小川未明童話集 - Ogawa Mimei’s Collection of Children’s Stories (Beginner Book Club)

NicoleRauch · May 28, 2021, 10:46pm

Welcome to 小川未明童話集 - Ogawa Mimei’s Collection of Children’s Stories

Where to buy

A big round of applause to @AMomentOfMusic who collected the stories from our schedule into PDF and Word (docx) documents.

Discussion Threads and Reading Schedule

We started reading on August 28th, 2021.

Week	Start Date	Chapter	Pages 1951ed.	Pages 2013ed.	Page Count
Week 1	Aug 28th	10. 野ばら¹²³	22	111	5
Week 2	Sep 4th	1. 電信柱と妙な男²		8	5
Week 3	Sep 11th	3. 眠い町¹²	51	24	8
Week 4	Sep 18th	7. 殿さまの茶わん¹²	135	69	8
Week 5	Sep 25th	16. 月夜と眼鏡¹²³	27	130	8
Week 6	Oct 2nd	5. 金の輪¹² + start of 13. 大きなかに¹ (until 床の中に寝ているのでした。)	175	48	4 + ~4
Week 7	Oct 9th	End of 13. 大きなかに¹	59		~9
Week 8	Oct 16th	4. 牛女¹²	143	38	10
Week 9	Oct 23rd	14. 飴チョコの天使¹	90		10
Week 10	Oct 30th	2. 黒い旗物語²		13	11
Week 11	Nov 6th	15. 黒い人と赤いそり¹	225		10
Week 12	Nov 13th	9. 港に着いた黒んぼ¹²	185	85	14
Week 13	Nov 20th	6. 赤いろうそくと人魚¹²³	7	53	15

¹: Contained in 1951ed. paperback book

²: Contained in 2013ed. paperback book

³: Audio recording available

Bonus Weeks

For those of you who would like to finish the Bookwalker ebook, these are the remaining stories. They are not contained in either of the paperback books, but all but one of them are available on Aozora. I will post screenshots of the missing story in its thread.

Week	Start Date	Chapter	Page Count
Week 14.1	Nov 27th	8. 角笛吹く子	7
Week 14.2	Nov 27th	11. 酔っぱらい星	8
Week 15.1	Dec 4th	12. 木に上った子供	8
Week 15.2	Dec 4th	17. 白い馬	4
Week 16	Dec 11th	18. 蠟人形	12

Vocabulary List

Discussion Rules

Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
When asking for help, please mention the chapter and page number. Also mention what version of the book you are reading.
Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun!

Member List

Are you planning to read 小川未明童話集 - Ogawa Mimei’s Collection of Children’s Stories with the book club?

Yes
Yes, but I might start late
Not sure
No

0 voters

If so, which version will you be reading?

eBook
Paperback (+ maybe some Aozora)
Aozora only

0 voters

NicoleRauch · May 28, 2021, 10:55pm

Hello and welcome to Ogawa Mimei’s Collection of Children’s Stories

The ebook that I based my nomination on contains 18 short stories. Unfortunately, the matching physical book is out of print, but there are some other books which contain short stories, but of course not exactly the same collection…
Luckily, most (or maybe even all) of the stories are available on Aozora for free (I will double-check this and add the links soon), so we can maybe mix and match to cover them all. Another option would be to drop some of the short stories, of course.

In the OP you can see the names of the chapters and their lengths. Disclaimer: I calculated those lengths from the Bookwalker ebook, so they will not be 100% accurate, but I hope the accuracy is good enough. When I was in doubt, I rounded up, so I would rather expect the actual length to be slightly shorter than what I’ve listed above. If we feel the need, we can fine-tune this later on.

Here is a first attempt at a schedule:

(Now outdated) schedule attempt

Chapter	Page Count
17. 白い馬	5
7. 殿さまの茶わん	6
3. 眠い町	7
11. 酔っぱらい星	7
4. 牛女	8
14. 飴チョコの天使	8
15. 黒い人と赤いそり	8
2. 黒い旗物語	9
13. 大きなかに	10
18. 蠟人形	10
1. 電信柱と妙な男 + 8. 角笛吹く子	6 + 4 = 10
5. 金の輪 + 12. 木に上った子供	3 + 7 = 10
10. 野ばら + 16. 月夜と眼鏡	4 + 7 = 11
6. 赤いろうそくと人魚	12
9. 池に着いた黒んぼ	12

This is a rather long schedule at 15 weeks, but we get a nice ramp-up in speed, starting from 5 pages per week and ending at 12 pages for 2 weeks. If we feel that this is too much, we can always decide to drop the last 2 or 3 weeks. Which would then also shorten the schedule.

