僕が愛したすべての君へ 📦 (Intermediate Book Club) ・ Week 17

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僕が愛したすべての君へ
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Week 17 10 Jun 2023
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Vocabulary

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!

Live Readings

The next weekly live reading session will be 2023-06-18T12:30:00Z Join the Japanese Book Club Discord to either read or listen!

Proper Nouns

Name Reading Notes
高崎暦 たかさきこよみ The main character
ユノ ユノ His grandfather’s dog
瀧川和音 たきがわかずね A top student in 暦’s class
虚質科学研究所 きょしつかがくけんきゅうじょ Institute of Imaginary Science
佐藤綾子 さとういとこ The founder of imaginary science
涼 りょう 暦 and 和音’s kid

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I’m reading this book after the club has finished
  • I’m no longer reading the book

0 voters

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

Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay abreast of discussion!

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Oh boy, is it time to gather my thoughts already? Well don’t mind if I do.

As I’ve said in the previous thread, I finished this part alongside the last week’s because of the cliffhanger. You could mention, how this showed how much I could speed up by the end of the book, and how much my reading ability improved, yada yada, anyways, onto my overall thoughts.

Beware: lengthy, ranty, just how I like it

Thoughts about the whole book

Sad to say, but this wook was a bit meh. There were certainly parts I really enjoyed, but it felt a bit outweighed by the parts that dragged on.

In particular my favourite parts were the one where Calendar and Kazune got together, up to the first big parallel shift incident and the banzai before the wedding. I really liked the message of “loving every possibility of someone else”, I think it’s even a great one for real life.

I really disliked the constant humble bragging in the beginning. Thankfully it stopped after our protagonists got together, but it was a bit too much beforehand. Also really disliked the author’s habit of ruining suspense. At least wait a page before pushing the explanation down my throat, thank you.

I would have really liked if the author played a bit more with parallel worlds. I had a bunch of ideas that were sadly unexplored (in the book, more on this later). I also found the romance aspect of the book a bit lacking.

Just because I don’t like to criticize something without bringing some examples to the table, I’ll list a few works, that have a similar premise, but executed a bit better in my opinion.

I mentioned originally, how the blurb sounded a bit like steins;gate, same parallel world (though there with time travel) story with romance. I know this is a bit unfair, because we are talking about a novel going up against a 24 episode anime (or visual novel, pick your poison), but both the implications of the technology and the romance aspect was explored far better, probably because we didn’t have to watch as Rintarou grew up or died from stomach cancer at 70.

Another movie, that I remembered while watching the films was “Mr. Nobody”, which is a sort of artsy movie about a kid, who remembers all of his futures. It’s a decent film, I recommend it, one of the earlier Jared Leto movies. It has the same exact setup in the beginning, after their divorce, a kid has to decide, which of his parents he wants to live with, and then the rest of the movie is us watching the result. It’s much closer to showing us the butterfly effect in action, than what 僕君 managed.

Back to the book. The ending of this book was a bit confusing. I understood exactly what’s happening, but didn’t have a clue about who the mysterious woman, that helped Calendar was. Thankfully since I watched the movies (more on that later). Anyways, as a final score, I’d give it a 6/10. Definitely not bad, but not something, I would recommend to someone on my level. Maybe if they were better at reading to the point, that they can finish the thing in a couple of days, sure, then it’s a decent enough idea at the very least.

Now onto the movies

So after I finished the book, I decided to watch both movies. And oh boy, are they certainly one of the movies of the decade.

Both of them are about 1 and a half hours long, but that’s a bit misleading, because both have a solid 15-20 minutes of clips from the other movie embedded in them with banger music (the artist is Keina Suda, same one who did the OP for Skip and Loafer from this season). They don’t even really spread these clips out, there’s literally just a single segment in both towards the end.

僕君

I decided to watch this first, because I was curious what they changed. The answer was “quite a bit”. Remember the parts I mentioned being my favourite from the book? Yes. They were either cut or shortened quite a bit. The awkward scene of Kazune’s 20th birthday is gone, and with it the whole idea of “is this the same person I love” got shifted and reduced. Their wedding was basically just a quick mention, with them taking off their IP monitors for no apparent reason. Koyomi didn’t do a single optional shift. I repeat. Calendar has never set foot in an IP capsule. The movie just felt rushed, concepts being ignored and then getting quickly explained when they are strictly necessary to include, important (to me at least) plot points completely cut. Worst of all, the message I liked so much, “loving every possibility of someone” was basically a footnote. With no optional shifting, there was of course no visiting other Kazune’s. The movie just felt pointless. The one redeeming quality maybe, is that the ending scene got extended, with the Kazune from the other world explaining what’s going on, who we are seeing, etc.

