消滅世界 ☠️ Book Club ・ Week 6

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

消滅世界 ・ Week 6

Week 6 14 May 2022
End page 113
End loc (Kindle) 1125
End phrase のかもしれなかった
Pages 15
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Participants

  • 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.

  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 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!

  1. 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!
  2. What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?
  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?
2

Ohh I didn’t forget favourite vocab for this week:

下駄箱

I was like, wait, they have a separate name for it? Cool!
And then I went to a drug store to buy 除湿剤 and it was written on the package. Instant reinforcement. ^^

3
Talking about themes again~

I had some more thoughts on themes while reading this week’s part over the weekend. :slight_smile:

Something that’s new with this book (imo) is the focus on media, and the difference between reality and fiction becoming more and more blurry. It’s something that’s on the news in one form or another from time to time. ‘Young people spend too much time online, not enough time doing things together irl.’ ‘Young people spend a lot of time alone (or with online friends) and don’t learn to make meaningful, healthy connections with other people’. I thought the co-worker we met over lunch break was a fine example of this theme brought to life. It doesn’t even feel that far fetched.

Themes we have seen in other 村田 works, like family (taking sex out of a marriage = taking a factor that often leads to divorce out of the equation to lead to longer lasting relationships. Also a strained relationship with the parents due to differing ideologies/expectations) and purity/cleanliness.

And of course, the question of the meaning of life. I felt this was especially prevalent this week with MC and her coworker talking about what they take their energy/motivation/will to live from.

4

I imagine the other top 3 reasons for divorce are money and distribution of labour, both of which seem to be split evenly in these sorts of marriages in Murata’s universe.

5

Enjoying this part of the book and looking forward to seeing how the relationship with the neighbor develops.

6

I’m here for the discussion for Japanese Society book club re-reading group

This week, there was another slightly repetitive conversation about relationships with fictional characters and the proper classification of the use of such characters for relieving sexual desire. (The narrator still seems to have a hard to make sense of delusion that these relationships are genuine reciprocal love affairs, and is still struggling with the view of everyone else that the activities that she pursues are self-love (to use an appropriate euphemism), rather than the usual other-regarding kind).

More interesting was the conversation with Juri about Amane’s parentage.
When I re-read it, I tried to imagine how to reframe it in a way that would capture just how shocking a confession this would be in the world of the novel. Of course , the obvious analogy is suggested for us. This is like confessing to a friend that your parents were brother and sister [or perhaps to give it even more of an edge, your father was also your grandfather…]. Alternatively, that you were conceived as a product of rape.
That last analogy I think helps to explain how and why Amane’s own sexual desires become fraught with uncertainty and (?) guilt. She says several times that she had to keep checking she was not like her mother.
Juri’s response is interesting. She alludes to a kind of moral relativism - this era’s sexual norms will be another eras sexual prohibitions (or vice versa). But she also seems to suggest that there is no such thing as a morally correct sexual urge/desire. [I have wondered how best to translate 発情, which comes up a lot in the novel. The dictionary talks about ‘oestrus’, which I confess I’ve never heard used in relation to humans, but maybe it captures a biological desire for sexual release??]