妊娠カレンダー🍐🤰🏻 Book club (IBC) ・ Week 8

Intermediate book club

Week 8 7 Dec 2024
End page 148
End point (kindle) 1420
End phrase end of story
Pages 14
Previous week Week 7
Next week Week 9
Home Thread 妊娠カレンダー

Vocabulary

Google sheet (thanks @Phryne )

jpdb vocabulary list

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

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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

Discussion questions

  1. What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?
  2. Did you spot any interesting kanji this week?
  3. 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?

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Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay abreast of discussion!

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For those who were wondering, that’s last week’s end phrase :slight_smile: This week we finish the story.

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Thanks. Editing posts on my phone isn’t ideal. I’ll fix later

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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?

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End of story

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.

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End of story

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

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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! :person_shrugging:t2:

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The end of the story

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?

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The beginning of the story

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…]

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Beginning of story

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…

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Wild theories

1. The tulip bulbs

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…

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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.

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A more mundane theory

*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.

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Love it! You have a gift for creative writing!

I think this story has now had more discussion than it ever had before on the English language internet!

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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.

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Wow, that turned into a wild ride. I couldn’t stop for the entire second half. And now to the most important question:

Whole story

Unlike 妊娠カレンダー, the story of Dormitory wrapped itself up in my mind pretty neatly right after reading the last sentence, so it left me pretty satisfied. The version of it that’s my personal mind canon now is a story about an unreliable narrator having a nervous breakdown, and it goes like this:

At the beginning of the story, the narrator has spent weeks if not months in a state of limbo while waiting for the right time to move to Sweden after her husband. Over the course of the story, it becomes increasingly obvious that she doesn’t want to go and and the mere thought of starting the preparations for the move sends her brain into a state of suppressed panic and avoidance overdrive. This constant state of unacknowledged dread has led to her developing a tinnitus that sounds like bee’s wings, and she gradually starts to hallucinate the bees that go along with it.

Also, her daily life during this waiting state lacks purpose and a social life. Instead of a job, she keeps herself busy with an open ended patchwork project with no clear goal, and when first いとこ and then 先生 reappear in her life, she focuses her entire attention on helping first one and then the other so that she doesn’t have to work on her move checklist. Both of these people, and the dormitory itself come with a comforting sense of nostalgia, because they represent better times in her life where things were simple and no-one wanted to force her to move abroad. Seen from this angle, the entire story is a series of tasks she uses as excuses to not confront her fear of her move to Sweden, and whenever one excuse vanishes, she seeks another one with an increasing sense of desperation and unhinged cognitive jumps.

Her conditioned avoidance response to the fear of going to Sweden is most obvious in the scenes where she reacts to her husband’s letters. He’s waiting for a response from her and sends her increasingly detailed checklists of things she needs to do to prepare for the move, but the more detailed the plans get, the more she desperately throws herself into activities that distract her from even thinking about them. Culminating in her reaction to the second letter, where she suddenly starts to sew random pieces of cloth onto her patchwork project while the three problems of いとこ, 先生 and the missing math student morph into one all-encompassing, attention-stealing über-problem in her mind.

In addition to the two letter scenes, there are two more scenes that show her reaction to fear and they contrast nicely with each other. One is the storm scene from Week 5 and the other is the beehunt right at the end. In both cases, she starts out afraid of something, then focuses on a less scary, more manageable threat (first the storm, then the bees) and thus ends up in a state of pleasant emotional numbness and unnatural calm. We also see a similar reaction in the library scene, where she doesn’t find any information on the missing student, but instead the other tragedies reported in the newspaper that day feel comfortingly like “someone else’s problem” to her.

Ok, this is getting too long, and I want to go to bed, lol. So, back to the bees. The moment I first suspected that we can’t trust the narrator’s senses anymore was the scene where the narrator notices that the bees are out flying in the heavy rain and she muses that she’s never seen bees behave like this. Then, one bee flies through the window and sits down right in the middle of the spreading stain on the ceiling even though the narrator can somehow see and hear that its wings are wet.

I suspect that from this point onwards, both the bees and the stain are hallucinations. We do know that the stain can’t be a blood stain, because why would a dead body leak blood for several days? Also, someone else already commented on the lack of smell. For me, it fits better if the stain is in her head and signifies her suppressed fears spreading out of control.

As for the bees, in the last two sentences of the story, the narrator reaches for the beehive with her bare hand, and is struck by the image of honey flowing away from her, if I understand correctly. Needless to say, this is not something you do with a real beehive. So my best bet is that at this moment, the bees and the honey are a stand-in for the tasks the narrator has been using to distract herself from her real fears, and she’s trying to cling to them.

In this interpretation of the story, the first scene might come just after the last: The narrator got struck by a sense of cognitive dissonance when she couldn’t reach her imaginary beehive, but she can’t go back to 先生’s room because she’s too afraid to find him dead and her last purpose in life vanished with him. So she wanders the streets in a state of confusion and distracts herself by focusing on the sound in her head.

Of course, to quote a prominent character from a previous club pick, this is all just speculation. But I do so love myself some good speculation.

I think it was the math student who planted the tulips. I vaguely remember 先生 describing how he used his problem solving skills to come up with the positioning that made them bloom row by row in different colors, and his dexterous, over-described left hand digging the soil with a little shovel. Apart from that, the part about him letting 先生 help plant the bulbs was how I understood it as well.

Btw, I got no idea if there’s some deeper meaning to the tulips and if they’re real or not. Any guesses?

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Thanks - I enjoyed your very interesting and detailed speculation. The connection with regular tinnitus is one that I had made. It struck me (especially thinking about the afterword), that Ogawa takes ordinary experiences and then lets her imagination take them in speculative and fantastic directions. There could be (is likely to be) a very benign explanation for the buzzing noise that the narrator starts to hear. But in Ogawa’s imagination, there is something much more sinister. The question of which explanation we should believe, is left competely open - indeed, I think that is a defining feature of these stories. The reader is left to speculate and find their own endings to the stories.

In terms of the tulips. I suggested a wild theory above, but I’m more inclined to think that there isn’t a specific meaning to them. They are one of the background surreal phenomena that appear dream-like in Ogawa’s stories (like 先生’s disability). We can try to create explanations for them if we want to, but my suspicion is that they are just features of the world that she has imagined, giving it part of its 夢幻的な quality.

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Whole story

If the purpose of the tulips was to add to the dreamlike atmosphere, that succeeded admirably in my case. Those repetitive descriptions of the eerily changing colors made me feel like I was trapped in a surreal nightmare, especially on the narrator’s second visit, when the colors just changed from orange to some dark pinkish shade and left me wondering what’s next. Blood red with a body lying among the tulips?

However, I don’t think 先生’s disability is there just for the atmosphere, it’s very relevant to the plot. As a matter of fact, I think I can now answer my own question from Week 6 (“what’s with the foot fetish?”) .

The way the narrator reacts to 先生’s physical state fits her usual habit of selective perception very neatly. In the middle part of the story, she constantly focuses on 先生’s healthy foot and the things he’s still able to competently do with it, in order to distract herself from the visible signs that the rest of his body is failing and his days are numbered. Then when 先生 himself tells her that he’s dying, this completely flips around and after that she often gets assaulted by mental images of his crooked ribs. Her perception of his coughing fits change as well. At first, they only appear in her conscious perception as little coughs sneaked into half sentences between conversation. After he tells her this’ll be the cause of his death, they turn into lengthy suffocation fits. And at the end, the threat of his death is what sends the narrator into a full-fledged psychotic episode with imagined bees and blood stains.

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