君僕

After the first one, I went into this hesitently, sort of expecting an “endless 8 mini”. Thankfully, I think this is the better movie of the two, though this is probably somewhat because I have no idea what was cut. For this reason, this review will be shorter as well. This movie felt somewhat closer to the end of steins;gate, both in tone and story. It had a decent enough ending, quite cute imo, though certainly of the heartstring tugging variant. The only major sin of the movie was the literal replaying of the first part of the other movie. Voice acting and all included. Why? Who knows.

All in all, I give the movies a 5/10 personally, definitely on the skippable spectrum, not worth the 3 hours of time I’ve put into them. If someone is really desperate for a sci;fi romance show, watch steins;gate.

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Here’s my take

The Good

  • Interesting premise with parallel universes, the ability to shift between them and consequences surrounding both the technology of voluntary shifts and the societal and personal consequences.

  • Likeable female protagonist.

  • Interesting story structure (prologue/epilogue + middle part + epilogue/prologue).

The Bad

  • Terrible start with the main protagonist dying of stomach cancer, a cliffhanger and the whole story being colored by that perspective.

  • Really unlikable humble-brag male protagonist. Many light novel-ish romance stories have similar male protagonists, but considering how they shine throughout the book, it’s forgivable. Here - not really.

  • Not enough romance. It felt like the romance is one of the multiple subplots, rather than the main plot.

  • Not enough actual exploration of the consequences of shifting. Much of the remarks and discussions were quite shallow.

  • A general lack of direction. The way the story is organized and told feels extremely fragmented, without spending too much time on one thing. The romance plot line is underdeveloped, then a crime story thrown in and resolved within a couple of pages.

  • The narrator notoriously spoiling critical plot points

    • telling us he and Kazune will get married shortly after they start dating, even though the next chapter uses them getting married as a source of suspense

    • spoiling the murder mystery with a simplistic explanation

  • The underwhelming and almost pointless ending. No, he doesn’t meet the girl in the leotard. She doesn’t exist. She’s apparently not even relevant. After Koyomi meets the older woman I was hoping something would happen, but literally nothing did.

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Annnd we’re here! I’ll give my thoughts on the book and then my spoiler free reflections on this being my first Wanikani book club.

Book Thoughts

I gave this book a 3/5 on Natively. I agree with the other weak points others have already pointed out. I wish it… went somewhere, a bit more. It still feels like a light novel to me more than anything. But I didn’t actively dislike the book either (although Calendar came off as a bit too smug for me lol). I’m glad I tried it out though.

I was hoping someone here would have an explanation for the ending but it looks like there isn’t one?

Thoughts on Book Club, Spoiler-free

This is my first proper JP book club! I did one before on Discord but it fell apart before the end of the book sadly (I did finish the book early though. I haven’t read many books in JP that aren’t for children yet so I was a bit nervous coming in. I was debating between intermediate/advance book clubs but this one had a more interesting concept to me so I went with this.

The level was good for extensive reading for me. There there a few words I didn’t know, and some on each page I’d double-check the reading of, but I never had to reread any sections to understand what was happening and could get through it smoothly.

However, the pacing was way too slow for me lol. I ended up picking up the Natively book club as well since this alone wasn’t enough reading for me. I also have a physical book I read on the side. I think in the future I should just stick with the advance book club since, even if the book is less interesting, at least then it’ll end sooner. But I think it was good for me to test intermediate first to make sure.

I’m going to be joining the informal group for 推し、燃ゆ next since I’ve been wanting to read that one for years.

