Yeah, that sentence…I’m still not sure I understood what it was trying to tell me even with machine translation. Particularly the 〈突っ張った〉ところのない part.
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Yeah, I found that a bit obscure, and when I was reading this part I just skipped straight past it. Looking around, I found this sense in 日本国語大辞典:
③ 青少年などが虚勢をはって、社会に反抗したり不良じみた態度をとったりする。
※父の詫び状（1978）〈向田邦子〉お軽勘平「女は気負い、いま流行りのことばでいえば『突っぱって』いたのかも知れないという気もする」
Note that the quote is from 1978, and like the use in our book (published 1981) it’s put it in scare quotes, and it helpfully even says “this is a hot new word”. So I think it’s pretty likely that Akagawa is using this popular-at-the-time way to refer to a kind of young person who puts on a show of being tough and a bit rebellious and delinquent. The sentence is saying that because 周平 happily admits to being bad at classes and really only caring about judo, he has this simple and straightforward personality with none of that bravado and rebelliousness to it.
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Thanks, now it finally makes sense. I googled it, too, but there seemed to be so many possible translations I got lost in them.
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Got through the week’s reading! I feel like this week went more smoothly than last week for me.
Story comments
It was good to see Izumi was aware of the woman in her father’s life and was okay with it. It makes me think that the line in the first week’s reading talking about her father also being her lover was just some weird turn of phrase.
The same thing happened to me!
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