時をかける少女: Week 6 Discussion (Chapters 8 and 9)

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Chapters 8 and 9: パジャマを着ていた/そのとき暴走トラックが……

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Start Date: December 29th
Previous Chapters: Chapters 6 and 7
Next Chapters: Chapters 10 and 11

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Long stretches of nothing but dialogue = breath of relaxing fresh air.

It’s like reading manga!

Edit: Well that ended dramatically. And graphically

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Although, funnily enough, I think the first page of chapter 8 may have had more unfamiliar words (to me) than any other page of the book so far. :woman_shrugging:

Anyway I was gonna ask a question when I got up this morning, but after sleeping on it I figured it out myself. But I shall present it for posterity.

I was confused by this, which I’ll blur because though the sentence fragment isn’t spoilery at all by itself, it’s related to super spoilery things at the very end of chapter 9:

ゴミ箱がわりのドラムかんをはねとばした。

I couldn’t figure out how to parse it. I figure writing it ゴミ箱代わり will help out anyone else who has the same problem.

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The beginning of chapter 8
「いま、しにいったらしいですよ」
What does this mean?

I’m still finishing up last weeks chapters so I don’t have context yet, but I believe it’s saying “Just now, it appears (subject) went to go do (something)”.

しにいった is する verb stem + にいく (past). ~にいく means to go in order to do something

~らしい means something like “seems” or “appears”

Hope that helps. If not, maybe someone caught up can weight in.

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Or it’s saying ‘went to die’. xD

I’ve literally just done my first read through of the chapters and I already forgot where exactly this fits in, so no useful comment off me here :wink:

I decided to do the first read through without looking anything up, and I actually managed quite well. Now on to reading these chapters rigorously! What a joy! Expect a bunch of questions soon xD

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That would be しににいった tho

Anywho I just looked at the book again recently and yeah. Specifically the random voice is shouting that someone already went to call the fire department.

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You’re completely right of course XD
A typical case of not reading properly and posting before thinking :joy::joy:

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I call that “my life”

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Thanks to Kazuo I was curious about the difference between 寝巻き and パジャマ, so I did a search and:

寝巻き


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So it looks like 寝巻き has the potential to be a more traditional robe or gown, whereas pajamas are just the usual top and bottoms.

Anyway, page 50 in Tsubasa Bunko, I’m trying to understand this sentence.

それに、また苦労して、きょうみたいにあなたたちに説明しなくちゃならないんだもの。

This one doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. She previously talked about how she doesn’t know if time was reversed, and now she seems to say, on top of that, she had to deal with this day again, and then something about having to explain this to them? (Them being Kazuo and Gorou.) I’m not really sure.

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Aah, no. You misinterpreted the previous sentences. She said that the way things are, she could go back in time again at any moment. いつまた、時間を飛び越えて逆もどりすることになるかわからないでしょう?
The いつまた and the fact that this is in the plain present/future tense is what should get you there.

So then she says that she’d have to, with great pain and trouble, like today, have to explain all of this to them again. Which is why she started off here dialogue by saying that having this power was bad.

Thanks for doing the legwork on 寝巻き, I was too lazy to look it up :wink:

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Here are some questions for chapter 8 from me. Maybe somebody can fill me in a bit?

(Sorry, I’m reading the eBook, so no page numbers… I guess all of them occur in the last three pages of ch. 8 though.)

Kazuko says: 「だって、そうなんですもの!」
I think this means “But, that’s how it is!” But I’m a bit clueless as of how to break this down… I’m thinking そう なん です もの , would that be right? Why does です appear in the middle of the sentence?

A few sentences further down, Kazuo says: 「まだ、君にそんな能力があると、決まったわけじゃないさ。
I’m confused by と which I interpret as if-then. Also, I don’t really know where まだ would fit in…
I’ve come up with: “If you have this ability, then it does not mean that this has been decided.” (whether the others look at her as being non-human, I think)
So I hope I got the gist, but the parts of the sentence don’t fit together nicely. Am I missing something? (Or am I just bad at doing translations? :joy_cat:)

On the last page (I think) there is the sentence いつのまにか眠ってしまったらしい。
I think this means “Before she even knew it, she was fast asleep.” What confuses me is the らしい at the end. When talking about somebody else, I fully understand why it would appear at the end of this sentence, but since she is talking about herself, why is it still added? (Is this something meta along the lines of “when she is sleeping, she cannot tell that she is sleeping, so let’s add a layer of uncertainty to it”?)

This と is like the と used with 言う, not the conditional. It may be a bit weird to see the construction as a quote, but it’s basically 「君にそんな能力がある」that isn’t decided (or isn’t certain) yet (the まだ comes in here).

