I’m reading along (I’ve read no further than the end of this week’s section)
I’ll catch up soon (I haven’t yet finished last week’s section)
I’m reading ahead (I’ve read beyond the end of this week’s section)
I’ve read this book already but I’m here for discussion
I have no intention of catching up or the club has already finished, but I’m using the forums as reference
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Vocab Sheet
Anybody should feel free to add to the vocab sheet. Read the guidelines on the first sheet- even if a word is not yet included you can use the spreadsheet as a tool to get help.
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.
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).
Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading need to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as such.
Discussion Questions
Feel free to use these questions as a framework or a starting point for responses. I also encourage people to post their own discussion questions!
What sentence/passage gave you the most difficulty? Feel free to request some help, or if you figured it out on your own break it down for the rest of us!
What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?
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?
I don’t get why they’re whinging so much about having to date people. Can’t they just… not? No one would be worse off for it, right? It’s not even like in other Murata novels, where there is at least some societal pressure to have kids, because in this universe the matter of having kids is completely separate from dating people.
I guess that makes sense! Our society has that expectation as well, I think, that everyone either has or wants a partner. And if they look at marriage as more of a ‘brother/sister/we are family’ sort of relationship in this story’s universe, it wouldn’t be so weird that they’d expect everyone to be looking for romantic love through dating.
I’m not sure it is making a whole lot of sense to me yet, but after the rapid time shifts in the first chapter, maybe we are now settling down to one point in time?
(There is a lot of rain and dark streets in the story at the moment. I quite enjoyed the poetic description of these, though not sure if it has a significance in the story?).
We start with some insights into the oddness of Amane’s marriage. As others have suggested, it seems like there is a deeply internalised norm that sex inside marriage is disgusting. Meanwhile, it is totally normal for partners in a marriage to have a succession of extra-marital lovers. (I thought it was funny how Amane’s mother (whose unconventional views on marriage are much more closely aligned to the normal view in our own world), made a face when she learned of Saku’s affairs).
I was concerned by Saku’s lack of concern at his lover’s self-harming. Even if it was attention seeking behaviour, (wanting him to remember her?, this seemed pretty callous.
Then we discover (I was not surprised) Juri’s confessed ‘feelings’ towards Amane. (These don’t seem at this stage to have any hint of sexual attraction, more just a pragmatic sense of their close friendship, and a hint that heterosexual marriages seem curiously anachronistic in this world).
Amane doesn’t seem to show any interest in return in Juri. She seems inordinately happy with her wealth of non corporeal ‘lovers’.
恋人がたくさん入ったポーチを見ていると、自分の人生なんて豊かなのだろうと思う。
We have a little more information (possibly too much information) about Amane’s sexual relationship with the anime character Chrome.
And we finish with a return to the mother character who has physically (and perhaps in other ways) changed a great deal since her introduction at the start of the book. As others have noted, there is something strange going on in Chiba
We more and more settle into the world and its strange ideas around relationships and romance. I thought it was interesting that Amane took a walk “together” with her invisible lover, and as she saw some other people, she wondered whether they were alone or also having a date with an anime character
Well, they said that it’s still not legal, but so many people seem to long for marrying their best friend (no matter the gender). Which kinda makes sense in this setting of “sex cannot happen between the married couple”. Because then the couple’s genders are really meaningless.
Could be that this is a hint / subtle criticism at the anachronistic state they live in?
