地球星人 🌏 Book Club ・ Week ３

Japanese Language Reading
#15

My favourite part this week was the part where Natsuki is in bed with nonhuman life pressing in on the other side of the window. Very evocative. I’ve never really been to places where the animal and insect noises are quite so overwhelming, but I can imagine it gets intense in summer on a wild mountain in Japan.

逆鱗に触れる

To touch the scales under a dragon’s chin = to infuriate? nice :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Just the fact that there is a two-kanji word for ‘the upside-down scales underneath a dragon’s chin’ is already enough to make this the vocab of the week.

Yes, between this book and かがみ Japanese middle school is presented as quite a hellish place to be (I even wrote that in my notes before I saw your question). I have a feeling, though, that Kokoro went through something even more sinister than Kise (as far as we know at this point). I do feel for Kise: you can’t escape the body that you are in, so it’s horrible to have your physical appearance be made fun of.

As others have commented, Kise’s problems seem to cause the parents to focus mostly on her instead of Natsuki, but so far, I wouldn’t call it excessive yet. Also, in my experience second children often have to live with less attention from their parents so Natsuki’s situation doesn’t seem exceptional (yet).

It was very striking that the promise to survive was added by Yuu…

This week wasn’t hard language-wise. Just one sentence I want to make sure I understand correctly:

野生の自分の細胞が疼いているような感じがした

This is in the part where Natsuki is in bed and I think this is saying something along the lines that it [sensing the nonhuman life of the night] is making her wild cells ache, which is a sentence I like, but I’m not sure I’m reading it correctly :sweat_smile:

Yes, that crossed my mind as well. Let’s hope that we’re wrong.

I also interpreted it as ‘to feel out of place’, like you said.

Indeed. @dappe17, please add spoiler tags to your remark about the trigger warning!

And I would actually suggest that we do not discuss the contents of the trigger warnings at all, with or without spoiler tags, because I always assume that the information hidden behind a spoiler tag is only a spoiler for the current week, but the trigger warnings might contain spoilers for later weeks!

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#16

It was a very evocative description of a very familiar setting for me. Spend a summer night in the countryside in any warm place, and you’ll know that you don’t dare turn on a light for fear of being swarmed by all sorts of bugs. And when it’s quiet in the dead of night, it’s really surprising how much noise all these tiny creatures make, as if they’re taking over the moment humans retreat, exactly like Natsuki describes.

I had to go back and search for this because I didn’t remember coming across it. I mean, the translation of my dictionary was just a mundane “incur anger”, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. I can see the scales and the reverse, but where are you getting the dragon from?

野生の自分の細胞が疼いているような感じがした

This is more or less how I understood it too. She felt as if the wild cells within her were throbbing. Like the wild part in her was awakened?

Good point. I think we can still have spoilers for future chapters if we feel we need to, just like we have spoilers for other books, but they need to be clearly labeled as such so that no one reads them accidentally thinking they refer to the current week only.

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#17

Yeah, I’ve checked out of these discussions because people were already discussing what was going on in the context of Murata’s other writings, which I felt spoiled some things for me.

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#18

I thought comparisons with other books have always been clearly labeled until now? I may be misremembering. In any case, you make a good point, it might be best to keep such comparisons for the end of the book. I would hate for people to not join the conversation for fear of spoilers.
(I haven’t read any of her other books myself, nor かがみの孤城 which also gets mentioned)

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#19

My bad! It won’t happen again.

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#20

三省堂国語 has this for 逆鱗:

〔文〕竜のあごの下にある、逆さに はえた うろこ（鱗）。〔人がさわると、竜がたいそうおこるという〕

Or this in the 明鏡:

語源竜の喉元には逆さに生えたうろこがあり、人がそれに触れれば必ず殺されるという中国の故事に基づく。

:smiley:

Yes, of course, clearly labelling is fine too (as long as the label is outside the spoiler tag :wink:)

Yes, I can see what you are getting at. There has been a lot of hinting at “what might come” and you could also consider that to be spoilery (but I guess those kinds of comments are hard to avoid in a book club like this one).

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#21

I need to start using monolingual dictionaries asap, I’m clearly missing out on a lot of nuances. :face_with_monocle:
That was amazing, thanks. :grin:

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#22

If it’s a prediction that later turned out to be correct, made by someone who is reading this book for the first time, I guess that’s within the scope of normal discussion. I feel like that sort of speculation is something Murata is almost inviting us to do, because she does tend to leave bread crumbs for us to pick up and work with.

I agree that references to the plots of other books than this one need to be clearly marked as spoilers for that book.

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#23

I am strongly of the opinion that connections to the outside world and to other literature deepen appreciation and understanding of the reading, so I don’t want to discourage this sort of discussion (in fact I encourage it through the discussion questions).

I’ve posted some straightforward spoiler rules to avoid the problem. The discussion and responses here have been so good that it would be a shame for somebody to miss out for fear of spoilers. The rules will be in the home thread, the previous weeklys, and every weekly going forward.

