スーパーの裏でヤニ吸うふたり 🚬 - Week 7 (Beginner Book Club - Behind the Supermarket, Smoking with You)

Welcome to Week 7 of - スーパーの裏でヤニ吸うふたり・Behind the Supermarket, Smoking With You :smoking: Book Club!

Week 7 26th of August 2023
Start Page 123
End Page 148
Chapters 10 and 11
Pages 26
Previous week Week 6
Next week Week 8
Home Thread Here

Vocabulary

スーパーの裏でヤニ吸うふたり Volume 1 Vocabulary List (courtesy of @eagleflo)

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

Discussion Guidelines

Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

Spoiler Courtesy

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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!

If necessary, include an explanation of any discrepancies in the Ebook page numbers from physical page numbers. If there is an easy shortcut for some ebook versions to relate back to physical page numbers, it would be worth it to include it as a third bullet here, or if you want to use chapter page numbers instead of volume page numbers, as is the case with some manga. For example:
Example

For the Kindle version of this manga, the page numbers and the location number are always 3 apart. If you subtract 3 from the location, this will give you the accurate page number!

OR

Please use the chapter page numbers, instead of the volume page numbers. These are located in between the panels!

Proper Nouns

Feel free to add to this as new characters / places get introduced throughout the book.

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

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?

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0 voters

If you’ve already read this book but are still going to join the discussion, please select “I have finished this part.”

Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay up to date with the discussion!

11 Likes

Finished this week’s content. Chapter 10 was interesting. By number of words looked up, it was quite high, but it wasn’t as difficult as that would suggest in terms of getting the basic meaning of what was going on. On the other hand, I’ve had times in my Japanese reading experience in these last few months where I’ve understood every word standalone but had trouble getting what the sentence was getting it in totality.

9 Likes

I got around to reading chapter 10 early this week, so I can’t do my usual thing where I read both chapters on Tuesday and then come to the book club and find any possible question already answered.

p 125

So…can someone please explain the ぽい joke?
image

7 Likes
Page 125

My understanding is that this is linked to what 田山 says in the previous panel:

So the second bubble says ‘So, Sasaki-san (was using) a feature phone’ then she says ‘ぽいね~~’ which basically means that, in Tayama’s eyes, Sasaki-san seemed to her like the kind of person who would still use an old feature phone (ぽい is a suffix that means that something appears to be or has similar characteristics to something). When Sasaki replies ‘ぽい…?’ it’s because he’s wondering what exactly in his appearance give off that impression.

13 Likes

スマホ chapter wasn’t too bad, but chapter 11 was surprisingly rough and I lost track about halfway through. Once I got to the Sasaki thought bubble:

But for real, will need to go through it again, I got the gist of it but pretty shakey overall

/edit: Also, this was brought up earlier, but

Chapter 11

Where the eff does Tayama’s hair go when she goes into Yamada mode? It actually loses volume and length. At first I thought she does a little bun or braid or something behind her which is non visible but there’s back shots of her with a pretty normal cut. Manga magic!

11 Likes

Okay, after a quick chapter reread and thinking about the mechanics of how people smoke, I think I understand better.

Chapter 11

I was following along until where Sasaki starts talking about his cigarette packet fortune-telling method or whatever, which sort of came out of nowhere for me (I think pg 144?). I guess the linking passage is:

ここに煙草三本並んでますよね そのお菓子三つ割り振ってもらえますか?

So is he saying something like, let me choose the candy you’re getting using this method? (Lit ‘let me allocate from among those three choices’) And then he taps the packet to get the ciggies out and the number of cigarettes that come out indicates a choice?

P 146

詰めの甘いお上品

Is that ‘[the candy Sasaki chose] is pretty high quality and stuffed with sugar’?

