Yes, and I appreciate it. To be honest, I had been rather looking for cheap thrills at the time rather than good literature, but I’m not complaining at all! And the fact that it’s approachable by everyone, horror lover or not, makes it an extra great choice.
I’m glad you decided to join us! I’m sure you’ll enjoy the story a lot.
Compared to the other two older texts I’ve read (one of them only halfway, granted), 糞尿譚 and 小川未明童話集 (ironically listed as stories for children, even though neither content nor difficulty had anything to do with children imo), I found this story way more approachable. Part of it may be down to experience, I guess, but mostly I think that if you initially pay attention to a few weird kanji and the three or so extra polite verbs that appear everywhere, you’ll soon stop noticing them.
I’m delighted so many people joined in and seemed to enjoy it! I’m thinking of maybe making it an annual thing. I’ll need to keep an eye out for short stories that are easily accessible and would fit the spookiness theme. Recommendations always welcome!
In case anybody is interested, here is a translation. I just read the story in English, because you made me curious and the Japanese seemed just too hard and annoying to get into.
It seems so short in English and so daunting in Japanese. Oh, well.
Thanks for this! I’ll struggle through the original Japanese and then reading the English translation will be all the more satisfying
I read the first page yesterday and had to look up every fifth word. Definitely far above my current level and harder than anything I’ve read before, but I’ve started, can’t stop now! I think finishing the story in Japanese can be my project for the month lol
Edit: Just read two more pages (took me an hour). The second page was surprisingly easier than the first for me. The difficulty level reminds me of when I first started reading Kiki, but seeing the percentage read shoot up with each page is very motivating!
Finished the story this morning! For some reason it felt very enjoyable to read this story in daily chunks of about 5 pages. It wasn’t too difficult after I got past the dozen or so words that are usually written in kana only, but the writing style felt somehow very slow, and so I couldn’t read it too quickly. Altogether it took me 4 hours to read it.
For the horror bit, sorry to disappoint but I didn’t think it was creepy at all - at first I was quite saddened that he was rejected by society so much that he had to revert to such drastic measures, and then I found it really heartwarming to read how he fell in love with the girl at the hotel and also with Yoshiko. What he focused on when he couldn’t see them. How they felt to him. How his senses shifted in this world of total darkness. (I wonder whether blind people can relate to what he wrote?)
Also, for the plot, it was clear to me from the onset that this would end like “oh and by the way I’m talking about the chair you’re sitting on right now.” (Because otherwise why would he send it to her, of all people?) But I could not guess how he would go about it - at first I thought he would turn himself into a chair, like on the cover photo of one of the books in the OP, or maybe he forced his assistant to use his skin as hide for a chair, or he would use his assistant’s skin as hide? The idea of him simply hiding inside a chair without permanent connection did not cross my mind.
Also, I did not foresee the plot twist at the end - I thought this was genius! To let her experience the whole situation as if it was real would definitely be fishing for a good review
I also couldn’t come up with the plot twist to the plot twist (i.e. maybe the second letter was just an addendum to defuse the situation, and the story was real after all?) - thanks to everybody who pointed it out! So now the reader is left with an enormous amount of ambiguity which makes the story even more enjoyable and shows the author’s amazing skill.
Huh, it’s interesting how you have so much empathy for chair man, but apparently none for those unsuspectingly sitting on the chair. True, they were never physically harmed, in fact never suspected a thing, yet while they were sitting there going about their lives, he was having what I could only describe as sexual contact with them. It’s like someone watching you in your home without you knowing - doesn’t it make your skin crawl, finding out about it, even if you were never directly harmed? And this wasn’t just watching, it was touching. In all the most inappropriate places too.
I also imagine that if he indeed was in the chair at the writer’s home, he would go out while they slept and roam around the house, stretch his legs, use the toilet, raid the kitchen. But even that feels less invasive than the rest of it to me.
