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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.
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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
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
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0voters
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This week brings us to the end of the road for our ドミトリー
I have some thoughts and theories, but I’ll save them for a day or two.
But since we have a shorter week of reading, I’m planning to go back and re-read the start of the story. What do others think? Does the beginning make any more sense now?
This week’s reading was great. I was completely absorbed and could not put it down! I was often feeling a bit frustrated at my reading speed as I wanted to know what happened next, but reading at a slower learner pace probably added to the tension.
The first story in this book was quite a gentle story, and I was lulled into thinking that the second story would be similar. Gradually I realised how different this story was, and that the story was becoming an old fashioned horror story. The short stories by Edgar Allen Poe came to mind.
This last section in particular sustained a constant, gripping tension. Achieved very subtly from things as simple as the buzzing of a bee, or the dripping of fluid. There’s been a strong focus on the senses throughout the book so far, and it feels like they were used really effectively here in creating the mood of the story.
In retrospect, I feel like the first story had a tinge of horror that I didn’t see for what it was at the time - especially the sections around the jam and the chromosome damaging chemicals.
Will be interesting to see what the final story is like.
Intending to go back and read the start of the story again this week.
Very tense indeed! I was nervous that we were, in fact, going to go there (grisly murder), and simultaneously nervous that the narrator was going to freeze and we were never going to find out what the stain was. The final discovery of the hive was a relief, even if it didn’t answer any of the other lingering questions.
Based on the description, 羽音 seems like it might be the mysterious sound? But then again, the narrator was hyper-aware of the 羽音 at the time, and when I go back and reread the first section, she says that she doesn’t know when it started, and she struggles to describe it. Maybe the mysterious sound is like that faint buzzing.
She says she hears the sound at odd moments, on a late-night bus or seeing the depressed-looking ticket handler at a museum. I wonder if these moments are happening in Sweden—or if she ever made it there.
A favorite phrase from this section:
詩の一行を読むような澄んだ意識の中
For the last few months for me, 一行 has meant “one group, one company”, specifically Frieren and her party of adventurers in 葬送のフリーレン, and read as いっこう.
So this 一行 caught my attention as it is read differently as いちぎょう (and meaning one line, or one row”).
Another word that caught my attention this week was 大味. I thought this would be easy, I could just lean on my kanji knowledge and translate this as big flavour, or great flavour. Actually it means flat-tasting or bland!
From the start of this week’s reading, the nature of the mysterious noise is revealed, and becomes a background hum to the building suspense.
The first section with the letter was a moment of slightly less tension. A whole lot of words that I had to look up relating to the patchwork
格子縞 （こうしじま）
白黒の水玉
蔓草 (with an interesting non Joyo kanji 蔓)
Assorted shapes: 正方形、長方形、 二等辺三角形, 直角三角形
It was interesting to see the transformation of the narrator into a carer for 先生. There is a quietly desolate point when she imagines the moment when 先生 finally succumbs to his constricting 肋骨 and she has to remove his prosthetic leg from his cooling body and is left alone in the empty dormitory.
Somehow she still seems to think that いとこ is coming back…
What did other people make of the tulip planting description. Once again, 先生’s description of いとこ is redolent with his feelings for the young 寮学生. Am I right in thinking that いとこ was holding out the bulbs for 先生 to tenderly pick them up with his chin and drop them into the ground? Obviously, this is 先生’s take on the scene. But I did wonder whether perhaps いとこ had some feelings for the old caretaker?
