Bleh. I was looking everywhere for my book but couldn’t find it. I was in the middle of posting here about how my dog ate it… when I suddenly remembered I’d taken it away with me when I went for a trip last month in the hopes of maybe flipping through when I had a few hours spare.
I was almost starting to suspect I had. Like, maybe I found Hyouka on the shelf in Kinokuniya, then went to muse over Flying Witch volume 2, then decided not to buy the latter, but then I accidentally put Hyouka on the shelf and bought Flying Witch. But no.
And suddenly I feel like Oreki. It’s a completely mundane solution.
I hadn’t started reading
Now that I have read this week’s part,
between the attitude of the main character and him joining an empty club, I’m getting some strong Haruhi vibes. It might be because I haven’t read many novels set in a high school environment.
I speculated with @NicoleIsEnough that maybe these types of novels are so popular because they’re so true to life - maybe people enter obsolete clubs and are pretentious teenagers in high school all the time?
My copy won’t be here until around Wednesday but I was able to get a 立ち読み version from Honto, so I started on that. And…I think I don’t actually know anything about Japanese? I can read manga without any issue at all, but I look at this and it’s almost like I don’t know how to approach it. It’s probably just due to my unfamiliarity with prose and I’ll get over it soon, but it’s a weird feeling. Anyone else?
Yeah, I get that a bit too. Haruhi was taking me half an hour a page, so I decided to slow down from the club’s reading speed, but pitched up too much and stalled out completely.
Just take it one sentence at a time. When you get your book, photocopy it to A4 size so you can scribble furigana and notes and whatnot all over it.
Novels are quite different to manga/dialogue. One can even say they’re 2 different languages. You do get used to it though, but yeah I remember the first time I read one I thought the same.
Aye, it does. I started re-watching the anime over the weekend, for the fun of it (not cheating, honest), and each episode that comes from this book ends with “the niece of time” captioned across the closing image. At the finish of the arc, I suddenly worked out what it meant.
Not gonna explain it now, though. Not until we get there.
The next few episodes end with “Little birds can remember”, which is the subtitle of book four. Haven’t re-watched further than that, though. “You can’t escape” may be the subtitle of the anime series itself, though I’m not too confident on that. It’s what Googling seems to imply.
I feel the exact same way! Didn’t help that I tried to start reading at night without proper lighting. Squinting at the teeny tiny text was giving me a headache so I went back to playing Stardew Valley instead. I shall try again today with a proper light source!
This is also my first Japanese novel and now I wonder if I’m in way over my head… I expect I will be asking a lot of questions once I actually manage to start reading!
…when a short sentence takes you a long time to read because it takes you a while to work out that 業務上過失致死 means “professional negligence resulting in death”…