I’d like to hear your opinions! And if somebody has a better suggestion or even better numbers for the story lengths, I’m all ears

tls · May 28, 2021, 11:24pm

I’m excited

I double checked the entries with the Aozora by WK level list a friendly durtle made a few years ago. I could not find the following entries:

1. 白い馬 → is it 白いくま ?
1. 蠟人形 → could not find it → maybe this one? 蝋人形

Here is a full list for Ôgawa Mimei on Aozora:
Aozora: Entries by 小川未明

Also I remember, I had found some free and legal audio files for one or two of the stories. Would this be something to share in here?

We could go through the pdf files on aozora and and those numbers as well. I remember for 大きなかに it was ~6 pages.

And we also have some discussion threads for 大きなかに here in the forums already. We could link them in the corresponding thread once we are reading the story. Not sure if we have threads for other of his stories as well.

mchinellato · May 28, 2021, 11:24pm

Btw, just found the Amazon Digital Link (Kindle). Only 550JPY But not much availability of the physical copy.

NicoleRauch · May 29, 2021, 1:14pm

Thanks for checking the stories! The “bear” story is different, unfortunately, and I could not find the “horse” story either on Aozora! Really weird
Anyways, I suggest we skip that story then, as the Aozora-readers will not be able to access it. Which will shrink our schedule to 14 weeks (or less, if we decide to skip some of the longest ones at the end).

Ah, yes, that’s the one. My book uses the old version of the kanji, while Aozora uses the new version.

Sure, as long as they are legal! If you post the links here, I can add them to the OP so they don’t get lost.

Actually, the reading is おがわ (which is 小川) and not おおがわ (which would be 大川). Confusing as it is

Not really sure how much information that would add because the number of pages of a PDF depends heavily on all sorts of settings like paper size, size of borders around text, choice of font and font size, and maybe even others. I would rather wait for somebody to get one of the physical books, so that we can get a better feel for the lengths of the stories based on the physical pages. (Although I know that they will probably also differ between the two different collections )

Oh, that’s nice! If you could mention them later in the corresponding threads, that would probably be helpful

Thank you, I added it (and also the links that @Radish8 dug up - thank you!) to the OP.

Radish8 · May 29, 2021, 1:35pm

I wonder if there’s a sensible schedule that prioritises pairing up the ‘missing’ stories from the physical books with ones that are present, so that there’s always one story per week you could read without turning to Aozora

I mean, not that there’s really any problem with reading something for free on Aozora! But for those who really dislike reading on screens / the weeks with stories not available on Aozora, it would mean people with physical copies were still able to read something every week.

I will have a play!

(Might be useful to poll people on which physical copy they’re buying; if everybody gets the same one it will make things much simpler.)

I realise I should probably prioritise creating a thread for the book club I’m running, which starts before this one…

NicoleRauch · May 29, 2021, 1:46pm

I see what you’re aiming at! I think those who really dislike reading on screens can always revert to printing out the Aozora stories. But I could as well add a marker for which story is in which collection. Then it would be easier to play around with arranging them. Do you have the table of contents somewhere for the two editions? I could not find them anywhere…

Radish8 · May 29, 2021, 2:42pm

Jawohl.

They even include the page numbers!

Missing from 2013 edition

角笛吹く子 *
酔っぱらい星 *
木に上った子供 *
大きなかに
飴チョコの天使
黒い人と赤いそり
白い馬 *

*Also missing from 1951 edition

Missing from 1951 edition

電信柱と妙な男
黒い旗物語
角笛吹く子 *
酔っぱらい星 *
木に上った子供 *
白い馬 *

*Also missing from 2013 edition

白い馬 is not only missing from both but also not on Aozora, seemingly.

Vanessa-san · May 29, 2021, 4:32pm

Guys, I just want to pop here to say that I do appreciate your hardwork to make all stories available to everyone for every format (paper/paperless)

I tried to look for the 白い馬 one too, but it’s practically impossible to find online on a free website

I’ll keep looking for it since I’m still unsure whether to take the Bookwalker one or Amazon

NicoleRauch · May 29, 2021, 4:37pm

Don’t worry too much about that story, I think I will just remove it from our schedule. I think we have plenty of stories to read anyways

Vanessa-san · May 29, 2021, 4:56pm

Fine Can’t wait to start this one since it’s very interesting!

