午后のあくび / Afternoon Yawnings - BBC Book Club - Home Thread

[simboubou]

Welcome to the 午后のあくび Book Club!

Join the beginner book club here!

Every day is a little bit strange. Every day is wonderful. Here in Shiratama-cho, strange things come to life like fireflies.

View the nomination post here!

Where to purchase

BookWaker

AmazonJP

CDJapan

Ebook Japan

Schedule

Week	start date	chapters	pages with text
Week 1	mar 28	1-3	12
Week 2	apr 4	4-6	12
Week 3	apr 11	7-10	16
Week 4	apr 18	11-15	16
Week 5	apr 25	16-19	16
Week 6	may 2	20-23	16
week 7	may 9	24-28	20
week 8	may 16	29-34	24
Week 9	may 23	34-36-omake	19

Vocabulary

Vocab sheet
This vocab sheet was generated automatically with Mokuro and Ichiran. It may thus contain mistake. Feel free to correct them !

Manga Kotoba (thank you @pocketcalamity and @ChristopherFritz)

Discussion Guidelines

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 (or “chapter X page N”), 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!

Page numbers

Page numbers are printed on all pages, physical and digital. It might help to also specify the chapter (they are all four pages long).

Proper Nouns

There are not that many recurring characters. Almost all the stories have Ayako meeting a one-shot character.

Name	Reading	Notes
あわこ		Main character
ねね香		A little girl from the same neighborhood
かご中	かごなか	Ayako’s colleague. Her head is a bird cage

Membership

Will you be reading with us?

• Yes

• Yes, but I might start late

• Maybe

• No

Which version will you be reading?

• eBook

• Physical

Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to be notified when weekly threads get posted!

[simboubou]

reserved space just in case…

[simboubou]

Schedule

The book contains 36 chapters of four pages each. Scanning through the pages, all chapters appears to be of similar “weight”, except for:

• Chapter 14 with no text

• Chapters 23 and 27 which are a bit lighter.

You can read the first chapter here to get a sense of the amount of text per chapter. It’s all without furigana by the way.

There is also a 7-pages オマケ at the end, called “Panna and Cotta - のんびりな一日”, which we may of may not read.

I thought the book was short, but I admit this is actually a bit more reading that I though.

As usually, we can vote a fast / medium / slow schedule. And possibly adjust later if needed.
EDIT: added 2 month schedule if we want to be slightly faster. I underestimate the speed the BBC is used to. I remember during Hitori Bocchi, at some I just fell behind hard.

Faster schedule

Week	start date	chapters	pages with text
1	mar 28	1-3	12
2	apr 04	4-7	12
3	apr 11	8-11	16
4	apr 18	12-17	20
5	apr 25	18-22	20
6	may 02	23-28	24
7	may 09	29-33	20
8	may 16	34-omake	19

Fast schedule

Week	start date	chapters	pages with text
1	mar 28	1-3	12
2	apr 4	4-6	12
3	apr 11	7-10	16
4	apr 18	11-15	16
5	apr 25	16-19	16
6	may 2	20-23	16
7	may 9	24-28	20
8	may 16	29-33	20
9	may 23	34-omake	11

Medium schedule

Week	start date	chapters	pages with text
1	mar 28	1-2	8
2	apr 04	3-5	12
3	apr 11	6-8	12
4	apr 18	9-11	12
5	apr 25	12-16	12
6	may 02	17-20	16
7	may 09	21-24	16
8	may 16	25-28	16
9	may 23	29-32	16
10	may 30	33-36	16
11	jun 06	omake	7

Slower schedule

Column 1	Column 2	Column 3	Column 4
1	mar 28	1-2	8
2	apr 04	3-5	12
3	apr 11	6-8	12
4	apr 18	9-11	12
5	apr 25	12-15	12
6	may 02	16-18	12
7	may 09	19-21	12
8	may 16	22-24	12
9	may 23	25-28	16
10	may 30	29-32	16
11	jun 06	33-36	16
12	jun 13	omake	7

The difference between schedules is not that high. I did try to take the “short chapters” into account. The omake week might also be cut of merged with the last week.

I will open the poll a bit later in case we want to discuss it a bit first.

[TobiasW]

Fast schedule looks great to me. It has a nice curve, and if anything it’s slower than the two previous BBC clubs (which were both harder and had more pages!). Seems more like a “medium” schedule.

[mgevaert]

any of these look fine to me, and I like that it’s a bunch of short chapters

I’d probably prefer medium or fast

[mike-lassen]

I’m considering buying an eBook version, but on BookWalker it’s marked as “Japan only” and I live in Europe.

Has anyone got advice on how to purchase the eBook outside Japan?

[mgevaert]

I was able to purchase the ebook on Bookwalker and I’m in the US, I used my Google and PayPal accounts. I’m not seeing “Japan only” on mine though so I don’t know if it’s just a Europe thing.

[mike-lassen]

Yes, it may be because I am in Europe. Here you can see the 日本限定

Screenshot from BookWalker

Anybody else from Europe that managed to purchase a book on BookWalker?

Edit: I just found out that this seems to affect only Denmark.

The following message is displayed:
“For various reasons, it is temporarily not possible to purchase titles from our web store when accessing BOOK☆WALKER from Denmark after 2 April 2025 (JST).”

So it looks like this might be a Denmark-specific issue rather than a general Europe restriction.

