田山 actually sleeps with her 携帯灰皿… not sure what to think about that. At least she wasn’t kidding when she said 「大事にする」. I hope she isn’t smoking inside…
Speaking of the inside, I’ve seen this style of two-storey apartments a lot in Japanese media. I guess these are very common in certain areas? Will have to keep an eye out.
Yeah, I don’t have a good sense of the internal layout, but it looks like a pretty basic leopalace - just mass apartment housing for singles (or families, alas) for the most part
I’m tempted to say that not only a romance, we have a veritable love triangle!
But nah, that’s not quite right.
I think the relationships between our three leads are the biggest attraction to this manga.
The relationship between 山田 and 佐々木 is one based in worship. 佐々木 has raised 山田 to a pedestal, and this keeps them distant – 佐々木 is always wondering about whether he is even worthy of queuing up to her register. Their interactions are formal, and both are playing roles – the cashier and the customer. 山田 has perfected her act over the years, and 佐々木 validates that as one of her fans.
The relationship between 田山 and 佐々木 feels much more direct, warm, ambiguous and multi-faceted, which is exactly to my taste – it feels more authentic. In this relationship 田山 gets to be herself, and she enjoys the advantage of information asymmetry. They started as smoking buddies, sure, but they’ve already been supporting each other far beyond that description in various ways. Almost every chapter explores them taking a little step towards knowing each other better. There’s affection developing between them for sure – but is it just a deep bond of friendship or something more?
My favourite part of the manga is definitely Yamada running circles around Sasaki with her double-persona, because it’s exactly the kind of thing I would do XD. Sort of reminds me of one time I sent my class’s Whatsapp group into an absolute frenzy by pretending to be 3 students through multiple numbers “discussing” an upcoming (nonexistent) exam lol.
I didn’t quite get the reason why Yamada hopped in the car with Tenchou. Did one of the part timers scan an item twice, so Yamada was going to go give the extra money back to the customer, and the chief was like “Whatever, get in, we’ll go do it together”?
I was also not very sure of that part, but I checked the english scans in Mangadex and it was also translated as one of the part timers scanning an item twice
“The thing around its neck is good (though what he means is something more like it’s cute/it’s suitable) … it sort of resembles…” [referring to Tayama’s choker, though he doesn’t know the word]
Ahh, I had to go back and see, based on the cat’s facial expression, that he’s comparing the cat’s collar to Tayama’s choker I was somehow thinking he was talking about his own neck … given the other cat was crawling all around it earlier!
I caught up on last week’s and this week’s readings and just absolutely loved them.
My favorite bit was the cat/collar silliness. I’m not surprised that Tayama was offended by the comparison of the choker to a collar. She doesn’t seem like the type of girl to want to be kept like that. Of course, it seems like Sasaki was thinking on a more superficial level, so it was really a more innocent comparison.
I couldn’t determine the conjugation pattern for 飼われたん. Maybe my translation is off, since I would have thought it: “最近飼ったんですか。” Not sure what this different form means …
I thought maybe the potential form, like “You were recently able to get a pet?” But I looked that up and think that would be 飼えたん。
So this is the receptive form (also know as passive, if you find that term clearer) of the verb 飼う.
飼われる => To be kept (as a pet)
In the same panel before, before that dialogue balloon, Sasaki says これ猫の…, making 猫 the new topic. So here there’s an implied (猫は)飼われた => Cat received the action of being kept (as a pet).
This one of those situations where I find the term passive confusing, because while this sounds natural in japanese, in English people would rarely use it in this situation. As you mentioned, the natural translation here is “Are you keeping one as a pet?” where the subject of the sentence is reverted to Sasaki, while in Japanese the subject is the cat.
んです is the grammar construct called “explication-tone の”, with の abbreviated as ん. So this is added to the sentence since Yamada is asking for an explanation (about why Sasaki has cat hair on him).
「田山ちゃんはわんちゃんでもねこちゃんでもありません」 