As for his sad backstory, it never convinced me. It felt too much like rationalizing to me. “They have more than I can ever have” has been used as an excuse for the most atrocious things - and anyone, even the richest and prettiest, can claim it. In fact, even the beginning, when he would just sit in the chairs before giving them to their owners and imagine all sorts of things felt a little creepy to me.
I have to say, I have been happy to find the difficulty has eased off a little more for me. I wish Aozora wasn’t just one huge block of text but eyeballing it I’m thinking I’m about 2/3 through? There are like 3 or so lengthy sentences in here so far that filled me with despair and made me question what I was doing but also part of the problem was often that I had forgotten what one of the odd usually not kanji words was, heh.
Glad I joined in, and thanks for doing this so I could get an extra push to take the story on! It’s still challenging and slow but it’s a pretty big move up in difficulty from everything else I’ve been reading (I know difficulty estimates aren’t perfect but I’ve capped on natively around 31 so far? One VN I’m reading right now is definitely above that level but still not as hard as this story) and it’s a first little step into demystifying older writing so I’m really glad to be doing it.
I’ll save story thoughts til I finish, hopefully in not too many more days…
Heh, this is more of a flying leap into old writing. A little step would be something like 少年探偵団 or 怪人二十面相 Or maybe one of the more chill short stories by 太宰
Even better! To be fair I’m being carried pretty hard by the furigana, dunno how much that’s common practice when anything is written in an older now non-standard way, or maybe an Aozora thing, or what. But if they’re going to tell me which word it is anyway there’s not much difference.
It really seems to vary. I recently read a book published in the 60s (my copy was printed in the 70s) and it was chock full of ‘vintage’ kanji with no furigana to speak of. I’ve also seen reprints of old texts that straight up remove the old kanji, or even modernize the grammar patterns. It really seems to be a ‘at the publisher’s discretion’ thing how true to the original text they want to be. I’ve memorized a lot of the older kanji just through heavy exposure but there’s still ones that trip me up (just today I had 其れ故 (それゆえ) and was staring at it thinking ‘what now?’.
Well I’m halfway; Flowers has trained me to recognize 其れ instantly haha. Just drew a blank on the latter part despite knowing the kanji. To be fair I don’t know if I’ve come across それゆえ in any form just yet…
Thanks for the info! Guess it might be worthwhile to shop around for available editions when I start reading more of this stuff.
Sorry to prolong this since it’s a bit off topic, but just remembered that I’ve actually come across a modernized text on Aozora itself! Brandon from Natively pointed it out to me when I sent him a spreadsheet of 100ish short stories I wanted added to the database
Are you referring to the first sentence? If so, I interpreted that to mean that once her husband was gone, she was able to act freely and do what she wanted rather than waiting on him. As I understand it, wives at this time were generally expected to be available to serve their husband and his guests whenever called upon, so she wouldn’t be able to hole up in the study until she was alone.
Thanks. From context I had supposed it meant something as “to take care of herself” but as it is clearly an idiomatic construct and as I didn’t found it in the (few) dictionaries I consulted (I was only on my phone), I wasn’t sure.
In the third sentence there is the unknown word 機通 (機通となくやって来た)
I believe you meant 幾？This is いく as in いくつ、and along with a counter (通 for counting documents, in this case letters) and となく, it would mean, basically, “several (letters)”. It’s equivalent to なん＋counter+か。
That’s indeed an interesting observation, thanks for reflecting it back on me! I think that’s mainly because my level of tolerance for closeness / contact is waaaay different from most people that I know, so even if I imagined myself being in the position of the person sitting on the chair, I wouldn’t take issue with that, I guess. (I hope that doesn’t sound too weird or creepy for you now )
It would, if it was done with an evil intent (e.g. planning to rob or rape or kill me), but if it was done solely for the purpose of looking at me, I honestly couldn’t care less.
Thanks for following up, your point of view is much clearer to me now. I’d hate being watched unknowingly, even if there’s no harm intended, and even if I’m not doing anything that I wouldn’t do in public anyway. It’s that feeling of vulnerability, that creepy feeling when you had been thinking you were alone and in fact you weren’t. I guess not everyone has it.
