That’s not the slightest bit rare.
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That’s not surprising to me at this point. It just seems like something people would write off as useless if they learned it in WaniKani and hadn’t seen it in books.
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After reading that section, this was my joking-but-kinda-not-joking prediction for where the story will go.
I thought people want to get noticed by 先輩? 
My thoughts on this week's reading
I’m kinda saddened by Keiko’s thoughts about the baby. She doesn’t really understand why her nephew is supposed to be more important to her than her friend’s kid. And that ending…
Also, her comparison of the baby’s cheek to a blister was, uh… interesting. 
By the way @Sylph and @Belerith, it was the sister who likened the baby to an animal.
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I had to reread that part once or twice because I was so confused by it
And at first it grossed me out quite a bit. But now I think I understand what she’s referring to. It’s not only that babies have a very soft skin, they also don’t have many muscles underneath the skin. Thus touching them may feel a bit… un-substantial, maybe. Just as a blister which is also kinda soft and wobbly.
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During the week 5 read-aloud session, someone (seanblue?) mentioned the use of 応 for こたえる in the sentence 店長の言葉に「はい！」と私と菅原さんが応えた, when they were responding to 店長’s 「今日も一日がんばろう！」.
I looked it up in a verb reference book, and 応 is used when the meaning of こたえる is either 1) to respond to someone’s desire/expectation/request (ex. 親の期待に応えたい) or 2) to strongly affect/hit hard (ex. 寒さが体に応える).
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Repeat Club Discussion Starts Here!
6 February 2021
End Page (PB): 62
End Page (HB): 55
End Kindle Location: 575
End Phrase: 唇を拭った。
Welcome to Week 5!
Feel free to use past discussion for reference, but please don’t hesitate to post any questions or comments! The more we discuss the more we all learn, and the more fun it is! Also, I strongly recommend setting each week’s thread to “watching” to stay abreast of the discussion. Please try to mark any spoilers as such.
- I’m reading along
- I’ll catch up soon
- I have no intention of catching up or the club has already finished, but I’m using the forums as reference
0 voters
Live Reading Sessions
The second live reading session will be 2021-01-24T03:00:00Z If you haven’t already, join the Japanese Book Club Discord. When the time comes to start, just enter the コンビニ人間 voice channel.
For live readings, we will take turns reading as much as we feel comfortable with (up to ~1 page), then go back and translate a section of our choosing together. Expect sessions to take anywhere from 1-2 hours, but feel free to join late or leave early as your schedule allows. We will be starting promptly at the designated time. Please post any questions regarding live reading session logistics in the Discord channel or on the home thread.
Vocab Sheet
Anybody should feel free to add to the vocab sheet. Read the guidelines on the first sheet- even if a word is not yet included you can use the spreadsheet as a tool to get help.
Discussion Questions
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What sentence/passage gave you the most difficulty? Feel free to request some help, or if you figured it out on your own break it down for the rest of us!
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What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?
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Was there any passage that you found particularly intriguing? Did it resonate with you (either positively or negatively)? Was it surprising? Offer any insight or new perspective? Was it just beautifully written?
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Share your story of dealing with irritating or infuriating coworkers (or customers)! How did you handle it?
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Nearly at the beginning of chapter 8 there is this sentence:
妹の夫は電気会社に勤務していて、大体終電で帰ってくるという。
It ends with という, but neither the Dutch nor English translation mentions it’s a ‘she said’ situation:
“Her husband commuted to his job at an electric company and almost always came home on the last train.”
“Haar man werkt voor een elektriciteitsbedrijf en komt meestal met de laatste trein naar huis.”
Is that just a translator’s choice, to leave the hearsay implicit, or am I missing some grammar point here?
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Wrong thread? 
No haha, I just numbered the ‘chapters’ so it’s easier to tell roughly where it is (cause of all the different ways people are reading it). But now I see that’s actually more confusing LOL
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I don’t know the answer to your question, but I have checked and it’s page 58.
I’m halfway through this week’s reading, and I’d honestly like to see Shiraha-san try hunting in the Jomon Period. Given how he’s been described so far, he’d probably take three steps and get eaten by a tanuki.
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This week most of all has been a huge flashback to my customer service days, right down to the gossiping, the overenthusiastic boss, the constantly shortstaffed employees, and the smarmy disgruntled jerk who begrudgingly does their job.
I’ve honestly really enjoyed Shiraha-san’s introduction. His cynicism is an interesting wrench in Keiko’s perfectly crafted machine, but I can’t imagine that this is the first time she’s had a coworker like this (considering she’s been there for 18 years). The absurdity of his incredibly misogynistic views are honestly pretty hilarious. While I recognize that this is likely drawing from real-life chauvinistic encounters that Murata-sensei herself has endured, in the context of the story it’s funny to see Shiraha-san’s pigheadedness met with mild confusion on Keiko’s part (I agree with @Belthazar re: his actual chances for wilderness survival lmao).
I still can’t tell if she doesn’t mind it, has immense patience, or just doesn’t allow herself to feel negative sentiments towards another person (of her own volition, anyways). The only time I can recall her expressing any criticism was in response to Sugawara-san doing so.
