And here is Week 2
八週＋一日
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I’m importing the book to LingQ week by week, and I have to cut up the audiobook manually to match. I did the same for Kiki’s Delivery Service and that book was roughly 1.3 minutes per page, and luckily that heuristic is working for this book as well!
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I spotted this week that the English version of the Pregnancy Calendar story was published in English in the New Yorker in the past. You can read it for free as long as you haven’t been reading any other New Yorker articles recently.
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Very nice. However it is an abridged version. Some scenes are missing completely (e.g. the sister coming home with her first ultrasound picture, the husband’s parents visiting).
BTW: Checking on the dates and weekdays I found that the story takes place in 1980 or 1986 (or before 1970).
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Week 4 is here. Last week of the first story!
二十七週
(This week’s fruity comparison strikes me as problematic, as cauliflower vary so much in size. To keep this in perspective, according to the standard インターネット comparisons. 二十八周 is an 
. So you have to imagine a fairly small cauliflower I think)
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二月十日
As 妹 was describing the effects of 姉’s morning sickness, waist shrinking, hollow cheeks, and pointed jaw, I was thinking “Oh she sounds so sickly” and then the next word was きれい 
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There seems to be a gentle background of disordered eating in Japanese fiction. I feel I often see a skinny character fussing about their weight and not eating too much.
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Week 5 is here
We are moving on to ドミトリイ
(If anyone has a physical copy and wants to let me know of the page numbers for the breakpoints in this story I can add them to the table above and the weekly post)
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Page numbers for last page of each week for ドミトリイ
Week 1 - 93
Week 2 - 113
Week 3 - 134
Week 4 - 148
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thanks! schedule updated accordingly!
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If you are interested to read this in English for any reason, or to share the stories with non-Japanese speaking friends, you won’t find a book called “Pregnancy Calendar” in a bookshop (or at least I couldn’t).
However, I discovered this week that there is a publication that contains two of the three stories from this book in English. It’s called “The Diving Pool” by Yoko Ogawa. It contains three stories:
- The Diving Pool (a story not in our book)
- Pregnancy Calendar (story 1 from our book)
- Dormitory (story 2 from our book)
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Well, we’ve reached the end of the club.
Did you make it to the end?
- I’ve finished
- I’m still going
- I started, but gave up
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voters
How did you find the book? Easy, hard, interesting, not interesting?
- Easy peasy
- About right level of difficulty for me
- Very hard
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voters
- Natch
- kind of interesting
- very interesting
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voters
Anyone interested in reading more 小川洋子?
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I’ve considered creating an 小川洋子 bookclub a few times already 
But in all honesty, nowadays I would prefer to create it in the Natively Forums instead of here - the chances of attracting potential participants are much higher over there in my opinion as it’s a platform specifically targeted towards reading books, while here book clubs still feel a bit like a collateral activity…
What do you think?
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I guess the question was partly to gauge interest.
There are some novels I’d like to try, ミーナの行進, ホテル・アイリス, 猫を抱いて象と泳ぐ
Also some more interesting looking short story collections eg 寡黙な死骸みだらな弔い
I haven’t joined any Natively book clubs. Not sure if they might not be a bit fast for my level!?
One option might be to create a club on both platforms (directing to whichever site is running the main threads)
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