That was a very interesting article you linked to. Chair man did stress several times that he was ugly, but I always thought he just wasn’t attractive, not that he might have had some facial deformity. This would indeed change my reading of the story somewhat. I had taken the ugliness to be there as 1) an excuse/motive and 2) to make it even more difficult for the author to stomach the thought of him being in her chair. You see, the way he described his love for her in the end was almost convincing, and I did wonder for a minute whether she might want to meet him after all. But, horrible as it sounds (and is), we usually tend to be more forgiving towards attractive people, and an attractive stalker might even be reluctantly acceptable (maybe even welcomed by some?) as opposed to an ugly one.
I never expected to associate this story with works like Phantom of the Opera. It’s eye-opening to be able to look at the story from so many different angles, so again, thanks for your insights!
As for the social issue of “ugliness”, I guess it’s present in most societies. It’s definitely not Japan-exclusive. Even if efforts are being made to make everyone feel accepted and perfect in their uniqueness - and there’s definitely been progress in that regard - “standard beauty” is still very much idolized. On a personal level, outward appearance plays next to no role for me once I get to know the person. There’s either a connection or there isn’t, and looks have nothing to do with it. But to have that connection, you need to get to know someone. Did Chair Man get to know the people sitting on him? He did have intimate contact with them, and could feel and overhear them, but it was one-way only. It’s almost like falling in love with a celebrity. On the other hand, we, the readers of his letter, know more about him, even without touching or hearing him, because he has revealed his thought processes (if he was truthful). And based on those, he definitely isn’t someone I’d be likely to want to get to know, regardless of looks.
I finished! Enjoyed it a lot. Had to read very slowly and more than anything just found that tons and tons of kanji have slipped my mind by now, but such is life I suppose. Eventually the reading got comfortable enough, allowing for looking up a few words in pretty much every sentence.
Spoiler stuff
Have to say though, I’m kind of on @NicoleIsEnough 's side about not finding it that creepy, though maybe not quite for the same reason. If I buy in totally I completely agree about it being an uncomfortable violation and a man just secretly existing in a small nook in your house is eerie. But I just… don’t think I can get over it being a chair. Look, it’s a man who built himself a chair-shaped suit. I love this chair so much, that I will wear the chair and become the chair and never have to leave the chair. It’s me, the chairman. I can’t not find it kind of funny I’m sorry. All I can think is every time I made some terrible joke about someone in my wife’s grad school department being “the chair,” I FINALLY know what she meant! A lot of horror has to kind of ride that line where for a lot of people it’s horrifying but you’ll have someone going “this is really silly” and as much as I try to play along every time, that person is me this time.
But it’s out there in a way that I respect and enjoy a lot, very unique. This kind of strange art is part of what draws me to Japanese in the first place. Probably 5 stars. Had a great time reading it and I get the appeal in the horror direction. Just, didn’t quite hit that way for me.
Oh yeah as for the ending! The thoughts of “how did he know everything” definitely hit my mind too but I immediately turned to some level of stalking rather than thinking the story is really true. Love the ambiguity either way.
I both agree and disagree on that angle, in that I think the guy is pretty tragic but feeling some level of pity/compassion and explaining his actions doesn’t necessarily justify them. I find it unlikely he’s so hideous no one will talk to him the way he says it (although the point on deformities and terrible treatment is very possible now that you mention it, I hadn’t considered that either), but to reach the point of climbing into chairs to feel people on the other side, you have to reach a pretty warped place in your life, so I absolutely believe that he believes it. In the modern day this guy would be an incel or something, toxic and probably self-defeating but certainly a deeply sad individual all the same.
Or maybe one of the more chill short stories by 太宰
I’ve memorized a lot of the older kanji just through heavy exposure but there’s still ones that trip me up (just today I had 其れ故 (それゆえ) and was staring at it thinking ‘what now?’. 
