🔆 光の帝国 👑 - Home Thread

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Welcome to :bright_button: 光の帝国 :crown:

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What’s this book about?

Fantasy and connected short stories :sparkles:

Where to buy

BookWalker | Amazon.co.jp

Discussion Threads and Reading Schedule

We will start reading on August 8th, 2026. Page counts are estimates from a digital edition. Please reference the stopping points as chapters did not work as good break points.

We aim to read fast books at 30-50 pages per week and hard books at ~15 pages per week

光の帝国 is considered a ‘fast’ book and so I aimed to have most weeks complete a short story. The exception to this is the second to last story which was too long and shares a portion with the final story which is quite short. For reference, the “iPad page (approx)” listed below - with my current text size I have 292 total pages which is more than the 272 in the 単行本 and the 288 in the 文庫本 and the highest total weeks tied at 43 pages on my ipad and the lowest at 27 (the first week). pm215 kindly looked up the bunko pages for us so those are now in the table.

Week Start Date Chapter Percentage 文庫 pages
Week 1 Aug 8 all of 大きな引き出し 11% 9-36
Week 2 Aug 15 all of 二つの茶碗 and 達磨山への道 26% 37-78
Week 3 Aug 22 all of オセロ・ゲーム and 手紙 40% 79-118
Week 4 Aug 29 all of 光の帝国 53% 119-152
Week 5 Sept 5 all of 歴史の時間 and 草取り 67% 153-192
Week 6 Sept 12 read until sentence ending in ５分間を」ちょうだい。 82% 193-233
Week 7 Sept 19 finish 黒い塔 and 国道を降りて 96% 233-272

Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • When asking for help, please mention things like chapter, page number, part of audio track, etc. Mentioning what version of the book you are reading may also help people locate the section
  • Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun!

Member List

Are you planning to read :bright_button: 光の帝国 :crown: with the book club?

  • Yes, I’m planning to read along
  • Not sure
  • Yes, but I’ll be starting fashionably late
  • Already read of it, plan to read the commentary
  • I had no intentions of reading the book, but I desire to click a poll
0 voters

If so, which version will you be reading?

  • Paperback
  • eBook
0 voters
2

Looking forward to this one. Seems really interesting. When shopping for buy options I realized the series has 3 books. I don’t know if the others are also short stories or not but I find it an interesting way to tell a long story with short stories.
I know it is a common style in Japanese I just don’t have much experience with it yet. Looking forward to see if the stories are more connected than in 人質. I expect we’ll follow a new person with ability in each of the stories at the moment :blush:.

3

The schedule looks perfect to me, thanks! It’s always amazing when an author writes in such a “regular” fashion.

4

Here are the paperback pages from my 集英社文庫 edition:

Week pages
1 9-36
2 37-78
3 79-118
4 119-152
5 153-192
6 193-233
7 233-273

I wonder sometimes if this happens because an author is writing for serialisation and the magazine or newspaper has a strict page count each month. But peeking at the publishing info and the afterword it seems like that’s not the case here (and the author even says they originally intended one or two of the stories to be full novel length!)

5

Thank you! I updated the schedule with these page numbers