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もの/もん is a sentence ending particle that gives a reason/explanation. It isn’t the もの you’re thinking of!

決まる, like many many words of this type, can be used with quoting と to show what’s being decided. So really he’s saying that it isn’t certain yet まだ that she has the ability (which he expands on after)

I think the らしい is used in the same sense that I’d say “apparently I fell asleep”

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Thank you @sigolino and @QuackingShoe - now those sentences make much more sense!

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Thanks, that makes more sense now. Is いつまた in the previous sentence supplying that “any moment” meaning? I didn’t know for sure what that meant. And since there’s no use of potential form here, is ことになる supplying a meaning like “it is the case that I could go back in time.” ? Though again that doesn’t sound like it’s directly referring to her ability to do so without the potential form. Then I wasn’t positive about the use of わからないでしょう other than her making it into something she’s questioning.

It’s not in the previous sentence, it’s only separated by a comma. She’s saying that at any time it could happen again. ことになる with everything means “it will happen again” and the わからない with the question word いつ means “I don’t know when it will happen again.”

She’s not talking about whether she can or not, because she doesn’t seem to be able to control it at all (as far as she’s aware). So she’s lamenting the fact that she doesn’t know when it will happen again.

そのままだと = if it is this way, いつまた、時間を飛び越えて逆もどりすることになるか = it will become that I go back in time again (when) わからないでしょう = don’t know (and specifically the questionword いつ)

It’s easy to get lost in the big pile of words, but remember that like in English, when there’s a question word in a question, well, that’s what’s being asked.

Like in English, “I don’t know when I’ll go,” the ‘when’ is the thing you don’t know.

Also, she’s not actually questioning anything here per se. She’s explaining to Kazuo why this whole situation 困る.

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I have several questions from chapter 8. Unfortunately I had to read it in my ebook copy so now I need to go track down the page numbers…

  • Very first sentence… ちょうどそのとき、具合のいいことに、風呂屋の筋向いの米屋の若い衆で、新ちゃんという青年が、洗面具をもって風呂屋から出てきた。
    I have a couple questions about this sentence.
    • First, I don’t really get 具合のいいことに at all here.
    • Second, is 若い衆 one word, as in young man / shop boy or is it 若い+衆 as in a young group? I’m guessing the latter because of the で (i.e. among the young group), but I’m not sure.
    • Third (which may be semi-explained based on the previous question’s answer), if 新ちゃん is coming from the 風呂屋, what is the relevance of the 米屋 at all?
  • And in the second sentence… 持ち前の大声を、しかも、喉が敗れるほど張り上げてくれたのである。
    • First, is the narrator saying the loud voice is in the nature of Shin-chan?
    • Second, is this saying that Shin-chan lost her voice for a moment, and then raised it?
    • Third, isn’t it a bit odd to have しかも after を?
  • Page 50: 「でも、昨日や今日の昼間なら、いくら説明したって、君は信じないはずだよ」
    • This is being said by Kazuko, right?
    • Is the はず here saying that it was expected for them not to believe before? If so, would this mean “As for yesterday and today (during the day), even though I did explain, it’s expected/natural that you wouldn’t believe.”?
  • Right after that on page 51: 和子は五郎の混乱を、笑う気にはならなかった。
    • I think the writer did this before in the book, but I can’t make sense of verbs modifying 気, in this case 笑う気. Is it the “disposition” meaning? Like, “Kazuko didn’t turn Gorou’s confusion into a laughing disposition”? This seems to relate back to the other sentence that I’m still unsure on.
  • Page 52: だったらそれは、偶然一度だけ起こったのかもしれないし、また君にその能力があるとしても、一度だけの能力かもしれないじゃないか。
    • Alright, I think I understand this one, but I wanted to double check. The context is Kazuo saying that it’s not “decided” that she has this power because she only did it once. The part I wrote above then would be “If that’s the case (that it only happened once), it could have happened once by chance, or if we assume that you do have this power, it could be a power that can only be used once.” Is that accurate?

And after writing all that, I’m not going back to check for typos… So hopefully everything is clear enough.

Thank you, that makes sense now. Reading it that way while keeping いつ in mind as the question word makes it a lot easier. :blush:

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都合がいい means that something is convenient. You’ll see it used too when someone tries to retell a story in a way that supports their side, for example. Here it’s convenient to her because it lets her not make a decision.

I believe this で is the て form だ. It’s saying that they’re the worker from the 米屋, and also a young person named 新ちゃん. So that’s how she knows them. Shin is exiting the 風呂屋 though.

新 is using the loud voice they were born with, they scream so loud it seems like their throat js going to break, and the しかも I think it emphasizinf that not only are they screaming with their naturally loud voice, but more than that, so much their throat will break.

The quote function is fighting me right now!

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