[simboubou]

Alright, let’s start voting. I added another, slightly faster schedule. It’s true that BBC can be much faster than I thought. But hey, maybe we can say it’s a cosy read with a chill schedule !

See the post above for the details.

• Faster: 8 weeks
• Fast: 9 weeks
• Medium: 11 weeks
• Slower: 12 weeks

I also ordered the french translation, just to help me keep pace if needed. As far as I know, it’s the only translation that exist.

I also need to prepare the vocab sheet. Do we usually just create an empty sheet ? Or do we use mokuro ? (I have bought the digital version and extracted the images already). I admit I almost never used the vocab sheet in the book clubs.

[mgevaert]

If you put up a blank sheet I’ll probably use it. For Hirayasumi I had to do a lot of lookups, and it was helpful to put them all somewhere (and maybe other readers benefited from it). Just a thought!

[equant]

I decided to remove my vote. I don’t have a strong preference. I’d like to vote against slow, but I don’t think it’s a big difference between faster and fast. I’d lean towards medium, but would be happy with any of them I guess.

[TobiasW]

Personally I’d vote for “faster”, but since I’m not really the BBC target audience (and since I might read the whole thing in a week anyway ) I’m not voting either.

[simboubou]

I’ll leave that poll open since we don’t have that many votes.

I’ll try to find time to run the book through Mokuro, but things are a bit tight at work, so I may have to use a simple blank document. We’ll see

[simboubou]

I remember someone (was it @TobiasW ?) using Mokuro or some other tool to extract vocab from book club books, but I can’t retrieve it on the forums.

[TobiasW]

You’re thinking of @ChristopherFritz. I purely use Mokuro for my own enjoyment (i.e. not having to use vocab lists or dictionary websites at all).

[Oceansea]

Alright, I’ll join! Let’s do this!

[pocketcalamity]

I ran this through Mokuro myself and submitted the .mokuro file to Manga Kotoba. Perhaps if the wonderful @ChristopherFritz has time he could extract the word list there for us!

I’ve been poking around trying to figure out a way to extract a word list myself, but I’m not quite sure. I feel like I’ve done it before a long time ago but I don’t exactly remember how.

[ChristopherFritz]

I find it interesting that this series (from the few pages I’ve seen) appears to be in a manga format, but BookWalker doesn’t list it as manga.

@simboubou

using Mokuro or some other tool to extract vocab from book club books, but I can’t retrieve it on the forums.

I do have a script to be able to (with a little time and minimal effort) extract the text from Mokuro in per-panel order. But it’s a bit complex and cumbersome to use if you’re not familiar with opening a browser’s JavaScript console and interacting with it. Let me see if I can get a UserScript together that’ll integrate with Mokuro Reader.

Once I have that available, if someone can provide the script’s output JSON file, I can run it through Ichiran to get dictionary forms of words + English translations, and put them into Google Sheets. More steps are needed after that, but that gets it the majority of the way there.

Normally I would favor “users add words to the vocabulary sheet” for BBC, but I suspect a lack of furigana is harder to retain readers for, and having a more full vocabulary sheet may offset that.

@pocketcalamity

submitted the .mokuro file to Manga Kotoba

Here you go.

---

Edit: Here’s the script:

Mokuro Reader Sentences Extract

Steps to use

This is designed for desktop PC/laptop use.

1) Install Tampermonkey or a similar browser extension.
2) Insteall the UserScript from the link above.
3) Run the manga images through Mokuro, and have it generate a .mokuro file (which any relatively recent version of Mokuro does).
4) Drag the image folder and .mokuro file onto Mokuro Reader:

5) Enter the volume in Mokuro Reader to bring up the volume.
6) Set the “Page view mode” to “Single Page” (may not be necessary, but I’ve only tested it this way):

7) Select the panels in the correct order. Skip over anything you don’t want to be part of the vocabulary list:

Controls

• Hover a text box: mark it as selected.
• 0: select the current next suggested box (green border).
• 1-9 (and multi-digit input): select the numbered box on the current page.
• *: undo the last selection.
• /: move to the next page.

In the sample screenshot above, I might type (without spaces):

7 2 6 0 5 10

(If someone can suggest better colors than red and green, which are not color-blindness friendly, don’t hesitate to do so.)

(I should probably implement - to ignore the green box, but didn’t get around to it when having AI convert my hand-written Mokuro HTML file code into a Mokuro Reader .mokuro file as a UserScript.)

8/) On the last page, there is a download button, which downloads the selected panels in JSON format

I can run this through my local install of Ichiran (using this script), then put the output of that into Google Sheets.

[simboubou]

Thanks !

I was able to download and install mokuro. I have the mokuro json, and indeed all that’s left now is to use some tokenizer and offline dict and hope for the best (found some python libs for that too, but if you already have a script for that it’s cool )

I’ll try to setup the doc sheet later today.

EDIT: I have quick and dirty python script, that should be enough for now. With proper grouping of words per chapter and page, the error in bubble order shouldn’t be too annoying. The tokenizer I found is parsing 食べた as 食べ and た tho, I need something better. I’ll need to use my linux machine and an ichidan docker.

EDIT: got ichira to work. Just need to figure out the exact API output and we’ll have a beautifull pregenerated list.

[simboubou]

Guess we’ll be going for the 8 week schedule ! I’ll update the post when I’m at a computer.

I’ll also finish and post the vocab list sometimes this week.