変な家 🏠 🔍 (IBC)・Week 8

変な家 :house: :mag:
Intermediate Book Club
Home Thread

Week 8 21 September 2024
End page 205
End % 74.2
Next starting heading 重治
Pages 22
Starting location 1284
Location count 246
Last week Week 7
Next week Week 9

Vocabulary

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

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!

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, 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!

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?
  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I’m reading this book after the club has finished
  • I’m no longer reading the book
0 voters

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!

4 Likes

Surprise!

A whole week’s reading without any new floor plan discussions!

my thoughts

Instead we get a lot of information on the family history of the Katabuchis.
I was a little confused when I first was told that the children 1, 3 and 4 died at a young age, and then that the “witch” established the family rules to ensure that exactly those children would be killed (nothing in her rules specified that the second son should be spared). Finally they say that the rules were never applied in the lifetime of Momota.

The instructions for the ‘left hand ritual’ confused even google translate which tried to translate from Chinese. What kind of Japanese is this really? It didn’t make much sense to me. Fortunately a translation into modern Japanese followed.

9 Likes

It’s archaic/classical Japanese. ChatGPT dealt with it pretty well.

To anyone else coming across a part where there are a lot of ‘random’ katakana and the grammar doesn’t quite make sense, don’t bother trying to figure it out (unless you like that kind of thing of course) and just read ahead to the next paragraph, which is a modern translation :grin:

9 Likes

Why would someone use that in the early 20th century? Was it even known then by average Japanese people?

1 Like

I don’t know a whole lot about this topic, but keep in mind that modern Japanese orthography only stems from 1946. And according to this article, government documents were still in classical Japanese until that time. So I imagine that yes, people would be pretty familiar with classical Japanese at the time those rules were written down and I imagine using classical Japanese gave those rules a more ritualistic, official vibe, because ‘official documents’ were still the realm of classical Japanese at that time?

7 Likes

I don’t know about other people, but I found this week a bit heavy going. Partly because there were quite a lot of lookups for unfamiliar words. Partly because we suddenly had a whole lot of names of new characters (most of whom I suspect won’t reappear). Partly because the week was very heavy in exposition (with a story that I confess I find pretty far-fetched. Family machinations, sure. Incest, ok I can accept that. Even the horrible episode of self harm. But then this new character who invents a preposterous curse story that the Katabuchi family just embrace without questioning. I think I’d have preferred the time travelling zombie explanation….

13 Likes

It’s really jumping the shark huh? It’s so over the top that I’m kind of here for it tbh :joy:

6 Likes
This week

I‘m with @Domjcw here. I like it when things get wild, but I also prefer it if the entire chain of events does not depend on everyone being dumb as a brick to work. I guess I’ll wait for the rest of the infodump about Katabuchi’s grandfather we‘ll get next week, but my hope that this whole steaming mess will get a resolution more satisfying than time travelling zombies seems rather slim at this point.

Wait, where did it say that? Does that mean it wasn’t Momota after all who killed the 3 children? I just assumed they went through with it and the witchy duo saved the son they didn’t want to be killed by making it easier for Momota to get to the other children.

6 Likes
sorry -- next week's spoiler

Sorry, I did it again. They say it right at the beginning of next week’s reading - at least this is how I understand it.

2 Likes

What does 出版可能な箇所だけをまとめた mean? (It’s just before the 兄弟 heading).

I understand the words individually but can’t make any sense of it in context…

2 Likes

[subject] summarised/included only those parts that are able to be published

5 Likes

Oooh, I thought it was describing what yoshiesan was doing which didn’t add up. Thanks!

2 Likes

We read a manga in the Intermediate Manga Club featuring a modern girl time-traveling to the 1910 and one of the stories centers around her struggling because she’s unable to read classical literature:

It’s not uncommon for the literary/official/liturgical language to diverge from the vulgate this way, either because the vulgate evolves while the “prestige” dialect gets fossilized or because a new language is introduced, displacing the previous one for some but not all uses.

Consider the use of Latin in medieval and Renaissance Europe, Church Latin in the Catholic church to this day, Classical Arabic still being the literary language of the Arab world despite having no native speaker, Old Church Slavonic used in the Orthodox church, the use of French among Russian aristocracy, the use of Normand French among the English elites during the Normand rule (eventually merging with Old English to become modern English) etc…

It’s both a natural phenomenon because the written word always tends to lag behind the spoken language, but also a way for the elites to gatekeep the access to knowledge if the unwashed masses can’t access the important religious, political and legal works without translation. It can also be a way to reach a broader audience, the way English is used today and classical Chinese was used in the far east at the time.

6 Likes

Yes! I had to read that part multiple times. This week’s reading took me so long to get through because I kept having to backtrack to keep everything straight.

3 Likes

I have installed a genealogy software on my PC to keep track of the complicated relationships.
However I can publish my result only next week because it would contain another spoiler for next week’s reading.

8 Likes

I’m glad that we didn’t speed up after all, the tale of yoshiesan is painful for me compared to the usual kurihara fare. Not even a single drawing to pad the pages a bit…

Pretty happy to get the backstory, however. Didn’t expect this to turn into Game of Thrones

8 Likes

I finally got to the archaic Japanese part, surprisingly I found it relatively easy to parse, it’s mostly modern Japanese with some archaic spelling and of course using katakana everywhere. I strongly suspect that it’s “faux archaic” written by a modern author who isn’t really able to write in this style fluently. It’s a little too clean. It’s like how modern English speakers will start using “thou” to sound old-school but won’t bother going deeper into it.

For instance the text uses the kanji 齢 but I’m fairly sure that at the time it’s supposed to have been written it should have been 齡.

I think all those videogames that like to use katakana willy-nilly have prepared me for this.

Plot impressions

They named their incest son “fat weed” lmao.

I actually quite liked this backstory conceptually, and I’m even willing to accept that 宗一郎 was delusional and traumatized enough to accept 蘭鏡’s 呪術 ritual. That said I do have issues with the way the author handled this reveal.

I feel that I’m given the solution of a riddle that I was given no opportunity to solve. I think it would have been more interesting to discover these plot elements incrementally and be given the time to speculate about their meaning. The incest thing could have been teased and become a big reveal, instead it’s spelled out two pages after you first hear about these characters.

Ditto for 蘭鏡’s true identity, I actually thought she must have faked her divination and was actually an insider with ulterior motives, but I didn’t have the time to think about it before the whole scheme was revealed.

It’s almost as if you’re reading the summary of the book instead of the actual story, it’s very dense and not hugely fun to read.

I hope we’ll get back on track next week, but looks like we have some more yoshie infodump ahead of us.

8 Likes

Yeah, the archaic part indeed felt a bit like the “archaic” you get from demons and the like in video games and manga.

I also agree with many of the points you raise about the plot progression. I am curious about where it goes from here, though, because at this point it seems as if a lot has suddenly been explained… On to the next week :smile:

(And I only just finished this week’s part, so I’m glad we didn’t speed up! It was indeed a bit harder to read than previous weeks.)

3 Likes

Oops I was on vacation before and forgot to post the thoughts I wrote previously for this chapter!

Summary

Uhhhh lot to process this week. Not even sure what to write LOL

The 左手供養 page was hard to read for me because of the katakana, I dislike when something is all katakana like that. I was struggling until I realized the narrator very kindly spells it out after that

3 Likes