And then, 先生 drifts off to sleep. (There isn’t any clarity about what happens subsequently, but I certainly had the sense that he wasn’t going to wake. He doesn’t respond to the narrator talking to him, and earlier in this section he implies that he thinks that he won’t be around for long. She talks about going shopping, and he says 「間に合えば」)
The scene where she discovers the liquid dripping from the ceiling should be horrifying, especially when she is convinced that it is blood. (I presume that because it is so dark, she is unable to tell the colour of it. I had wondered why she did not detect its smell.) But one of the interesting elements is the disconnect between the situation and her response to it. She has a moment of apparent panic when she races around the dark corridors of the dormitory. But she puzzles herself with her calmness reaching out to collect the liquid in her hand, and then later to climb up to the vent in the ceiling…
I assume I’m not alone in yelling at her at this point - not to do it…
I have some theories, but we are left with a cliff hanger. Like 妊娠カレンダー we have to imagine what happens to the main character beyond the last page. Ogawa has wound up the dramatic tension, and then leaves it to the reader to imagine what comes next. Is that satisfying, or frustrating? Interesting or a cop-out?
I went back to the start of the story to see if it made more sense.
One of the things that I couldn’t work out on first reading was the time perspective. Was this before she was contacted by いとこ out of the blue, or later?
My overall impression on re-reading was that this was set some time after the end of the story. If it was some time later that would explain the あいまい nature of the memories. It would also be reassuring that 従姉妹 had not been swallowed by the hive, and had survived. Perhaps as @crispetynougat suggests she is now in Sweden, and the sound and dreamlike memories from her time in the dormitory are still present, but only intermittently.
But there is a reference in the first section to it being ６年間以上 since she left the dormitory. That confused me because in the main story she says that it is six years since her graduation and she hadn’t been back to the dormitory since then. So that makes it seem more like it is less than a year since the events of the main story. (assuming she is referring to having left the dormitory as a student, rather than having left the degenerated, bee infested dormitory at the end of the story). The other possibility would be that the beginning is set 6 years after the end of the story (and the repeat of the 6 year interval is a coincidence???).
One of my reflections on re-reading the start is that one of the ideas of the story is that the 音 is a kind of tinnitus - a half heard sound on the edge of hearing. Is it really there, can other people hear it? Is it like the high pitched noise from the fridge that you are mostly unaware of, but sometimes creeps into your consciousness. Or is it a noise arising from within yourself? The echoes of the sound that 従姉妹 can still hear after the end of the story presumably don’t correspond to a real vibration in the world*. But if that is so, we might wonder, she might wonder, whether the sound was ever really there. Was the sound (and maybe the whole episode) just inside her mind??
*[unless… that is… the bees have followed her to Sweden…]
I read the start of the story again. I feel like it’s all a bit vague. It sets up the mysterious nature of the story, and draws our attention to the importance of sounds.
My summary of that opening section was - There’s a sound I hear now and again. It’s a faint but slightly haunting sound. I hear it when I think about the dormitory. Let me tell you about what happened at the dormitory…
As I re-read, I wondered about the story of いとこ stumbling upon these discarded tulip bulbs. I wondered whether (perhaps like a dark fairy tale or Stephen King story) they contained within them the origin of the changes - the infestation of the dormitory, the disappearance of the students…
2. 先生
This is a totally wild supposition, but I had one thought that perhaps 先生 was the child of 姉 in the first story, and his amelia (apologies for the gratuitous bit of medical terminology (absent limbs)) were the consequence of 染色体の破壊
Some of his enjoyment of the sweet お土産 seems reminiscent of 姉’s pregnancy altered appetite…
I love these theories. Extra credit for linking the two short stories together! There are so many interesting elements to the stories, and unresolved threads, I think it would be possible to come up with lots of interesting theories to explain these stories.
Here is my much more dull suggestion:
Possible explanation for ドミトリending
Maths student’s disappearance had nothing to do with sensei. He’s come to some sort of sticky end, but it’s completely unrelated to sensei and events in the dormitory. Are we really expected to believe that this man with no arms and an artificial leg was able to overpower and kill a healthy young man? Even if he has poisoned him, how would he dispose of the body?
As the disappearance was unexplained, people’s prejudices came to the fore, and suspicion fell on sensei as he is disfigured and can come across as a bit creepy. Once rumours started, people were quick to believe them, because deep down we are all prejudiced, and it was easy to believe the rumours about this man whose physical appearance makes people uncomfortable. Once the rumour took hold, it destroyed his business and left the dormitory empty.
