This is the main thread for reading the manga スーパーの裏でヤニ吸うふたり・Behind the Supermarket, Smoking With You together with the Beginner Book Club (BBC). It’s suggested that you have a solid understanding of N5 grammar and at least some of N4. If you have finished Genki 2, or have finished an Absolute Beginner Book Club and thought it went rather well, this might be at a good next step for you!
Note: This book has been rated by users as slightly harder than a few previous picks. As such, some readers may struggle more compared to other manga. Do not be discouraged and feel free to ask as many questions as needed.
We’ll be reading together according to a weekly schedule, ask and answer questions in weekly threads, and we’ll have vocabulary and grammar sheets we’re building together to make this easier for everyone.
Physical: Amazon JP and CD Japan.
Digital: Kobo and BookWalker.
For those who use Kindle JP: you can download the free sample which includes the whole chapter 1
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.
Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags
Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).
Hide Details results in the dropdown box like below:
Example
This is an example of the “Hide Details” option.
The “Blur Spoiler” option will simply blur the text it surrounds.
This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.
Posting Advice
When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.
Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!
Names
Feel free to add to this as new characters / places get introduced throughout the book.
Example:
Name
Reading
Notes
山田
やまだ
Main character
田山
たやま
Main character
佐々木
ささき
Main character
Membership
Will you be reading with us?
Yes
Yes, but I might start late
Maybe
No
0voters
Which version will you be reading?
eBook
Paperback
Hardcover
0voters
Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to be notified when weekly threads get posted!
So I bought the kindle version, which has a whooping 245 pages (story ends on page 239, but that is chapter “0” ). Page (location) 5 of the kindle version is the contents page:
And page 6 corresponds to the first page of chapter 1. According to the table of contents, this is page 3. When referring to the pages of the week, I will use the numbering referring to the table of contents - hopefully that makes it easier for people with different versions to be on the same page.
Page 3, the first page of chapter 1 (kindle location 6)
With a whooping 17 chapters in volume 1 (including chapter 0), I’m quite sure most people don’t want to do a chapter a week and be reading for 17 weeks. However, we also have to consider that the book won’t be a walk in the park for beginners, especially since some pages are quite text heavy + very little to no furigana.
Chapter breakdown: Chapter 1: 15 pages of text Chapter 2: 14 pages of text (including 2 omake pages) Chapter 3: 12 pages of text Chapter 4: 14 pages of text (including 2 omake pages) Chapter 5: 11 pages of text Chapter 6: 13 pages of text (including 2 omake pages) Chapter 7: 12 pages of text Chapter 8: 14 pages of text (including 2 omake pages) Chapter 9: 12 pages of text Chapter 10: 13 pages of text (including 2 omake pages) Chapter 11: 12 pages of text Chapter 12: 13 pages of text (including 2 omake pages) Chapter 13: 11 pages of text Chapter 14: 13 pages of text (including 2 omake pages) Chapter 15: 12 pages of text Chapter 16: 17 pages of text (including 2 omake pages) Chapter 0: 17 pages of text
(Perhaps I counted 1 or more page less in the above, but this should give a general idea)
Overall, the chapters are not very long. Mostly, if we read 2 per week, we would be at ~25 pages/week, which might however be too much for a BBC book. However, either we would have to break it down by reading 1 chapter a week, 2 on the other, or cutting chapters in half (eg. week 1 chapter 1 and half of chapter 2, week 2 the other half of chapter 2 and chapter 3). I think for week 1, we could also just do chapter 1 to ease in the reading. This way, we would be at 9 weeks if we read 2 chapters a week, or 11/12 weeks if we divide them.
Before I start the poll:
Does anyone have another suggestion/idea I haven’t thought about? Please feel free to discuss here, I will begin the poll on Wednesday otherwise.
I like the breakdown with 2 chapters per week.
The total character counts is around 16.3k for this book.
To compare, Rojica is 9.9k and also read in 9 weeks. But so far I have finished the reading assigment in one sitting each time, so even reading something twice longer than Rojica would be fine for me.
How much text is on a given page approximately? Because if it’s just a few text bubbles, 25 pages a week should be fine, but if it’s like detective conan, that might be a different story.
Yes!!! ヤニ吸う won! I’m so happy to share the joy of this manga with y’all.
Although this is a bit dialogue heavy, the vocabulary is IMO quite “everyday” life — the supermarket setting definitely helps here. Also, the lack of furigana really didn’t seem to bother me all that much.
Some example panels in this PV should give a decent approximation of the level involved. (There’s also a version without narration if you’d prefer…)
I manually transcribed the first few chapters to get some IME practise. I now wonder whether it would be ok to share those with all of you… being able to use browser extensions for the few difficult words would be really helpful.
If that’s not ok, I’m thinking about processing those files to break down the vocabulary into Google Sheets / Anki format for those who want to get an overview or practise before reading. @ChristopherFritz, I noticed you’ve been using mokuro to do something similar – do you have some nice workflow for this?
The first chapter has 1136 characters in it, including punctuation and hand-written asides. I have no idea how that compares to others, though.
Like @eagleflo said, the text itself isn’t too hard due to the nature of the dialogues, though of course some pages/bubbles are a bit text-heavier or the occasional harder subject pops up. I think for most readers it shouldn’t be a big problem.
Also eagleflo, if you do process the files into google sheets somehow we can link them here as a vocabulary list or something similar
Seems mostly manageable. And of course, if the pace turns out to be too great for some, there are no rules against changing it in the middle of the book club.
That’s the idea of the mokuro method. Generates vocab sheets kinda like this (worth looking at later chapters, where the translations aren’t yet proofread for the raw output)
Yeah, that was its original purpose I believe. I’m also planning to use parts of it to make the Kurzgesagt vocab sheet. Though of course without mokuro.
Gorbit99 already linked to the thread on it, but to add a bit:
I don’t have a “nice” workflow for it.
It’s a matter of:
Run the volume through Mokuro.
Run my Javascript in a browser to manually identify the order of dialogue boxes.
Can be a bit time-consuming, and nothing stores in the browser, so if you accidentally close the tab or browser, you have to start over from the beginning.
This is necessary only if you want to ensure words are sorted by order of appearance per page.
Run through Juman or Juman++ with filtering to remove things you don’t need in a vocabulary sheet (such as particles, copula, etc.)
You could optionally use Mecab or something else, but that may require extra work that I haven’t written scripts for.
Put output into a spreadsheet.
Introduce Wikipedia sheet and conditional formatting.
Manually split into different tabs per week.
Remove duplicates (before or after splitting if you want words to appear once per volume vs once per weekly tab).
If you’d like to work at the steps above, @eagleflo, I’m available to answer questions (in the thread Gorbit99 linked to). I can also be available through Discord for text or audio chat and screen sharing to go through the steps.
Book Club!
I’m so happy to share the joy of this manga with y’all.
