It’s so obvious once you’ve explained it 
Well if it’s that obtuse, I don’t feel bad about not getting it 
Thanks for the help!
2 Likes
I’m not sure I fully understand. So if 殺風景できれいに片付いた部屋に qualifies 入り, then is this sentence supposed to be read as “While entering a tasteless but clean room, Izumi thought.”?
Fake edit: I went back and actually re-read the two sentences in question and it is clear now. That’s an interesting way to arrange things for a bit of “suspense”, haha.
1 Like
While reading your message I thought.
1 Like
“Maybe I can pull off this joke!”
Two drums and a cymbal fall from a cliff in the distance.
7 Likes
I giggled. 
2 Likes
Though there shouldn’t be anything grammatically incorrect about it, right? For me it sounds pretty normal. Maybe I would compare it with a quote like: “This room is so tasteless”, she thought while entering the room.
Or maybe that’s just my years of studying German and having to wait for the verb in the end of the sentence to actually give meaning to everything Also in Finnish you can pretty much order the words in any order and it’s going to be grammatically valid, albeit a bit weird.
1 Like
Another question:
p2/1%: 少し心配だ。
It sounds a bit funky, but it’s just the narrator saying that Yuuji’s situation is a bit worrying, right? Not Yuuji or Izumi commenting on the situation?
It’s a pretty common saying. It’s not exactly Izumi’s comment but I do connect it to kind of Izumi thinking that.
Weird, I hadn’t really thought about the type of narrator. Even though it’s 3rd person I feel a bit like we’re on Izumi’s perspective here.
3 Likes
That’s not quite it, see the comments about this above. Just to recap, it’s actually something like ‘while entering the room that was so clean it was dreary, Izumi thought’. What she’s thinking is then detailed in the next sentence, ‘ああ、私一人なんだな。’
3 Likes
Yeah but if I’ve understood what @Naphthalene is saying, the room being tasteless is just a narrative description rather than Izumi’s opinion, and the いずみは思った is acting on the next sentence…pretty sure that’s weird in any language.
Edit: ninja’d…
2 Likes
That’s what inspired me to ask; I originally read it as a thought from Izumi, but on a re-read realized that that may not be the case.
Ah, right. The end of the sentence was missing, and I didn’t get the joke so I got a bit confused.
Still, I feel like this happens in dialogue sometimes, too. Like はっきり彼は言った。And then what he says follows in the next sentence. At least I could have sworn this happens in Kino, since it sometimes confused me about who is speaking.
1 Like
Hehe 
what @morteasd said ^^
Is it so unusual? In both my native tongue (German) and English, you can put ‘someone said’ /‘someone thought’ before or after the thing being said or thought.
Rubeus thought, what a bummer. What a bummer, they said. Usually they’re one connected sentence / separated by a comma instead of a dot, I give you that.
I agree we’re definitely experiencing the story from Izumi’s pov so far. Aside from the beginning paragraph about the bats that is. Anything that sounds like an opinion seems to be Izumi’s, and I also read 心配だ as Izumi being worried.
3 Likes
Yes, that’s what I meant (although in Japanese you would mark the quotation with と). I honestly didn’t think about it until the question, but that made me realize that it felt strange indeed? I don’t really know. I have seen it a lot in writing, though, so it can’t be wrong.
Yes, similarly to the previous point, while we have a third person narration, what she thinks is transmitted to use without quotation. I think it’s called “incomplete omniscient” or something? The time when I studied that terminology is way in the past.
Edit: it’s “limited omniscient”.
7 Likes
Yeah it’s partly this bit that feels weird, but also the quoted bit being freestanding with no grammatical link to the verb.
Actually the 思った being used rather than 思っていた feels a bit weird now, but I’ve probably just started overthinking things…
2 Likes
Is there any way to know when this changeover occurs? Besides context clues, I suppose.
2 Likes
I don’t think it would be possible without context, no. 
in complete isolation, you have no way to know who is saying or thinking those (well, expect if pronouns are included, but that counts as context I guess).
3 Likes
I hadn’t noticed the names listed in the home thread and just decided to read 裕司 as Hiroshi, lol. Gonna be hard to break that habit now.
2 Likes
Alright, y’all got me, I’m giving this a go and am joining the book club 
Let’s see how horror-like it will become…
I’ll reserve the right to chicken out if it gets too horrible for me though…
On the plus side, I read the first week’s assignment, and I encountered the fewest unknown vocab EVER across all books so far! So much for encouragement 
Or maybe I’m eventually learning some vocab word or two after all
Of course this week’s reading did not go by without confusions - I somehow got the impression that there were three people (I sometimes have a tendency of believing in an unnamed “I” narrator in Japanese texts), which caused some confusion until I read this thread 
So thanks to everybody who recapped bits and pieces of the story, it helped me set things straight in my head.
11 Likes
I had intended to read along, but it turned out to be too difficult for me T___T
I’m struggling since the first page.
I might give this a go again once I study some more 