This is the explanatory の. If it were ない I’m pretty sure it would have been ておかん, not ておくん.
So the break down goes,:
ちゃんと決めとく = properly decide beforehand
んだった= のだった explanatory の, literally “it was that”. This pattern is often used to express regret (see page 502 of Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns, or this link for example).
な - thinking aloud to oneself
So all in all, it would be something like “We should have decided properly in advance, huh” .
I’ve gotten horribly behind due to the holidays and some health issues. I hope to be able to catch up to you all next week. Definitely been missing the book club. 
perfect, thank you
The game may not necessarily be violent, but it “properly shows blood (coming out)”. For all we know, Kotoha can be playing a hospital surgery game, but it could also be something like one of the Street Fighter games.
For those unaware, 「血が出る」 is the Japanese counterpart to saying “bleeding” in English. For example, if you fall and scrape your knee and it’s bleeding, a Japanese person would say it is 「血が出る」 (“blood is coming out”).
At its core, you can think of より as meaning “from” (in regards to distance). Thus, 「公園より外に」 would be “from the park to outside” or “to outside from the park”. Here, Yui figures the other two wouldn’t leave the park, which implies she will only look for them within the park.
I had no idea this scene was indoors!
(Looking back at that scene now, it’s kind of obvious. But when I originally read this series, I was probably a bit more focused on the words than the art.)
I’d say this is definitely it. Yui doesn’t know how far the others can go to hide, and thinks it should have been determined in advance.
I know how this can be. Worst case scenario, when we start week nine (new chapter) you can skip ahead to that to follow along at club pace, and return to any missed chapters later. Good luck!
I’m also behind due to holidays and being a slow reader. I mostly just read through the weekly threads to answer my questions though, so I should be able to catch up eventually…though unlikely this week.
I’ve managed to keep up with the rest of my Japanese studies though!
One option would be to skip forward to the current chapter and go back to chapters you’ve missed later on. I can’t see any major story arc developing.
Get ready for a lot of questions next week, page 55 has kicked my bum…
You could say the meaning has passed me by. wah wah wahhh
I also think the full expression would be written as 立ち入り禁止 but often gets printed on signs with just the kanji 立入禁止 probably just so it can be printed larger. It similar to 入り口 just written as 入口. It still gets read the same, but conserves space when trying to print it large on a sign. They are sort of abbreviations for convenience and are accepted ways to write the expressions even though the readings don’t really match the kanji.
Not that anyone cares, but the first time I went to Japan I remember buying train tickets at the JR office behind them. I didn’t realize that until you posted the link to that Google Street. So cool to see it in the book. I love the real world locations.
Week 8’s thread, concluding this chapter, is now up:
Hmm. I caught the shinkansen from Ueno during my second trip to Japan, but since I entered the network at Uguisudani Station, I probably didn’t visit that ticket office. Maybe it was this one.
I’m currently catching up and all the questions posted helped me out tremendously! I have one question left though, so if anyone still wants to chime in, I would really appreciate it:
I was wondering what the second part of this panel acutally means: 駅の方とかはさすがに.
The vocab-sheet lists さすがに as “as one would expect”. I found that とか means “such as” or “something like”. This leaves me with: Something like the station’s direction, as one would expect. But how does this fit here? Is it connected to the previous panel, where she is staring at a branch? Is she concluding from the branch that they went into the direction of the station? Or is this sentence connected to Yui thinking that the others probably didn’t leave the park?
さすがに carries the meaning of reconfirming one’s evaluation or judgment of a matter. You can see this in the translation of “as one would expect” in that you are reconfirming that it (whatever it is) matches what you had previously evaluated or judged it to be (what you expected).
Here on page 53, Yui in the first two panels realizes that she doesn’t know how far the others are allowed to hide, and considers they should have decided that in advance. In the third panel, she first says they wouldn’t go outside of the park.
Next, she says 「駅の方とかは」 on the topic of something like the direction of the station, and her comment about this topic is 「さすがに」, she’s reconfirming her belief that they won’t go somewhere outside of the park, such as toward the station.
If I were translating this into English, rather than “as expected” (which in English suggests an actual confirmation), I’d probably go with “sure enough” (which is more reconfirming without an actual confirmation). “But, they wouldn’t go outside of the park. Sure enough, (they wouldn’t go) somewhere like toward the station.”
さすがに is still very hard for me to wrap my head around. I was convinced that it was the exact opposite of what you said, so something like “surely they’ll be towards the station”. Here is an interesting (although not entirely enlightening) analysis on Tofugu: さすが (Sasuga) Is Not Always a Compliment.
The Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns says this on さすがに: “Used when someone (or something) that is usually evaluated in a certain way is put into an extraordinary situation and shows a result or behaviour that diverges from this evaluation.”
And Deepl offers this translation for our sentence: “I’m not sure if it’s the station or not.”
Colour me confused.
I think this is a good rabbit hole to go down.
さすが (the noun) has a couple of uses, according to this Japanese dictionary page:
Essentially, “To confirm something rumored or expected is true, and to be impressed again.”
More or less, “Acknowledging something is true while having conflicting feelings about it.”
We can change this noun into an adverb by adding に to it, giving us さすがに. Now, it’s modifying the verb. The same dictionary includes adverbial definitions:
Meaning, “Understanding that a thing that was expected (predicted, anticipated, hoped) is true, and further being impressed again by that truth.” Synonyms given are なるほど and やはり.