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Open at your own risk, heavy spoilers for the other book/movie

So tl;dr or tl;dw, the other book is about the world, where Calendar chose his dad when he was a kid. As a result, instead of spending time with her mom, he mainly spent time in the Imaginary Research Institute’s daycare, where he met Shiori, the other love interest. If you remember the first parallel shift Calendar went through, with the random girl in there, that was that world. They fall in love, but because their parents also fall in love, they are afraid that they won’t be allowed to marry. So to run away, they try to parallel shift to a universe, where their parents aren’t divorced. As a result, Shiori dies the exact moment she’s returning, leaving her as a Schrödinger’s Shiori, not dead, but basically dead. The rest of the story is about Koyomi trying to time travel back to a world, where they haven’t met, just so the accident doesn’t happen. When this books Koyomi meets the old lady at the end, that’s Shiori, and he asks her if she’s happy, because that was other book Koyomi’s sole wish.

You don’t have 5 books in your “currently reading” list vying for attention? That’s probably the issue.

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Thank you for the explanation!!

Haha! When I started it was just the one plus the physical book, then I picked up the Natively book club so I was reading 3. I’m not used to reading multiple books at once but having one physical and one on my phone to read seems to work for me.

But the pacing here was slow enough I almost always finished readings in one sitting, whereas I’d prefer them to be long enough that I can space them out throughout the week. But I get that this is the intermediate book club so that’s how it is.

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Oh… so one has to read the other book for the stuff to actually make sense? :sweat_smile:

Now I’m starting to understand @seanblue 's recommendation to start with the other book before jumping into this one. Chronologically it’s a little weird, because the other book came second and so without it, there is tons of stuff in the first book which don’t make sense.

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Pretty much. The movies kinda spoil each other, but if the other book is like this one, then neither makes much sense without the other.

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That’s a super weird way to write a book, honestly. Now I’m genuinely torn. I actually want to read the second book now to fill in the gaps. Considering your earlier spoiler, it also sounds like the second book might be the more interesting one to me.

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I don’t have much to add :slightly_smiling_face:

Having an ending that only makes sense if you also read the other book is kind of a neat concept, but doesn’t do much good for this book and the writing wasn’t good enough to make me want to read the other book. Thank you @Gorbit99 for giving us a summary!

I did like reading some sci-fi again for once and the book’s concepts were thought-provoking at times so I did enjoy that aspect of this book club.

So, thank you @seanblue for nominating the book and @maskedkoala for running it!

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Perhaps Bunny Girl Senpai then? :slight_smile:

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I basically plan on it because the writing was easy enough that I can sit down and read this on a day where I don’t have any of my other projects going on, and I pretty much operated under the assumption that the other book would explain what was left unexplained in this one. That’s what I meant last week when I said I got sucked in again.

Overall, the writing wasn’t stellar; it suffers a lot from pacing issues (I suppose that’s what happens when you try to fit 70 years into a rather small book), and the author could definitely do with some consistency in terms of building suspense ( Good = Tying it into the other book and leaving you wanting to read that one. Bad = spoiling any suspense after a single page ), but it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve read, and it’s just good enough, I’m willing to give the other book a shot by virtue of interest on the subject matter and it being easy enough as essentially a pulp read.

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For those of you who do read the other book I’d definitely be curious to hear your thoughts on it. I liked this one better (hence why I nominated this one), but since the reason was mostly a matter of tone and theme I can imagine some people liking the other book more.

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Sounds like an offshoot club. There’s also a third book apparently which I think doesn’t feature Calendar as the protag

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Thoughts on the book

Disclaimer: I am just a cat, there’s too many things about hoomans I just don’t understand.

I am probably in the minority, but I didn’t like this book in almost any aspect.
Besides the writing-style issues others have already mentioned (self-spoiling all interesting developments, book not being self-contained, unlikeable main character, extremely weak romance), I have qualms with a few other main points.

This is my very personal point of view, but I largely dislike the idea of parallel worlds based on decision points (e.g., every time there’s a decision someone has to make, one or several parallel worlds split based on each possible choice). I feel this idea has a big problem:

It completely denies the idea of free will. The very concept of making a decision completely disappears. Instead, you live in a world where taking choices is purely a game of chance. You either end up in the parallel world where you took choice A, or you end up in the world with choice B. There’s always a you that made the dumbest choices, and a you that made the wisest ones, and then a million mediocre other yous. All choices lose meaning. No matter how desperate you are to make this other person happy - there’s definitely a you somewhere that made them very unhappy.

