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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.
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.
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Thanks for linking the original story! It certainly makes this book’s story more enjoyable to have the background information that presumably Japanese readers will have.
So are we to assume that the two women found the money they needed by selling lanterns door to door? And the “no door sellers” sign was the modern equivalent of the お札? That’s actually hilarious.
I’m now wondering which traditional story the first story in the book was referencing. Possibly this one?
Did you see the last page of the book which gives the inspiration of each story? For the first story it mentions the kabuki 娘道成寺 which is this one in your yokai page.
Oh, no, I hadn’t see the last page at all! I’m reading the ebook, so just looking at the end of the book isn’t something I do naturally. Thanks for the heads up!
As for the kabuki, this is explicitly referenced in the story too. But the narrator turns into a different kind of creature, even if she feels inspired by the kabuki heroine.
Thank you so much for linking the original tale! I wasn’t super impressed with the おばちゃん version after first reading it, but being able to read the original ghost story helped quite a bit, I think. One question I did have about the おばちゃん story: 新三郎 was left with four lanterns in the end; did they get him to pay for them somehow?
At the end it says he’s sure they’ve filched the money from his wallet (確実に何枚か紙幣を抜かれているはずの自分の財布を思い、新三郎はやれやれと思った) and maybe they even borrowed his hanko to stamp a bill of sale…
I’m plodding my way slowly through this- reading a couple of pages a day where I can. I’m now about halfway through this week’s reading. So I’ll still be behind but not by much.
I liked this one a lot more than story 1 as well, though I was a bit confused about the ‘point’ of the story until I had read the original. It’s funny to see all the points where the versions match, such as the women not having lower bodies and the way they kept describing the man as heartless. This was exactly what I was hoping to get out of this book when I nominated it: a good excuse to learn more about traditional Japanese stories
With every page, I hated Tsuyuko and Yoneko more and more. After looking at the original story, some of the choices in this one make more sense, but within the actual story, it’s still… well, Tsuyuko comes off as a right piece of work. I did not like this story at all, but at least I understood more of it than the first lol
I put my thoughts/reactions to the last 11 pages, which I read yesterday, in my Read Every Day Challenge update, which I’m putting below the cut. I don’t think I had much to say about the story before then.
Even though I’d predicted practically since meeting them that Tsuyuko and Yoneko were themselves the supernatural element of this story, rather than or in addition to the titular lantern, I was still somewhat surprised to find that the peony-patterned lantern really was just a regular ol’ lantern. Possibly mass-produced, if the two left him with four of them.
I’m really hoping that at least some of these stories have likable characters, because I haven’t liked a single one so far.
I think I didn’t dislike the two characters because they were so obviously not normal people, and were running through a fantastically twisted and nonsensical “sales pitch”, stuffing their story from a different tale into a mould it didn’t fit in – it was absurd.
