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.
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.
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).
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.
Proper Nouns
Name
Hiragana reading
Notes
Kindle location first mentioned
小川 洋子
おがわようこ
the author
cover
二階堂
にかいどう
doctor (psychiatrist for 姉)
22
ジュジュ
the narrator’s dog
1420
Discussion questions
What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?
Did you spot any interesting kanji this week?
Was there any passage that you found particularly intriguing? Did it resonate with you (either positively or negatively)? Was it surprising? Offer any insight or new perspective? Was it just beautifully written?
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 at IBC primer pace
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0voters
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Thanks to @Domjcw for nominating this book and running the book club. I’ve loved the pictures each week as you post the weekly threads and appreciated all your organisation. This book is exactly what I was looking for to finish off the year - quirky, intriguing, full of beautiful writing and descriptions, and at the same time written in a straightforward style that made it much more easily accessible than many books aimed at adults. I particularly enjoyed the fact that the sentences were often relatively short in this book compared to some things I have read in Japanese!
Thanks to @Phryne for the vocab list. I often had this open on one side and it made looks up easier and the whole reading experience more pleasurable. It was such a big file that my ipad totally couldn’t cope with it but was great once I broke it into smaller files!
Final story
I enjoyed the final story. After the tension and horror of ドミトリ this one felt like it just washed over me. I loved all the descriptions of the school cafeteria preparations last week. And this week I particularly enjoyed the description of the alcoholic grandfather taking a child who had got into a tricky place with their mental health, and helping heal them through the power of spending time with your grandad, the magic of an abandoned factory, and a hint of chocolate.
The telegrams were surprisingly difficult to read in katakana! I’ve come across this before with robots talking in katakana but using Japanese words that would normally be written in hiragana or kanji, and it becomes surprisingly difficult to parse (there were also some tricky vocab in the telegrams).
I was left not quite sure what to make of the single word telegram 「オヤスミ」. I enjoyed this sentence in that passage: その一文字一文字がわたしの身体の隅々にまでしみ込んできた。(There was a similar sentence I liked later on where she digested word by word what the man had said to her by the school.) Sometimes it’s frustrating being given threads of a story without all the conclusion, but in this case I was happy being left with the uncertainty of the narrator’s future with her partner.
This story went in a much different direction than I expected, but I enjoyed it!
I read through the reviews on Goodreads, and the one long one gave some good insight on what the story might mean. The narrator was a bit uneasy about her new, married life but hearing the man’s story (also in the end it does seem like he was a door-to-door religious/cult kind of guy, just a bit more complex than the usual type) about how he overcame a fear made her feel more at ease and ready to welcome in her fiancé.
I think too she felt a sense of human connection from hearing him open up, and that made her long for the fiancé as well.
Here is the link to the Goodreads reviews if anyone is interested:
Besides the in-depth one, my favorite review is “liminal slay”
Overall I enjoyed the book. As I mentioned earlier, I enjoy reading short stories so this was a suitable pace for me.
At first I thought not having the main characters have names would just be a 妊娠カレンダー thing, but now I’m wondering if this is how all of Ogawa’s stories are?
Edit: I realized this is the third Akutagawa Prize winner I’ve read (コンビニ人間 and 推し、燃ゆ are the others). I’d definitely like to read more in the future!
I’m a bit slow with my re-read of this week’s section and only part way through
But I have a few questions
雨のプール
When the rain starts during the swimming lesson, is he in the water? I had thought that when he described himself ゆらゆらと, that he was bobbing in the water pretending to swim. And then everyone else got out (leaving him behind?). But on re-reading, it seemed like he was shivering on the side all along.
Why is he behind the 洗眼用 at the end of the lesson?
He says
「だって、雨のプールがまだ夕暮れの給食室にまでたどり着いてないじゃありませんか。ちゃんとそこに到着するまで、責任を持って下さいよ」
I couldn’t make sense of this. Is he saying that he hasn’t yet explained the connection with the cafeteria in the evening?
There is a list of things that are lying abandoned on the chocolate factory floor. Some of these make sense, others seem very odd ocarinas??? Anyone manage to work these out?
I got the impression that that the place had been abandoned for a long time, I think there was 3cm of dust on the floor. Presumably grandpa isn’t the only one who comes there to hand out. So I assumed the non-factory related things were general trash left by other visitors. The ocarina surprised me too, once my brain had decoded it from o-ka-ri-na to ocarina!
