I cheated a bit and started early to see what I was getting myself into, so I’ve already read up to the first chapter.
So far it has been surprisingly easy (but this is the advanced bookclub so I don’t know what I was expecting). I have to look up a ton of vocab as usual but not too much, and the grammar hasn’t been a problem. Crossing fingers so it doesn’t suddenly get hard.
Biggest difficulty was probably telling if an unknow word was a name or a made-up term (turned out to be names) and the bits where she is confused about her not-her body, but that’s confusing in any language I guess?
If nothing changes the main challenge will be the pace.
About the story, not much to say yet since this was covered in the synopsis. The only thing is I keep wondering where the original ‘owner’ of the body is. Dead (forever)? Transported to another body? Or maybe we are not supposed to care.
I also thought it was interesting that she mentions that Japanese people are seen to be obsessed with hygene or something by other countries. I guess in my country we don’t think enough about Japan to have an opinion on that, but maybe its neighbors do?
I can’t tell if a short first week has set me up for success or lulled me into complacency that I will regret later, but! It was easy to get through these two sections, and I’m interested in what’s going on and looking forward to reading more.
I think there’s no original owner of the body in this situation. It’s more like schizophrenia and developing a second personality. As far as we know, one of those personality is fake (e.g. the world where she wakes up is an hallucination OR “our” world is a fever dream).
Oh, my comment wasn’t specific to this book at all. I was just trying to rationalize the whole genre of “reincarnating into a different world”. I don’t think we’re supposed to think too much about it, but since @Sylph mentioned it…
I read the first chapter and can’t help but feel like the main character maybe is a bit too obsessed with books
I obviously have no idea about the real answer so this is just speculation, but in another isekai book I read what happened was basically that the main character ended up being a bit like both people(and with all the memories from both), but more heavily leaning toward the “reincarnated” one, so maybe something like that happened?
Though, on the other hand it doesn’t seem like there was as much past memories or personality involved in this book, with how how young マイン seemed to be, so maybe the original personality was just straight up replaced(which I guess would basically be the same as death). Guess we’ll hopefully find out eventually
The two main categories (where the body is not created for the MC) I have seen so far in manga are
The “soul” (for lack of a better word) is in the body from birth and becomes aware of its past life at some point (often after a near death experience on another big event)
The “soul” of the MC takes over right after the death of the original owner
There are other possibilities (merging of the “souls”, one kicking the other out, etc.) but I feel like these two cover most of the stories I have read.
No, everybody should love books as much as her
Even if I am by no mean as obsessed as her with books, I don’t know how long I could endure not reading anything…
麗乃 does get that country language from マイン’s memory when the mother talks to her (p 16)
What did I just read. That’s way beyond what is covered in the the prologue + first chapter. Please tag it appropriately, as in [book XX spoiler] (or just remove it entirely )
There’s a certain irony here in that I’m reading this while walking, though I’m not walking where there are vehicles. Not that it’s risk free, seeing as I rolled my ankle doing this yesterday. But at least the chance of dying is low…
I just finished reading this weeks chapters. I haven’t participated in a book club before so I’m excited to read along with all of you! I also want to start participating in this forum more, and book clubs seem a good place to start. And by chance I already own a physical copy of the first three books which I haven’t read yet. So really the stars aligned when I saw this in the “recent community topics” section and I had to join in
I don’t really have a lot to say about the book so far. It was pretty difficult for me to read in terms of vocab, but I definitely understood the majority of what was going on at least. I also used an ebook version alongside the physical book so I could quickly look up words without disrupting my reading too much. The grammar was relatively straightforward I thought, though I would say grammar is my strong point over vocabulary or kanji so maybe that’s to be expected.
As for the story, I’ve seen the anime before so it wasn’t too new to me, but I did really enjoy the anime so I’m excited to enjoy it again with new details. The following spoiler tagged content is only about the part we’ve read so far, but of course the fact that I’ve seen the anime means I might not speculate in certain directions, so this might be a bit (very indirectly) spoilery? I don’t think it’s too bad though.
I was under the impression Main died from her fever.
そんな風に思っているうちに、幼い声は段々小さくなっていく。
The fact that the voice fades out like that feels like death to me, growing distant and fading into nothing. And right after that we get:
Like Main’s conciousness left to make space for Urano.
Also I found the audio book on Audible here, and it’s even narrated by Main’s anime voice actor 井口裕香, which is very cool. I plan to re-read the chapters we’ve read each week while listening to the audio book, and perhaps even listen to the audiobook on its own for more listening practise.
This was my impression too. Original Main died, and Urano entered her body, which included her brain, which included her memories.
I’ve never read any isekai books before, but I’m guessing that this sort of thing is an accepted convention that we’re not supposed to bother thinking about too much? It’s kind of eating at me, though. I can’t help keenly feeling the tragedy that this five-year-old died and her family members are apparently never going to know. Urano has access to Main’s memories, but she’s definitely not Main.
I get that, but since 麗乃 went to another world/body when she died, I guess the same could have happened to マイン. And if it’s not a common occurrence then there should be a reason why it happened to her in particular.
But yes, I realize this is probably just an 異世界 thing and I shouldn’t think too much about it.
Suddenly I am imagining a book of short stories about isekai body-roulette, where each chapter is about the new life of the person who recently vacated the body of the previous chapter. I wonder if this exists.
)