Sorta new character this week in that she’s not formally introduced (yet?) - Aru’s friend Hana. Her full name is 山田花子, and there’s no pun here - it’s just that her name is utterly generic, the blandest name that ever named, the Japanese equivalent of “Jane Smith”, basically.
On page 105, I like Aru’s reactions to being told she read the wrong page. ガッデム speaks for itself. いとわびし is obviously 古文 given the context. From a quick google search, it looks like いと is an adverb with similar meaning to 非常に or すごく. Then わびし is an adjective in its classical sentence ending conjugation and it appears to mean something like “frustrating”, “disappointing”, or “painful”. The modern word is 侘しい, though the meaning seems to have shifted.
I take it that Aru is thinking/narrating that because she’s normally serious anyway, any slight feeling of something being off (not discomfort) can be explained away (thought of) as just being behavior due to that seriousness.
That’s like 80% me understanding and 20% me reading between the lines + (now) googling a lot. Particularly, the マジメたる故の行動 part is something I’m not that familiar with. 故に・故の is N1 grammar for stating a reason. So マジメたる故の行動 refers to her seriousness being the reason for her behavior/actions. I’ve seen たる and なる used as modifiers instead of な, but I couldn’t tell you why たる is used here instead of な. A google search ([1], [2]) says なる would replace な and たる would replace である. I’d guess then that it’s just used here to match the formality of the rest of the text, but I’m not sure.
I think this is meant as a “joke”, if you can call it that? like, Aru is waxing all poetic here about life, but in reality she just brought a rucksack to school instead of the usual over-the-shoulder bag. That being said, I’m not great at understanding tone…
Well, guess I ‘Finished’ this weeks reading. Really just gave it a light skim. At this point I’m going to see it through but just sort of lost motivation to read this one I think. The text is still pretty hard for me to get 100% and I don’t seem to care enough to get a full understanding. Kind of okay with that though as I’m not really looking to take on another offshoot haha