Yeah so, I’ve previously worked at Starbucks and Best Buy, both of which were pretty taxing on my mental health. As I mentioned earlier, this entire week has been hugely reminiscent of my time in customer service. There’s a certain pettiness that people can bring into the workplace that’s further reinforced by the negative stigma towards customer service as a line of work.
Shiraha-san’s quip of 「はあ、わからないこと？ コンビニのバイトで、ですか？」during the meeting encapsulates the more negative opinion from the employee perspective. Granted, my training experience wasn’t nearly as pandering as SmileMart’s seems to be, but it was pretty dang close at times.
We haven’t seen any awful customers yet, but those were typically the rallying point for me and my coworkers. The shared experience of having to deal with unreasonable and oftentimes combative people is a good way to get people talking to each other (if somewhat toxic).
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I’ve been a bit quiet (and busy!) the past couple weeks so I’ll post some ramblings.
There’s something enticing about the way Keiko thinks. Because she fully considers herself an outsider, she has a very detached view of the world. Dealing with somebody as awful as Shiraha doesn’t affect her emotionally like it would most other people. She really just describes the world as she sees it. Even her negative and in some cases disgusting descriptions of him don’t seem to be backed by anger or hatred, but rather just cool, detached observation.
Unfortunately at other times her lack of emotions come across as borderline psychopathic, like her thoughts regarding the baby and the knife. Oh god. As proven to some degree by her childhood incidents, her detachment can be dangerous.
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Also as a reminder, this week’s live reading is about 1 day and three hours from the time of this post. There was a steep drop-off in participation and I missed hearing everyone’s excellent reading! Let me know if there’s anything I can do to accommodate more people. If you haven’t joined yet, come check it out!
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I think it’s more that this particular situation isn’t covered by her pre-programmed set of available responses, so she just reverts to the default. It feels a bit to me like the fact that he’s insulting her just goes completely over her head.
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Finished the reading. Read the last sentence on page 61 about three times, because I was sure I’d misread it. I had not.
Given what I’ve read about Murata’s latest book, I’m not too sure I like where this could be leading…
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Hoo boy. Got through a few pages and got to thinking about how I’d come and complain about the negative sides to both overly cheerful and and ‘too good for this’ coworkers and then she went and suggested that a knife would be an easier solution for quieting the baby. And now that’s all I can think about. I can definitely still relate to Keiko, but she’s further out there from the rest of society than I’ve ever been.
Somehow still keeping up. New chapter thread went up today, and I discovered that I’d managed to read all bit the last sentence of the reading during bathroom trips. Anyone else think this week was a little easier to read, overall?
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I wasn’t really surprised by Keiko’s thoughts about the knife (I had read the spoilers after all), but I found shocking that right after this disturbing thought she switches it completely off and gives her attention to the cake. I don’t know why, but it was the contrast that I found shocking.
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Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you can mostly read it as hearsay - Japanese is generally stricter about not stating facts that you don’t know firsthand without some kind of framing device. The other possible way of reading it, is that it is kind of “defining” her sister’s husband, by telling us what kind of husband he is. Either way, certainly in English (and I suppose Dutch too!), I think it is more natural to leave it out to avoid sounding redundant. That’s my two cents anyway
I mostly agree - the number of passages I highlighted was probably half the amount of the previous week. Most of the challenge was figuring who was speaking in the opening bit!
I finished the chapter last night while clearly half asleep and initially completely missed the mention of the knife - I had to go back and figure out this morning why everyone was slightly freaked out by it, ha!
My place of uncertainty are just around one 3 sentence passage near the end:
あんまり邪魔だと思うと、小学校のときのように、相手をスコープで殴って止めてしまいたくなるときがある。(35%)
My breakdown
あんまり邪魔だと思うと = When I think too much nuisance (other people?)
小学校のときのように = Like when I was in elementary school
相手をスコープで殴って= Strike other person with a shovel
止めてしまいたくなる = It because that I want to completely stop? (not sure I’m getting the full nuance here.)
ときがある = There are times
There are times when other people feel like too much of a nuisance, I start to want to stop them by striking them with a shovel, like that time in elementary school.
そんな話を何気なく妹にして、泣きそうになられたことを思い出し、私は口をつぐんだ。
My point of confusion here is with にする, which doesn’t fit any of the uses I’m familiar with. I think that she is saying that she once said that to her sister, and seeing as it had made her look like she was about to cry, she kept her mouth shut?
小さいころから親切にしてくれた妹を悲しませるのは本意ではないので、私は「あ、そういえばユカリと久しぶりに会ったら、雰囲気が変わったねって言われたよ」と明るい話題を口にした。
The first bit is what I am unsure of:
小さいころから = since we were small
親切にしてくれた妹を = Sister who was kind to me (again, not sure about にする)
悲しませるのは = to make my sister
本意ではないので = Not my intentions
Because it was not my intentions to make my sisters, who had been so kind to me since we were small, sad, I said cheerfully …
And onward to next week! I am excited to see more of her interactions with 白羽, and to see whether she does eventually get annoyed by him, ha.
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I’m not feeling competent enough to go into grammar details, but for what it’s worth, I understand all three sentences the same as you.
And I also agree with you here.
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