the 1/1 even mean? “/” isn’t really used in japanese punctuation so it could mean anything :expressionless:

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So with the third chapter in this volume we get a new character with a hard-to-parse speaking style :smiley: and a cool (as in :sunglasses:) barracuda with wings and legs. Makes me wonder whether the barracuda is a mutant, genetically modified or a robot…

I think I’m getting the hang of the accents and managed to understand most of it. I did get stuck for a while on the 宿代の足し because I had overlooked the okurigana for some reason and what the *$! is a 宿代の足?? :sweat_smile:

I’m not sure how I feel about the プロテイン chapter. I was hoping for a more spectacular robot malfunction but instead we get some uncomfortable indigestion… another slightly uneventful chapter (maybe to compensate for the action of the previous chapter :upside_down_face:).

I did like the designs on the kites (?), though (ちょっと派手？). Suitably surreal for a dream experience.

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So, I did a Google image search for メイポロ, and got about 90% images from this manga. Is that just not a common drink in the real world?

Were you hoping for her to explode? That would have put a crimp on further stories. :stuck_out_tongue:

They’re clearly fish. :stuck_out_tongue:

I wonder if they’re based on the design of her weathervane, though I’m not sure if there’s been any close-ups of it so far. (You can see it in the final panel on page 60, for example.)

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Yes, I was wondering about that too. So far I settled on it perhaps being tea with maple syrup… is that something people drink?

Edit: or maybe it’s just coffee with maple syrup because apparently that is also a thing. Maybe because she runs a coffee bar, the coffee is implied and the drinks are just called by the other ingredients besides coffee.

Well, she did mention falling flat on the ground before :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Yes, weird flat painted-on fish :upside_down_face:

Well spotted, I hadn’t made the connection yet.

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omg, you guys are reading volume 2 already. I must do a hurry.

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I thought the fifth and sixth chapters of this volume were also pretty nice (just two more chapters to go after this - I’ll be creating the next thread Saturday).

I had some trouble with the start of the ナビ chapter but I think I got it in the end.

Apparently バンバン can mean something like a lot, so バンバン使った方がいいとは思うけどつい becomes something like I thought that it would be best to use it a lot. I said earlier that I already expected that the camera would come in handy, but I wasn’t thinking of doing your hair with it…

In the next bubble I keep misreading it as …のに… every time I see it, but it’s 持ち歩くの・に, right? Making 持ち歩くのにピッタリなんだ: it’s perfect for carrying around.

The chapter had some nice landscape drawings again. The scene with her looking across the water at the street lamps in the distance was very 懐かしい. But of course in the end she has only taken the rather mediocre photograph of the scooter :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:, she must love that thing a lot.

My favourite word for this volume so far: 引っ張り回す (p. 81).

Does anyone have any idea why the chapter is titled ナビ? I doesn’t seem to be that much about navigation…

I liked the festival in Kamakura (I also liked the dawn festival in the first volume). I was as surprised as they were by the big rocket, those were some nice panels.

Did anyone take the trouble to pick apart the slurred speech this time? I think I got most of it except for these:

p. 87, upper right: そこ来んかじじい
I think I technically understand what it says, but what is he actually asking?

p. 97, top: てーげーこいじゃ朝んなんべなー
I’m guessing there is some extra drunken slurring involved here and I haven’t a clue what he’s saying :sweat_smile:

So is everyone still enjoying the manga and if so, what do you like about it?

For me it’s the laid-back atmosphere, the landscape drawings and that the humour clicks for me (it might not be very sophisticated, but it often gets a happy chuckle out of me - it works better for me, for example, than the humour in the Househusband manga).

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I was amused by the last panel of page 72, where she’s going “just act natural” while standing in that absolutely ridiculous pose. :stuck_out_tongue:

I definitely would have taken a photo of the first panel on 74, at the very least. Though, to be fair, I usually have a storage capacity on-hand of thousands of photos, not just a few hundred.

It’s also short for “navigate” - 進路を決めること. Though yeah, not much conscious decision seems to be going into her route planning in this chapter.

I read it as “Why did you come here, old man?” (i.e. why are you sitting between me and Al-chan? sort of thing)

I tried plugging this one into Google, and it just coughed up around six pages about Japanese dialects, each of them different.

てーげー is most likely たいがい. I’m thinking こいじゃ is probably ここでは. So maybe something like だいがいここでは朝までいるつもり, though that’s more gut feeling than anything I can actually prove.

Yes, that.

Why are we doing this at three weeks per volume instead of something more like two chapters per week?

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I believe it’s because this way we can have threads with more than ten replies more often.

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Thank you for your help with the language questions!

Or maybe you mean that 4 weeks per volume would make more sense? I would be fine with that too. I’ll add a poll when I create the next thread so that everyone can vote for when they would like to get the next thread.

By the way, you don’t have to wait for me to comment on a chapter (in case anyone thought that) :smiley:

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I finished this volume a while ago, some really pretty panels as usual. Some of my favorites are definetely the one in page 78 and also the rocket going up in page 92.

My favorite chapters were the last 2 ones of course. Colored chapter 14 brings some great life to the laid-back atmosphere and sensei looks super rad when younger (except for the old man who seems to look like an old man even back then :joy:). It felt almost nostalgic with them remembering the old days before the ocean swallowed some of the land.

It’s the laid-back atmosphere for me as well, and I always end up reading too much in one sitting so I need to be careful :sweat_smile:

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Only downside to the coloured chapter was that it was so short!

I only realised later that the title page of the last chapter is actually the sensei :smiley:. The young version of the old man was great!

Two old man speech questions:

My guesses for what the old man is saying on p. 103 top left

So the text is:
もうここぐれえだべ
おおかた沈んでまったっけ

My guesses (correct me if I’m wrong):
ぐれえ＝ぐらい
べ is just a sentence ender
沈んでまった＝沈んでしまった
っけ＝か？

p. 114: イッちゃん: is that just a name? (Maybe I missed it if it already occurred earlier.)

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Yah, it’s just a name. It hasn’t come up before, but the context makes it clear.

Young Old Guy: As expected, it seems that Icchan has work and can’t come.
Young Sensei: I see. Well, ok. Shall we go with just the two of us?

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