Alright, after … ahem … quite some time I’m picking up this book again, determined to finish it soon™. I was in the middle of story 5 but did not remember anything, and so I decided to restart that chapter again. Will keep y’all posted about my progress!
Section 21 once again as I‘ve decided to read chapter 5 from the start again - simply didn’t remember as much 
The grandpa and great-grandpa stories are really nice and bitter-sweet. 曾祖父は山口ではなく天国に旅立った cracked me up once again 
Other than that, I didn’t closely follow all of the relatives but instead just took in the atmosphere generated by all the little anecdotes and personal history bits. Now I‘m wondering how this all relates to the main plot… 
Section 22:
Yuki enrolls in a US university and befriends a Japanese student called Rara. They plan to visit the resort, but Yuki is denied entrance for undisclosed reasons. Rara turns radical when hearing the background of Mine and the resort, and he wants to destroy the company.
Section 23:
Rara turns into a terrorist, and after a long internal struggle Yuki follows him - basically after she noticed that her grandpa tried to reach a certain spot (the post office?) as the last expression of his free will but was kept from doing so by means of the family’s surveillance. That pushed her over the edge to finally start a plot to act against Mine. The first step was to join the Mine university, which was promptly answered by her family through disinheriting her. Life is complicated 
Section 24:
Finally, Yuki enrolls in the resort’s university and moves into the resort. When she asks her fellow students about their opinion regarding the surveillance, they just shrug it off and don’t seem to care much about it. This pretty much reminds me of the ongoing discussions about privacy and surveillance in Western countries - with the same arguments even (“they don’t use it for bad stuff” / “I have nothing to hide anyways”). Very interesting!
One sentence especially resonated with me: 「君はものごとを深く考えすぎだよ」I feel that this is a pretty nice societal criticism regarding the West where everything is presented to the outside as sunshine and roses (cf. the omnipresent “Awesome!” in the US).
Section 25:
Yuki and Rara manage to place their bombs in the stadium, but before anything happens, a mysterious policeman grabs them and basically “kidnaps” them. He tells them that they have been the top suspects for a week, but of course the system would not tell why, and so the policeman refused to arrest them and quit his job instead 
Now who is this crazy person? Initially I thought this must be Stevenson (or what was his name again?) but he is together with a woman, and I have no memories of such a person.
This section also gives us a rebound on the criticism towards the west:
日本では、家族や親戚から完全に自由になることはできなかった。それは血筋や遺伝子の問題ではない。自分の過ごしてきた環境が、自分を縛りつけているという当たり前のことだった。
I thought this was a nice way of digging up a few pain points of the respective societies.
Section 26:
And of course the system predicted the police officer’s move as well and servants come to arrest them all. The policeman tries to pull a move by pretending to take Yuki hostage, but to no avail. In the end, he jumps off a cliff into the ocean.
After that, Yuki thinks about her grandfather and what freedom actually is. For me an important sentence was 自由の解釈をめぐる戦いだ。We first need to grasp the concept before we can try to (re)gain it.
All in all, these are very interesting philosophical excursions, and I’m a bit sad that I still feel I miss out on a lot due to my language level On the other hand, this book is something I can look forward to reading once more in a few years. And I’m somewhat puzzled as how much this author lives up to his first name… I had not expected such deep thoughts given that he won the Naoki prize with his other book, and that’s usually for rather non-philosophical books. Anyways, at some point I will read it and know more 
Now I need to catch up on 月の裏側 and then I will get to the last chapter here 
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And it’s done! 
Phew… I think I need to recover for a bit before I can think of reading his Naoki prize winning book
Section 27:
Ok we switch to a completely different perspective, namely to that of a Christian priest. (Admittedly I could have well lived without that one…) He encounters a stranger in his church, who asks him about freedom. Soon afterwards, the oriest decides to quit his profession.
Who is this stranger? My bet is on Stevenson, who had survived the jump into the ocean and now emerges as someone who doubts everything even more than before…
Ah, now this was easy for a change for my German ear: It could be Abendrot (which means “evening glow”, you know the red sky when the sun sets) or some fancy derivation of this.
Fun fact: This is a name of Jewish origin, and I found it a tiny bit confusing that he was a Christian priest 
Section 28:
We meet the priest‘s son and grandson, two very smart people. It is refreshing to listen in to their conversation where the son is trying to explain to the grandson why animals can talk in fables and can do unbelievable things, like blow away a straw hut just with their breath. The grandson only accepts technical explanations Somehow reminded me of my own children.
Also, the priest is in a very unhappy marriage but refuses a divorce. So sad to see the shackles of Christian belief in full swing… 
Section 29:
The wife is not stupid at all and commits adultery because her husband had told her that’s the only condition under which God allows a divorce Haha you asked for it, you got it! Of course when she tells him so, he still doesn’t accept it. 
So she takes the last exit and disappears. (I’m surprised she didn’t disappear way earlier, though…)
Anyways, we then get a full infodump on the son, Peter, who is permanently being threatened to be killed because he wrote a book. Nice times, eh? Feels a bit like the Middle Ages…
(I mean you could argue that even in modern times people like Salman Rushdie basically live with the same threat, but in the latter case it’s the regime that tries to kill him whereas in Peter’s case it’s the populace, so there’s still a difference to me. But of course from the victim’s perspective it doesn’t matter.)
I must confess at the start of this chapter I was almost convinced that these chapter-stories were more or less unconnected and we had to draw conclusions from each one individually (mainly regarding the question of what freedom really means) but by now it feels that they are sort of coming together in the end?
Section 30:
Abendrot is indeed the resort’s architect, wow! And Peter turned against him by publishing his book about it, which upset so many people.
The man from the church is indeed the policeman who was involved with the arrest of Yuki and Rara, and apparently he survived the jump.
Section 31:
Omg Abendrot and Tim move into the house where Dorfman’s mother lives? 
Now I’m curious…
But in the end nothing came out of this. We follow the priest until the end, where he meets the mysterious man again.
Oooh I really liked that! Just imagine the two of them riding into the sunset (it was sunset at the time, and our guy is aptly named Abendrot ) continuing their conversation, and you hear their voices grow fainter and fainter… 
Oh my, I was sooo annoyed about this! And then all the bible quotes in Japanese
I don’t know, maybe it was because it was at the end, maybe it was because I’m quite familiar with it, but it somehow felt more … intrusive than the other chapters? I don’t know, I didn’t like it that much. Felt a bit as if the author is Christian and tries to persuade his fellow countrypeople…
I liked the book quite a lot. But there were also some parts that irked me a lot:
This is the most unrealistic aspect in my opinion. The technology is depicted as perfect, and even better than the humans in its judgment. I (as a software developer) unfortunately do not share this opinion (no, not even with ChatGPT). Software is usually only as good as the people who invented and built it, and that means in many cases that the software is actually pretty bad 
I wish I had a better opinion on the state of software development, but that’s what it is for me.
That on the other hand sounded totally believable to me…
I think I need to let this sit for a while and reflect on it.
(And if you’d like me to maybe add more at some point, somebody would need to unblock me please )
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I’m very impressed you finished it after all this time! This wasn’t an easy book, and picking it up again after a while can’t have made it any easier.
It was fun being reminded of some details through reading your comments. If you have anything more to add, by all means 
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