An example sentence is given: 「一人暮らしはさすがに寂しい」 “さすがに, living by oneself is lonely.” You can fill in “as expected” or “sure enough” as an English translation for さすがに here.
Which we can read as, “Acknowledging something, but having conflicting feelings under certain circumstances.”
As an example sentence, 「味はよいが、これだけ多いとさすがに飽きる」 “The flavor is good, but if I have a lot of only this, さすがに I’ll get tired of it.”
(The third adverb definition is for 「さすがの…も」, so I’ve excluded it here.)
There’s a footnote on another usage of さすが as an interjection, such as in saying, 「さすが(に)、センスがいいね」 “さすが(に), she has good (fashion) sense.” That’s not applicable to Yui’s usage here, but it’s one that comes up a lot, so worth mentioning.
なるほど and やはり were listed as synonyms, so it’s worth also looking at さすが(に) compared with those.
Here’s a page on さすがに and なるほど:
My translation:
In these examples, you can see both さすがに and なるほど have a sense of “sure enough”, although I feel “as expected” is better suited to さすがに and not so much to なるほど.
The page further goes on to say that さすがに is used when acknowledging the current situation is what was expected. なるほど is used when positively reconfirming what you heard or knew previously, or when you are convinced that the other person or thing makes sense.
It gives examples of when each can and cannot be used:
Comparison 1:
Comparison 2:
(I have to admit, the incorrect なるほど usage does sound “off” to me.)
Comparison 3:
(Likewise here. I think it’s just a matter of reading/watching a lot of material, the brain’s pattern recognition eventually starts finding these situations where one word “sounds right” and the other would “sound wrong” if used.)
Comparison 4:
(This one, I don’t have a feel for.)
I’ve hit my time limit, but here’s a Japanese page that covers やはり and さすが(に) for the interested.
Thanks for all the extra reading on さすが. I suspect this is going to be my new という in terms of how many times it will stump me before I start to get a feel for it.
That said, I’m still not clear how we can be sure about that “(they wouldn’t go)” in your translation. I always struggle whenever a negative is omitted - how am I supposed to know to fill it in? Why is it "Sure enough, (they wouldn’t go) somewhere like toward the station.”, and not just "Sure enough, (they would go) somewhere like toward the station.” The station is right next to the park, so I’m thinking they could have gone towards the station even without leaving the park, couldn’t they?
The negation came from the previous sentence in this case: でも公園より外に出ないよね
The 駅の方とかはさすがに is a direct continuation of that sentence. I also treated 方 less as it’s “direction” meaning, and lean more towards “area” (which still implies a particular direction, but is more focused than a general direction.)
I basically imagined a comma after the first sentence to piece it all together in my head:
でも公園よりに出ないよね、駅の方とかさすがに.
But (they) wouldn’t go outside of the park, or somewhere like to the area of the train station, certainly/surely/naturally (pick your flavor of さすがに).
If you interpret 方 as just a general direction (going towards the station, but remaining in the park), I can see the confusion, but with it being explicitly tied to the train station, I think it’s less general, and you still definitely have to leave the park to reach the station, so when the whole phrase is attached to the previous sentence, it makes sense.
As @MrGeneric mentions, it’s because it’s tying back to the prior sentence.
Looking at this again on a new day, and freshly reading only the one さすがに word balloon in isolation, I completely understand the interpretation of “Sure enough, (they would go) somewhere like toward the station.”
If we extend our scope a bit, here’s what takes place:
In the first panel, Yui establishes the topic as 範囲 (range). While は and も are the primary ways to establish a topic, because the topic is simply what one is talking about, the (indirect) quote marker って works to establish a topic as well. That’s what we have here (「そういえば、範囲ってどこまでなんだろう」), as she wonders what the range of hiding is.
The second panel doesn’t have a topic specified, as it’s carrying over the same topic of 範囲. She’s still commenting on the range, as she considers that they should have established it in advance, what the range would be.
Going into the third panel, she’s still talking about the same thing, 範囲, the range. Here, she’s saying the others wouldn’t go outside of the park. In Yui’s mind, this establishes the range as within the limits of being inside of the park.
Still in panel three, she then introduces a new topic: 「駅の方とか」. Now she’s talking about a location outside what she believes to be the sensible range for hiding, and her comment is さすがに. This means that going somewhere like the station is as Yui expects. That expectation is what she figured in the prior word balloons: the range of the game is within the park, and therefore something like the station is sure enough, outside of bounds, as she’s figured.
Ah, right, regarding them as one sentence does the trick. I took them as two different sentences (the second one troublingly incomplete), and so interpreted the second one as contrasting the first.
See, that’s why I feel manga are harder than novels. They are basically spoken language written down, with all its quirks, and I feel I’m often missing a lot of nuance because of lack of exposure (and lack of all the clues actual spoken language carries in the way it’s spoken). Prose seems much more straightforward to me.
Oh, that’s interesting. I had been wondering about that は, I felt like it gave me some new information but wasn’t sure exactly what. The way you put it makes a lot of sense.
I can definitely understand that feeling; the only reason why I tend to have an easier time with manga over prose is that I have actually practiced reading manga in Japanese, and have only just started with prose. I sat down and read my first whole chapter of a light novel yesterday evening, and it took me about 2 hours to get through about 19 pages because it’s so different from what I’m used to. 