午后のあくび / Afternoon Yawnings - BBC Book Club - Week 5

This week will be the last of summer !

Week 5 April 25th 2026
Start chapter 16
End chapter (included) 19
Last Week week 4
Next week -
Home Thread 午后のあくび

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

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! (even tho, to be fair, there is no real story in that book and not much to spoil).

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 a the very least the chapter 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!

Proper Nouns

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

Discussion Questions

What was you favorite story this week ?

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?

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

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

It’s definitely getting easier to read these stories as I get used to their style :slightly_smiling_face:

And once again I really want to drink the refreshing “peppermint soda.”

I really enjoyed the mood of the last story and it felt like a fitting conclusion to the “summer” section.

Vocab:
密度 - density
薄荷 - mint
炭酸水 - carbonated water (sparkling water)
なんだか - a little, somehow
夕暮れ - evening, twilight
手に手に - each
いつもより - more than usual

Grammar: 〜ていく・〜てくる for Gradual Process

gosh, the world of this manga is delightful!! i loved the flashlight story (+kanji pun), the carbonation story (which might have been from last week), and the festival night to close out the season

Agreed, I would like to live in this town, please!

Ch 17 (the 神社 story) was good vibes and amazing art, but I feel like I missed something at the end. Perhaps there’s some 神道 culture note that I’m missing?

Ch 18 made me a little homesick with the heavy summer storm and 停電. Not that those things aren’t sometimes scary and dangerous, but there’s a certain weird magic about being stuck inside with nothing to do and the rain and wind howling outside… Idk, brings me back a bit, though I don’t really miss hurricanes!

Grammar question ch18 p81

I’m not super familiar with いいとこ, so I wasn’t sure if this is supposed to be read as “Ugh, it was the good part [of the book] though…” or “Ugh, well it’s a good time for it (the power to go out) though.” Context strongly suggests the former, but I figured I’d ask!

Also I love the recurring details like the 福引!

Finally, I caught this idiom in ch19 p85:

Maybe there’s a little intended double meaning here to say the town is building community, or perhaps this is more of a nod to the origin of the phrase? Cool either way! I feel like this series is full of this wordplay and I’m only picking up on a fraction of it. :laughing:

This is how I read it! For me のに often comes across as wistful, if not downright regretful, which fits this reading better

Ah, good to keep in mind. I technically haven’t delved into the grammar nuance of that one yet, so I was just parsing it in a purely mechanical way. Thanks!

chapter 18

This one was so magical and also brought up memories of being a kid and getting excited about power outages.

I was happy I looked up the book title 知らぬがホットケーキ as my dictionary revealed it was a pun on 知らぬが仏 :joy:

oh wow, i love that idiom, thanks for sharing!

I got behind last week because of my irl 英語 book club, but this manga is so good that I keep coming back to it.

I almost missed the joke about 海中, because I [wrongly :flushed_face:] guessed the reading was うみちゅう. But it’s fun to realize we’re understanding puns in a foreign language.