アオハライド (Ao Haru Ride) book club [now reading volume 9]

konsei · January 3, 2021, 1:27am

This thread is a place for people who have read, are reading, or plan to read アオハライド to discuss the manga.

We’ll be starting a mini book club on February 1st so if you want to read it with others click here for the volume 1 thread! We’ll be reading 1 volume per 2 months, but may change the pace if others want to speed up or slow down.Otherwise feel free to discuss or ask questions about the manga in this thread!

Background

Summary:

from mangaupdates

Yoshioka Futaba has a few reasons why she wants to “reset” her image and life as a new high-school student. Because she’s cute and had a demure personality she was ostracized by her female friends in junior high, and because of a series of misunderstandings and mishaps, she couldn’t get her feeling across to the one boy she has always liked, Tanaka Kou.

Now in high school, she is determined to be as unladylike as possible so that her friends won’t be jealous of her. While living her life this way contentedly, she meets Tanaka-kun again, but he now goes under the name of Mabuchi Kou. He tells her that he felt the same way as she did when they were younger, but that they cannot go back. Will Futaba be able to continue her love that never even started from three years ago?

Genres: shoujo, slice of life, school life, romance, comedy

Where to buy: | amazon | ebookjapan | bookwalker |

Difficulty

This manga would probably fall in the Beginner range - the story and grammar are pretty simple, and it has furigana for all kanji (apart from some of the comments in the background of some panels)

sample pages from chapter 0

sample pages from chapter 1

Discussion

Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4
Volume 5
Volume 6
Volume 7
Volume 8
Volume 9
Volume 10 - coming February 2021

Spoilers

For all spoilers, please post the chapter number followed by blurred or hidden text:

for blurred text:
[spoiler]stuff happens[/spoiler]

Spoilers for chapter 4 stuff happens

for hidden text:
[details="spoilers for chapter 5"] More stuff happens [/details]

spoilers for chapter 5

More stuff happens

konsei · January 20, 2020, 5:04am

Polls

Status

Planning to read
Reading
Paused
Completed
Dropped

0 voters

Background

Read the manga in English
Watched the anime
neither

0 voters

Interest

Loved it
Liked it
It was okay
Didn’t like it
Hated it

0 voters

Naphthalene · January 19, 2020, 11:43pm

Why does the title of this thread have an extra “ru” in it?
Also, wow, it’s starting to become one long thread inspiration chain.

afunian · January 20, 2020, 12:05am

The title of the book is written that way in english if you look closely

Moritaro · January 20, 2020, 12:06am

Such a good manga. This was actually the first manga I bought and the first I read all the books in Japanese. It took me a while to read all of them but it is a great story. I recommend if anyone is on the fence about this series.

Naphthalene · January 20, 2020, 12:06am

Oh, it sure is.
Weird.

afunian · January 20, 2020, 12:07am

Yea, I thought the opposite at first, “why is there a missing ル in haru for the Japanese”

konsei · January 20, 2020, 1:50am

This had me stumped when I first started learning japanese and tried to buy the manga online. The series is transcribed as Ao Haru Ride and translated as Blue Spring Ride, so why is the title actually アオハタイド??? And not a fan of a full-katakana title

kelitt · January 20, 2020, 7:02am

I remember reading Ao Haru Ride when I was first getting into manga! In English, I don’t think I had started learning Japanese at that point. And I think it was ongoing, so I didn’t read all of it, I think it just sort of got dropped at some point (I’m not great at keeping track of all the manga I read).

I like fluffy school life shoujos, and I think they’re good reads for Japanese learning, since they’re usually fairly simple and full of everyday life vocabulary. I have several tomes of various manga in this style (not Ao Haru Ride unfortunately) that… I will tackle at some point I’m not very confident I can read them currently, but they are my main motivation for learning to read Japanese so I’ll get to it eventually.

As a side note, are there instructions on how to do the spoilers formats? I figure this might be blurred with the spoiler tags but I don’t know how to fold an entire section.

konsei · January 20, 2020, 7:34am

then this is your chance to finally find out how it ends

its the hide details option, I just added it to the first post

thebiofan · January 20, 2020, 5:07pm

How difficult is this manga, grammar and vocabulary wise?

ChristopherFritz · January 21, 2020, 2:41am

I bought the anime on DVD a while back, as the description sounded interesting, but haven’t gotten to watching it yet. I may have to bump it up on my watch list, and see if it’s something I’d like to read.

Here’s the description from the anime if anyone’s curious, as I otherwise don’t know what it’s about to assess if I’d be interested =)

Summary

Can you change who you are inside? In middle school, Futaba’s shy nature and cute appearance attracted boys, but made other girls so jealous that she became a social outcast. So, when high school began, Futaba remade herself, becoming sloppy and pretending to be unfeminine… and now she has friends! But her new world comes crashing down when she runs into a boy she used to know: Kou. The one boy who could have become more than just a friend.

Except Kou’s changed as well. So much so that she barely recognizes him. And while the attraction that she used to feel seems to still be there in her heart, he doesn’t seem to feel the same way anymore. Or does he? Is the difference in the way Kou’s acting due to how different she’s ostensibly become? Or have they both changed too much to ever recapture what they had?

Kobo has chapter 0 and chapter 1 (about 90 to 100 pages) free as a preview (probably the same for other e-book sites that have previews as well).

Here are a few random pages:

Sample Pages

LittleCheeno · January 21, 2020, 7:46am

I haven’t read a lot yet (I’m on volume 2), but to me it seems they speak quite causually, and use mostly common words. I use Jisho for any words I don’t know. If you’ve seen some slice of life anime, I think the causual writing should be fairly understandable. And it should be easier than fantasy manga (shounen, stuff like that), as they tend to use a lot of niche words

konsei · January 21, 2020, 1:23pm

@LittleCheeno want to do a 1 volume/month schedule for now? Since we already read vol 1 we can count that as January’s reading, and that way we can finish it Jan of 2021

LittleCheeno · January 21, 2020, 7:56pm

Sounds good

LittleCheeno · January 21, 2020, 8:04pm

kelitt, thebiofan and ChristopherFritz, you want to join us? It should be quite okay to read, and we can help each other if there’s something difficult If you haven’t seen the anime, you could do that too, just to know a little bit beforehand (I think it might help), and the manga is worth reading anyways, since the anime dropped some content (more at the end).

kelitt · January 21, 2020, 8:53pm

I was downloading the kindle sample of the first volume right now

I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up, since my reading pace is quite slow (plus I already signed up for the なぜ？どうして？ club, and I have a 4-koma manga that I’m reading bit by bit on my own), but I might end up just reading along with an English translation

Would the pace be set to 1 volume/month or broken down by weeks/days?

konsei · January 21, 2020, 8:22pm

We can set it up as 1 volume/month starting February, that way people can go at their own pace and read a little every day or read it all in one sitting. If you guys are down I can set up a thread for next month

kelitt · January 21, 2020, 9:07pm

Yeah, this is not posible for me I will follow along the best I can, though I might have to cheat Maybe I should do a read-through of the English version and then tackle the Japanese version with the story fresh in my mind

I will look for the volumes in the local japanese bookstore, and if not I will look at getting the kindle version or a set from amazon japan

Anyway, for now you can count me as “interested, but hesitating because I want to preserve my sanity and I still need to find the manga in Japanese and I also don’t want to slow everyone else down”.

konsei · January 21, 2020, 9:24pm

cheating is a-ok cause then you can try to re-read it later without the english copy!

the first two volumes are free on amazon/ebookjapan/bookwalker so you should definitely get those!

edit: looks like they’re only free until Jan 28th