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#24

Good thing I still have Penguin Highway to read that I want to finish before the end of the year, helped me not to read ahead this week. :sweat_smile:

The book definitely is giving me and scratching that certain itch simultanously. Really enjoying it so far. Language was also very approachable this week, finished faster than I expected. Btw, thanks for the name/relation sheet!

Don’t really have anything to add to the discussion that wasn’t covered by everyone else already.

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#25

Are there online versions of these dictionaries, or are they are only available in physical form?

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#26

On iOS you can get them in the ‘Dictionaries’ app from 物書堂, but you will have to pay for each dictionary. I don’t know if there is also an Android version. And I assume that you can also buy them in physical form. The app is pretty nice actually, because you can easily search for words, idioms and example sentences across multiple dictionaries in one go (if you bought them).

Watch out if you like dictionaries and have disposable income… I mean I’m not saying that I didn’t spend hundreds of euros on dictionaries in one app…

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#27

Do you read on the Bookwalker app? Can you use these dictionaries from within Bookwalker?

I’ve been looking at that app and the available dictionaries for ages, trying to resist (for now). I know that once I get one, I’ll want more. (As a kid I used to casually read random dictionary pages to pass the time, so you could say I like dictionaries.)

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#28
More off-topic dictionary talk

No, sadly I haven’t found a way to search words directly from Bookwalker. If only the ‘Share’ function in Bookwalker actually shared the selected text, then it would work. I read on an iPad and keep the Dictionaries app docked to one side so that I can swipe to open it and type in the word. It works almost as well.

I would say the 三省堂国語 is worth it just to have a J-J dictionary. I use it a lot and I think I paid less than 15 euros for it at the time. Since it’s aimed at middle/high school students, it uses fairly simple language and kanji and has furigana for more advanced kanji. (Strangely, I don’t see it listed in their in-app store at the moment (?) maybe their listings change periodically; they also have various sales all the time.)

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#29
More off-topic dictionary talk

For reading on the iPad, there is already a J-J dictionary built-in (スーパー大辞林), you just need to enable it. You can look up words from within Bookwalker on the built-in dictionaries, by selecting the word and then Dict from the pop-up menu. I’d really like more variety though, so I’ll definitely look into buying some more dictionaries in the future. I saw the listing for 三省堂国語 just the other day, but now it has strangely disappeared.

Right? There is a way to share selected text, it just probably takes more time than actually typing the word like you do. It was discussed a little in this thread where I was seeking dictionary-related advice if you’d like to read more.

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#30
More off-topic dictionary talk

Yes, you are absolutely right! I had slightly forgotten about that because the Dictionaries app is now my go-to solution. With the iOS built-in dictionary the definitions are often still too hard for me to understand (that should get better in the future) and you can’t “click through” to get to the definitions of the words that are used. In the Dictionaries app you can drag your finger over a Japanese word to search for its definition and drill down.

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#31

I just remembered something I had been meaning to ask:
How come Natsuki and Yuu have the same surname? 笹本奈月 and 笹本由宇. Isn’t Yuu’s mother the sister of Natsuki’s father? Or did she change back her name (and her son’s) after the divorce?

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#32

In this week’s reading I loved the marriage scene, especially the pastor’s role, although the clause #3 added by Yuu to their nuptial contract is slightly worrying me.

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#33

Good question and I don’t know. Maybe we will find out more about it later.

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#34

Just wanted to say I’ve had almost as much fun reading the responses as I did the actual book. I’ll be careful about responding too much because I don’t know to what extent my knowledge of what comes informs my opinions.

I’ve discovered yet again with this book that there is sometimes so much to be gained from reading slowly. There’s so much nuance that I missed from listening on 1.5x speed over the course of two days in English. Here it’s been great taking some time to digest over the course of the few hours it takes to do a week’s reading.

The whole Obon chapter felt extremely relatable. I have cousins that I love that I saw every Christmas when I was young. Unfortunately my mother and their’s had a bit of a falling out, so it was devastating when we stopped seeing them as often. I definitely felt for Natsuki in the scene where she was dragged for the sake of Kise and her mother.

I’m aware that the choice not to attend school is a big problem in Japan. I wonder to what extent it’s driven by bullying? (Minor spoilers for かがみの孤城）I’m really interested to learn why the other kids in the castle don’t attend school. I also wonder whether the driving factors differ for boys and girls.

Bugs are clearly a motif here, and I didn’t pick up on that at all on my first readthrough. (General comment on other Murata books) Insects seem to appear frequently in Murata books, and in the last few I’ve read they’ve seemed to carry significance. I’m curious to see where else bugs show up in this book. (Spoiler for first page of chapter 2) The silkworms do make an appearance in Natsuki’s baby-factory analogy.

I almost want to start a page in the spreadsheet for favorite vocab of the week. Some of these words are too great to forget.

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