Humans make choices based on limited information, and the significance of a choice is the very fact that it cannot be changed. Having another world where you made the “right choice” feels just like a cheap way to comfort oneself, just like people like saying “it could be worse”, as if somehow comparing a situation to a worse one somehow made things better. It doesn’t make it better - the situation is exactly the same.

And that is why I find the final page of the book kind of annoying - Calendar is thanking the other versions of himself that didn’t love Kazune, because that gave him the “chance” of being one of those who ended up loving her. He naively hopes the others have also found happiness with someone else or something. This is ridiculous - there is some Calendar out there, for sure, who is lonely, never found love, died alone of cancer in his apartment and his corpse was only found 5 days later because of the rotten smell the neighbors felt. Hey, thank you for having a crappy life so that I could enjoy my time with Kazune and a happy family :man_shrugging:

Romance is one of my favorite genres. We cats don’t experience romance, so it’s always interesting for me to observe it in humans - that’s probably the main reason I like the genre. However, while the idea of “love every possibility of the other person” may sound nice, I feel it’s completely unreal and doesn’t make any sense.

When humans are asked why they like another person, there’s always important factors, and those factors are strictly based on decisions they make. People are naturally attracted to others for reasons that are based on those decisions. People are not “naturally kind” - it’s that people who do kind things are kind. They make the decision of being kind. A person who is “kind by nature” but never takes any kind action doesn’t exist.

And that’s the whole point. A person’s decisions are an integral part of who they are, what personality they have, and thus, the very reason people like or dislike them, and thus, eventually the reason they are loved or hated (I mean, romantically speaking. A mother can still “love” her son even if he turns out to be a terrible person, but that’s a different kind of love)

The book very conveniently ignores this reality which I feel should be obvious. Would Calendar have loved a Kazune that was cruel, annoying, disdainful? Hell no. Would have Kazune cared about Calendar at all if he hadn’t been super smart? Well, no, because the whole trigger of him having higher score than her would have never happened.

And that’s the whole point. A human being makes thousands of choices every day. These choices have consequences that change them, and turn them into the most awful people and the most amazing people. You cannot love “every possibility” of a human being, because that’s basically like saying you love anyone no matter what they are and what they do, because a human inherently has all those possibilities. The whole idea of a special someone disappears - because saying you love all possibilities is like saying you love anyone. The “person” doesn’t matter. The whole idea of who a person is (e.g., of their essence, their personality, their qualities) completely disappears expect for maybe, their name. They all have the same name, the rest can be completely different - can be anything at all.

The thing I did like about this book - I feel it was at a very comfortable level for me to read without many lookups, making it feel pretty smooth. I was happy to get this feeling from an novel, in which I usually struggle a lot more.

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I bought as well, but haven’t had a look yet. Read somewhere (wikipedia?) it’s more of a spin-off.

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A slightly different perspective

Not going to respond to your whole post, but I wanted to offer a slightly different perspective on one part in particular.

I like to look at it not as random chance but probability. While a world for each possible decision may exist, ones based on a decision that you’re less likely to make are less likely to exist. Let’s say you’re an upstanding citizen. There may still be a world where you robbed a bank. But for that one world there are trillions where you didn’t do that because it’s so unlikely you would have taken that action. We get a glimpse of this in the book by seeing how far Koyomi has to travel to find a world where he and Kazune aren’t engaged and again in seeing the number of worlds in which Ryou died and Kazune did an optional shift to escape that world, but it’s not nearly as explicit as I would have liked.

Anyway, that’s my reasoning for why free will still exists. It just goes from a binary decision to a probabilistic one, which is in line with quantum state and other concepts that are sometimes used in parallel world stories. Not trying to convince you of course, just wanted to share another interpretation.

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maybe slight-ish spoiler from the book

I think the IEPP was meant for this, Koyomi killed the wife of that maniac in a 10 world radius of #22.

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I think this was the leading theory of parallel universes until the string theory became more popular :slight_smile: . I still remember reading about it when I was younger.

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So… i couldn’t help myself and read the 序章 of the 2nd book. The writing style is way better somehow and the intro not full of wtf moments.

@MrGeneric i think we could start a book club spin-off or something less official if you’d like? We already have 2 other people here familiar with the 2nd story.

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