I assume you meant to put more detail here (otherwise this is an exceptionally general question…)
So here are some overall thoughts on the story and the book
I had been thinking about what unified the three stories. Until I read the last story, I was struck by the theme of transformation - which is central to 妊娠カレンダー and ドミトリー. But although 変性 appears in a passing reference, this didn’t seem to be a major element of the story. Instead, I was struck by the common thread of the main character in a curious waiting state, or a kind of limbo. In 妊娠カレンダー it is the long wait for the new baby to arrive, in ドミトリー the narrator describes herself in a かいこ waiting to go to a new life in Sweden, in 夕暮れ it is of course the forthcoming wedding with absent fiancé.
In this limbo state, the main characters find themselves passively responding to the events occurring in their daily life and to those they encounter. But they have little sense of agency or control.
This sense of powerless waiting is linked to the overall pervasive 寂しさ (as I wrote that word, I was struck by a linked word that comes up a lot in the second two stories: さび).
The third story in the book is quite different from the first two - it doesn’t have the latent menace that taints the first story (like a bitter note of pesticide in the jam), but is thick as dripping honey in the second story. But the main character feels very similar to the female character in the first two stories - aloof and self-sufficient, it was hard to know what to think about her forthcoming marriage. She seems at the end of the story much closer to her fiancé than 従姉妹 in ドミトリー. But I couldn’t help feeling a little concerned for her, and wondering if her friends/family members are right to warn her against this man who seems to be moving on from his previous failed marriage to a new one with a much younger woman. Are his brief telegrams a sign of genuine affection, or of detachment?
Interestingly, we learn a lot about a male character in this third story - the missionary father with childhood traumas. But he still felt like a bit of a cipher. Even more than the main characters of the stories, the men who appear (義兄,先生,男), feel curiously hollow - it is hard to know what their real motivations are…
Which takes us to Ogawa’s curious postscript. She clearly distances herself from the stories - her own life is much less interesting, she implies, than the events of the stories. Even when she discovers something macabre under her floorboards, it ends up just being an old onion…
Which led me to a last thought. Is this a clue to Ogawa’s ideas. We sometimes see things and imagine sinister explanations - the shadow in the street corner, the shriek in the darkness, the house with perpetually closed curtains… But most of them will turn out to be something mundane and harmless. The horror is in our imagination. So I wondered whether like the truth behind the stories is actually much more like the onion under the floorboards - rather than a deceased cat?
Maybe it is just me, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this instrument (and I’ve seen a lot of instruments over the years). So this seemed a very very strange thing to be on the factory floor.
In fact, a little bit of googling suggested that maybe ocarina’s are quite popular in Japan. Reddit - Dive into anything
Also (surely this is not a coincidence??), there is a brand of Japanese ocarina called ‘Ogawa’! [Is this an Easter Egg I wonder??]
In the English translation of the story, the things on the floor are described as
And everywhere were piles of junk: nuts and bolts, springs, batteries, empty soda bottles, a plastic hair band, a harmonica, a thermometer, all sleeping quietly in the dust.
So the translator has converted the ocarina into something more familiar to a Western audience
I kinda feel it’s too early for me to comment on the end of the book and read everyone’s comments, since I skipped Dormitory and only just got started on it…but if I wait too long, I’ll forget this week’s portion.
Week 10
This story‘s ending felt a bit anticlimactic to me. We never found out why cafeteria guy went to the MC‘s house in the first place, right? So he wanders into her life, has several epic oversharing monologues, then leaves. Leaving MC feeling melancholy and me feeling slightly baffled what all this was about.
Thank you to the people who deciphered the telegrams. The only one I got was オヤスミ, didn’t even have a clue about the rest of them.
I never even knew this was a thing. For unknown katakana words, I usually use the search on Google function of the bookwalker app, because it usually leads straight to pictures when you feed it a single word, and it did not disappoint:
Honestly not sure if I would have recognized this as a musical instrument.
Didn’t get that, either. The whole evening mood seemed to be more related to the theme of leaving - the work in the cafeteria is done just as mystery man is ready to wrap up his story, and the sunset culminates in their final さようなら. But I didn’t see any direct connection between that and the pool.
I also wasn’t sure if he got into the pool as a boy. When I first read the section, I thought the description of him feeling like his body was sinking into the pool meant that he was trying to go in and stuck on the stairs or something. But after rereading, it was probably just his imagination.
That’s interesting that some others weren’t familiar with an ocarina. This is something I’ve been familiar with for a long time. It’s quite a simple instrument so cheap and fairly easy to pick up - bit like a recorder or penny whistle.
I hadn’t considered that ocarinas may be a popular instrument in Japan. But that perhaps makes sense. It features early in Animal Crossing New Horizons as an item you can craft and play. That game just became the biggest selling game ever in Japan.
If you (and everybody else as well, of course!) like, please feel free to join The Akutagawa Prize Reading Challenge where you can keep track of all the Prize winners you’ve read so far
Thanks. This was my first price winner, and for all I know it might remain the last, but I checked it on the list anyway, because I like clicking polls.