The dormitory was already losing custom, as when sensei’s health deteriorated it was harder for him to maintain the property to the standard he used to.
Cousin is fine, he’s just been really busy enjoying student life, so it’s not surprising he’s often out when the narrator comes round. After all there is no-one else living at the dormitory, so he tends to be out hanging out with other students elsewhere. If mobile phones and social media were invented it would have been much more obvious to narrator that he’s fine, but this is from the eighties when it was much harder to keep in touch with people.
Narrator doesn’t go to Sweden. She still loves her husband but has become more distant from him since he’s been away, and really doesn’t want to leave her life in Japan behind. She stays lonely, but continues to enjoy her patchwork, and has too much time on her hands that she spends brooding on events at the dormitory. The experience with the beehive has left her psychologically scarred, and she is still haunted by the sound of the bees.
*Did I ever tell you about what happened in my first year of uni? I was seriously short of cash and desperate to find a way to manage to pay the bills. Anyway, I remembered that my cousin had apparently stayed in a cheap but decent dormitory on the edge of town when she was a student. I managed to get her number from my aunt and called her up out of the blue. She rang her old dormitory and apparently they were happy for me to stay there. It was crazily cheap - which should have made me suspicious. Anyway, it ended being super weird and creepy. The place was completely empty apart from an old caretaker with one leg and no arms. Somehow he managed to live there on his own and look after the place, but he seemed sick, and kept looking at me strangely. Also, if you can believe it, there was a bee’s nest in the ventilation system. I used to spend as little time as I could there. If there was any excuse, I’d stay with friends. There was a rumour going around about the dormitory. The story I heard was that a student had disappeared and the police were involved and all the other students had moved out. Actually, by coincidence, I met the missing student about a year later. I’d told him about the weird dormitory and he’d gone pale. Eventually, he told me something and I pieced it together. He was studying maths, and had got on really well with the caretaker. He spent a lot of time teaching the old guy maths, even doing some gardening with him. In fact, I think it sounded like he felt sorry for the guy and some boundaries were crossed… He didn’t say exactly what had happened, but apparently somehow his father had found out and gone completely ballistic. Had pulled the guy out of uni and sent him away with no warning. Then he’d concocted this story that the student had disappeared and called the police… Anyway, I didn’t find that out until later. The last time I went to the dormitory, I came back really late at night to find the whole place in darkness. That wasn’t so unusual, but I heard a strange noise and found my cousin in the caretaker’s room, curled up on the floor. The caretake himself had had some kind of turn - he wouldn’t wake up. I ended up calling an ambulance for both of them. I don’t know what happened to the caretaker, but my cousin had had some kind of breakdown. I stayed in her apartment after that while she was in hospital and then after she got out. She spent a couple of months recovering before moving to Sweden.
I actually finished reading this section before the thread was posted but waited on writing my thoughts in case my feelings changed.
I like the ideas people came up with here for the ending!
Summary
I was excitedly reading up until the end, but as expected was let down by the ending. I wasn’t bothered by the open-ended nature of 妊娠カレンダー because the ending wasn’t the point of the story, the younger sister’s sinister actions were. But the point of ドミトリー is that it’s left open-ended which I tend not to like.
I’m curious if the author purposefully put this story in the middle of the book for that effect. In 妊娠カレンダー, there are a number of small clues that lead up to the conclusion, so that primes the reader to think that ドミトリー is going to go the same way, desperately trying to put the pieces together only for it to all fall apart in the end. The main character reaching out, trying to grasp the honey for any sign felt like the reader “grasping for straws” (I know that’s not a Japanese saying but stick with me here!) trying to connect the different parts.
Another reason I feel this way is it seems the author wanted us to think 先生 was trying to lure in the main character by pretending to be unwell, only for it to seemingly turn out to be the truth at the end.
So for me it feels like the author is teasing me as the reader, like “damn you really thought 先生 was a serial killer? haha”
I like to imagine at least that the cousin is okay, just creeped out and went to go stay with a new friend.
This week we finish the story.