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.