I’ll be starting a few days late, but I did just break down and buy 全巻 on Amazon.jp, and they’ll actually make it to my house before I will lol.
As I said in the volume 1 thread I do have all the volumes in english, so that might be useful for comparison at some point if we’re ever stumped, or just want to look at how something was localized for fun
omg nice! I will be getting all of those haha. Read the first volume the other week so looking forward to following along for the second volume 
It’s May! I was convinced I spaced on the group and missed a week of reading, glad that’s not the case.
I’m just getting started with volume 2 (living that lesbian life, reading yuri in the sunshine while my girlfriend chases bugs) and Nanami is already killing me on page 5… I’d say more but I don’t know how to spoiler on my phone!
yeah! official start is tomorrow! 
but first i need to finish a chapter of Kase-san ^^
Yay, first day of the volume 2 book club! As you are reading, do not forget to add any vocab that you did not know into the communal vocab sheet. Please do read the instructions, though about how to add the new items.
I think I am starting on the book tomorrow, I spent the whole day doing a translation for a client and my brain cannot cope with even more translations tonight, even if this one would be waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more fun.
First chapter down! It feels like volume 1 was more of an intro to everything, and now in volume 2 more things will start to happen. And I mean not only between the main two but also at school with more people being introduced etc. Looking forward to next chapters (trying to forget everything about anime to relive all those emotions again 
)
i’m a little late getting started, been a little busier irl than previous weeks. and had to finish Kase-san, and rewatch yuri kuma arashi (very important, that 
).
but i finally got round to reading ^^ found it a little difficult today. maybe because i was frustrated, because my kindle app wasn’t working, and i had to spend time fixing that. maybe it was the image quality; we’d already mentioned that the furigana were difficult to read in the volume 1 thread, i compared it to Kase-san just now, and that does seem to have a much cleaner look. maybe it’s my eyes (they’ve been annoying me lately, having difficulty focusing). maybe it was just that the chapter starts with quite a lot of text?
compared to volume 1 i definitely recognise/can read a lot more kanji, though obviously there’s still a lot i have to look up. had one word where i knew the kanji, and was able to guess the word (i forgot what it was 
). and does the new guy have a distinct manner of speech?
not much to say content-wise: 七海先輩 has just announced that the student council will perform a play at the culture festival, and i think they are all a little surprised/weren’t expecting the extra work-load. i’d forgotten that was a thing in the anime, so i’m surprised and looking forward to that also
i’ll try to finish the chapter tomorrow, and then continue right on with chapter 2
how has it been going for you all?
Once again, I thought I was behind, then looked at where I left off in the book and I’ve definitely read all of chapter one… twice
New guy is my least favorite character, he seems … kinda annoying. But I looked up the っす ending and it’s very simple and straightforward imo, so whatever. He can hang out, I guess.
So on re-reading this chapter Nanami still bothers me in the final scene… When she’s basically like “It’s your fault [I keep wanting more / I want to kiss you]!” I’m like, woah, lady, back off, that’s not cool. They do follow it up with Yuu saying she’s not-not interested so overall it’s … ok? Idk sometimes their dynamic is a little tough for me.
finished the first chapter, in time to write a little before i do reviews
overall reading went better than last night, i guess my eyes were tired. but the font is definitely less legible than in kase-san. but anyway.
definitely. Nanami is being way aggressive about this. Koito does say that she’d be lying if she said she weren’t interested, but there’s a huge difference between that and enthusiastic consent. like, i’m into bdsm, and consent is so important! if my partner is not enthusiastic about whatever we’re doing, it just doesn’t work. so that kind of bugs me.
but on the other hand, if looking at it from an ace perspective, it kind of works. i’m somewhere on the ace spectrum, and i have done stuff with people which i wasn’t very interested in. i might have found it a bit boring or silly, but i didn’t mind at all.
but yeah, i really enjoyed the anime, but i also remember stuff like this bothering me. so it’s good to be reading the anime now, and thinking about this a little more.
Maki is interesting. but don’t know what to say just now.
i’m rather proud that i recognised that the other guy is speaking a dialect! i wrote yesterday already that his speech-patterns seemed unusual. today i saw some of his stuff marked as kansai dialect. that feels like a milestone, being able to recognise that something is a dialect
tbh I was planning to lurk here, since although this is one of my favourite series and I already had the Japanese version I feel it is a bit beyond my optimal learning level for reading (my grammar isn’t quite there). My reading of the chapters has been more like skimming, though I followed a lot more than I expected.
Nothing like a discussion of consent to lure me out of hiding, even if it is technically OT in terms of learning Japanese…
I get what you are saying, pressuring/moving the line can be a problem, and many manga are careless about consent issues, but I think this one isn’t particularly problematic.
Consent isn’t something abstract, it is something that happens between people in context, including their history up to that point. The interaction isn’t happening in a vacuum, and that there is more to it than just the spoken words from a particular scene. Harassment in one context might be playful banter in another.
Considering Touko directly, “your fault” may seem a bit like gaslighting, but it is more a turn of phrase about the pattern they are falling into. Yuu keeps agreeing to what she wants, without any sign of real discontent, so each interaction she asks for a little more, it is a fairly common way for a relationship to evolve, and very different from eg someone trying to overcome a “no” with repeated badgering on the basis of a yes to something else. The lines Touko keeps crossing aren’t Yuu’s they are ones she set herself.