6 Likes

If it’s the thought bubble I’m thinking of (i’m not quite to ch 11 yet), someone actually brought this up in the main BBC thread after it got nominated. :laughing:

rakugo reference

Jugemu - Wikipedia

9 Likes

Wow, thanks! No way I would have gotten that otherwise

5 Likes

The english translator for the version I read didn’t get it either, don’t worry :laughing: I also would’ve had no idea if someone hadn’t pointed it out

my favorite genre of translator note: "I give up"

12 Likes

uwhaaaa finally caught up TT this week was so hard, especially because I read all the way from chapter 2 in one day. My brain needs to sleep and then I’ll re-read again lol

8 Likes
P. 144

ここに煙草三本並んでますよね そのお菓子三つ割り振ってもらえますか?

That’s how I understood it as well!
I think this is difficult to understand without having handled a Japanese cigarette pack before. I think there are three cigs at the opening then he shakes it once and sees how many of those three come out? Depending on this he decides what to do or in this case what to buy?

9 Likes
Chapter 10

It’s around this stage where I realized the extent of 山田’s developing feelings for 佐々木. The healing definitely goes both ways.

Pulling 佐々木’s leg to get that reaction was a nice bonus. (Although I thought Japanese mobile phones have the camera shutter sound permanently activated, but maybe I’m wrong.)

Chapter 11

She is yet again trying to find the best way to mess with 佐々木 and once again she is quite successful. This extra-quick switch back to 山田 mode is possibly the hardest suspension-of-disbelief moment I’ve had with the manga.

満足度100%

「満足度100%」-- surprisingly only one んははは this week! Counter is at #10.

7 Likes

Had to take another look at the official translation to see how they coped with this…

Not quite Jugemu

I can’t place where this is from. :sweat_smile: Some sort of mantra anyway.

6 Likes
Chapter 11

That’s how I understood it, too. I was initially confused because they didn’t name the 3 choices, but then I saw that she already had 3 packages in her hand in the top left panel of that page, so one cigarette probably meant buying the first of those.

Sasaki’s cigarette oracle reminds me of those fortune sticks you can shake from a box at Japanese temples. I wonder if that’s where he got the inspiration?

詰めの甘いお上品
Is that ‘[the candy Sasaki chose] is pretty high quality and stuffed with sugar’?

That’s what I thought, but Deepl claims it’s “overstuffed and overpriced”. Hm, I hope someone knows more about this.

9 Likes
Chapter 10

I think that might be why she fiddled with Sasaki’s phone settings at the same time, so that he would confuse her phone’s shutter sound with some sound his phone makes when you edit settings.

Chapter 11

This extra-quick switch back to 山田 mode is possibly the hardest suspension-of-disbelief moment I’ve had with the manga.

My suspension of disbelief has been dead since like chapter 2 or something, so nothing new here :face_with_peeking_eye:. But the all-important hair question is back. Before, I always figured that Yamada hides the rest of her hair under the headscarf thingy of her clerk uniform, but here she doesn’t wear any headcover and you can clearly see that her hair just vanished. Manga magic indeed.

7 Likes

If you dare to read 11本目後日談 on page 161 (physical, 163 on BookWalker) it’s actually explained with a diagram. :joy:

4 Likes

My decision to go “Oh, it’s handwritten and super squiggly and he seems panicked, it’s probably just a stream of panicking” seems to have paid off.

10 Likes

Exciting! If I read this section this week, I’ll be on track with the club again. The recent chapters have been fun. Looking forward to reading with you all again!

7 Likes
Page 146

This part was puzzling for me as well but I think I got it figured out (could be completely wrong though :sweat_smile:)

  1. When googling for the phrase 詰めの甘い you get lots of results for 詰めが甘い which seems to be an expression which kinda means “failing right at the end” or “failing to see things through”.
  1. I think 上品 here is not “high-quality goods” but rather the “elegance” we already encountered in chapter 1, which I myself asked about.

  2. We need to pay attention to what 山田 says before the speech bubble in question:「途中で止めたってわかるっての」which refers to the previous page where 佐々木 barely managed to stop himself from revealing that he uses his “cigarette pack oracle” to divine if he will be able to see 山田 at the cash register on a given day.

So to sum it up the meaning is probably something along the lines of: “You (佐々木) messed up being cool/suave right at the end (of helping me choose)”.

12 Likes

That makes an awesome lot of sense, thank you for the research!

7 Likes