Now I should catch up with the others that I’m reading

See you around

NicoleRauch · May 29, 2021, 4:59pm

See you soon!

lucylavelle · May 29, 2021, 5:09pm

I’m looking forward to this, it will be the first non-manga I’ve read in Japanese, which is exciting!
I’m planning to read a 2013 physical copy, but I might try to read the missing stories on Aozora too.

The schedule looks great to me, thanks for all the hard work you do organizing these book clubs!

NicoleRauch · May 29, 2021, 6:23pm

Soooo. I’ve looked into this once more (thank you for providing me with the tables of contents!) and now I’ve figured out evvvverything

First of all, I looked at how many pages each story has in the paperback books. To my surprise, there seems to be quite a bit less text per page in those two editions than I had thought, i. e. the stories are longer in terms of pages than what I had originally calculated. So I adapted the page counts to the figures I got from the paperback books (mainly the 1951ed. where available). Then I prioritized the stories that are in one or both of the paperback books, which got me to this schedule:

Chapter	Page 1951ed.	Page 2013ed.	Page Count
10. 野ばら¹²	22	111	5
1. 電信柱と妙な男²		8	5
3. 眠い町¹²	51	24	8
7. 殿さまの茶わん¹²	135	69	8
16. 月夜と眼鏡¹²	27	130	8
5. 金の輪¹² + start of below story	175	48	4 + ~4
13. 大きなかに¹	59		~9
4. 牛女¹²	143	38	10
9. 港に着いた黒んぼ¹²	185	85	~10
End of above, start of below story			~4 + ~5
6. 赤いろうそくと人魚¹²	7	53	~10
14. 飴チョコの天使¹	90		10
2. 黒い旗物語²		13	11
15. 黒い人と赤いそり¹	225		10

¹: Contained in 1951ed. paperback book

²: Contained in 2013ed. paperback book

This schedule covers 14 weeks, which I think is a suitable length. Luckily I could arrange the stories so that the paperback book readers will never have two weeks in a row where they have to read only from Aozora. (But keep in mind that you can print out the Aozora stories if it’s the screen that bothers you.)
Those of you who decide to only read from the paperback book and not go to Aozora at all will miss out on 2 stories if they read the 1951ed. book and will miss out on 3 stories if they read the 2013ed. book.

I decided to exclude 5 stories from the ebook edition (those stories are not contained in either of the paperback books, and one of them is not even on Aozora). But as the schedule is already 14 weeks, I think that’s fine. We can always run a spin-off book club and read All The Stories™
(In case you don’t know yet, the ebook edition book is actually the first in a series of 3 books )

I have not yet looked into how to split those stories that extend across two weeks, but I will look into these closer to the date.

If you have further ideas for improvement, please feel free

TeaSouple · May 30, 2021, 5:41pm

This schedule looks great!
Thanks so much for considering us paperback readers .

From looking at the 花子くん schedule, is it safe to assume we will be starting this around September?

NicoleRauch · May 30, 2021, 6:56pm

Oh, thanks for the nudge! I wanted to double-check its schedule but then forgot…

Yes, if we assume the usual one-week break between book clubs, we will start reading this book on August 28th. I will update the OP with the schedule and the proper dates soon.

EDIT: Updated

KazeTachinu · May 30, 2021, 8:55pm

I just realized that I own this book – it was among the first bunch of Japanese books I ever ordered. I think I’ve read one of the stories back when I still wasn’t confident enough to read a whole novel.

Maybe I’ll join you for some of the stories. :>

tls · June 2, 2021, 12:45am

Thanks for looking into it. Yes, bear and horse might be different Also, thanks a lot for working out a schedule that works for people going with the printed book / ebook version and for those going with aozora.

Point taken. Since the link is shared a couple of times within the WK forums already I am quite confident this time though… (but @ everyone: please let me know in case durtles still feel different about it…)

That’s so me I wish I could claim it was a type… Thanks for spotting it though.

NicoleRauch · June 3, 2021, 4:50pm

Thank you for the audio recordings information! The site looks pretty ok to me as well. I’ve added the information to the OP and annotated those stories where an audio recording is available.

Radish8 · June 7, 2021, 5:01pm

My copy just arrived! I always forget that Japanese books are really small, it’s so fat and adorable

Not sure if it’s useful at this point, but happy to look up / confirm page numbers or anything.