As for Yuu, the subtext here is very strong (and Yuu is a very unreliable narrator when it comes to her own behavior/desires). Contradicting her grumbling, essentially all of Yuu’s efforts have been directed at getting closer to Touko, not getting away from her. In vol 1 she held Touko’s hand to get a reaction, and then at the speech she took charge, manipulating the situation to get Touko alone and comfort her. Taking charge of someone’s welfare like that can be a very possessive move. Later pattern of behavior: she keeps on doing it.
Right near the start when Yuu talks about Touko her friends assume from tone/body language that she is talking about a crush. And in v2 ch2 we see Maki who is presented as a relationship expert being very doubtful about her claims not to have feelings for Touko.
And now in vol2 she has responded to Touko crossing the line… by going out of her way to engineer a chance for them to be alone together for more of those interactions. Even her scolding is only playful teasing. Future events in non-specific terms: and she keeps on doing these things too.
Series Yuu personality spoilers but not specific events: Yuu may say over and over that her fussing over Touko is just normal, but we never see any evidence she is that way with anyone else, in fact she seems fairly distant with her friends’ emotional issues.
Broadly speaking I guess what I’m trying to say is it seems like Yuu likes (or at least wants to explore) what Touko is doing (and hasn’t told her to stop), so there is no reason that Touko should behave as if her actions are unwelcome (esp since characters have better access to non-verbal cues than readers do). Generic rules of behavior are only the starting point for strangers.
tldr: Yuu is top.
i mean, it’s beyond my optimal level of reading too, but i enjoy it, so i return. whereas other stuff which would have been more suitable to my level of reading, i didn’t enjoy, and dropped
and yeah, i agree that Yuu wants to be with Nanami, she wants to feel these exciting feelings. but she hasn’t been able to fully articulate what she wants to herself, so the messages are sometimes mixed…
…discussions of consent will always draw me in, yeah
Grabbing interest does seem to be a strange thing, despite trying the Cardcaptor Sakura manga, which should be closer to my level, it hasn’t grabbed me, although I really like the anime. While last weekend I “accidentally” read (more like half-read given my Japanese level) all three volumes of ハナとヒナは放課後 (Hana and Hina After School).
I find yagakimi somewhere inbetween - although I’m enthusiastic about the story (and have read the translation many times) I think nuance is a bit more important than in eg Hana and Hina, so my limited Japanese gets in the way more.
I’m jumping off the wagon friends. The store recently restock but I’m not gonna get volume 2 just yet as I thought I would. And since I still had some of the first volume to catch up, I decided to drop the pressure of meeting a weekly reading pace, which I was failing to do already. I will definitely come back to it at some point when I feel more committed.
Happy reading! 
The first part is "It’s like before. But the second line has me a bit confused. Something like “Because I’m not surprised attacking you,” but obviously that sounds odd in English lol. Any thoughts on how I might translate it better?
Hidden simply because this is a long tangent on the consent topic not actually relevant to studying the Japanese.
The interaction didn’t bother me at all. I don’t even remember it being a thing I noticed when reading it in English a year or more ago. The analysis cbrettin gives is basically correct, but also I think people are generally way too consent obcessed these days. Like, there are always going to be weird probably sometimes uncomfortable interactions in developing romantic relationships, that’s just the nature of the beast. Stressing over every interaction I don’t think is really productive or useful. The assumption that everyone is capable of successfully navigating relationships in a way the other person, who they may not even know very well, just seems like a bad assumption. There’s lots of socially awkward people who still should be able to move boundaries, or just have relationships that will basically garunteed cause the other person to feel uncomfortable, or be uncomfortable themselves. The consent minuca obcession just hinders real relationships, and I really don’t think does much to help against real issues with consent. Like, you don’t have to do fine grained analysis to realize why what Harvey Weinstein did was bad lol. Or why you shouldn’t sexually harass people who’ve showed no interest or rejected you.
You can feel free to ignore this entire post basically, but imo relationship building and just romantic dynamics in the west I think are generally just not in a good place, which is bad for everyone involved, and so I felt compelled to respond. I could go into a lot more detail, but tbh I think I’ve already hijacked the thread enough lol. If you want to discuss further I’m happy to, but might be better to do on discord or something
Edit: I finally figured out WK forum formating! Yayyy
みたい is a な adjective connected to 不意打ち
It’s, “Because I won’t do a surprise attack like (I did) before anymore”
It’s her excuse, why it’s different now.
I don’t have an interest in making it sound like natural English though, sorry <3
I think 前みたいな modifies 不意打ち. So it’s more “the like-before surprise attack I will not do any more”, or perhaps more naturally “I will not surprise you like before any more”?
Ty to both of you! Very helpful 
Whelp, very late start, but I may be able to catch up at some point. Just bought volume 1 on Bookwalker and read through chapter 1 in about… 2 hours or so, I think? I didn’t time it that well, but if I sit down for it a bit and focus I think I can make it through volume 1 this weekend and maybe even catch up by the 17th, otherwise I’ll probably be caught up by the 24th.
I can follow along for the most part, just have to look up some words on jisho, but nothing too spectacular.
What’s the best thing to do if I have questions about the first volume? Just post in the respective threads for the chapters/the first volume even though I’m like two months late?
Finally managed to find time to read the first chapter…feel like I’m back into the story now so the issue will probably be not racing through the rest haha.
I share the same slight discomfort some others have mentioned about consent. I think just now how I feel about things will probably depend on how they progress (I haven’t watched the anime so going in blind!) - hopefully will turn out to be okay!
It’s interesting, while I’m probably finding this to be an easier read that ハイキュー which is the other manga I’m reading right now in terms of vocab, grammar etc…at the same time it being a more internal story can make it more tricky as there isn’t as much help from the pretty pictures. Anyway, looking forward to reading more
