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?
Kind of interesting how not really anything has happened yet. It’s cool, though. I kinda like it.
Also noticed I just read the past weeks in one go now instead of two parts.
This was by far my favorite stretch of the book so far. A big reason is I understood it very well compared to some of the other sections. But it’s also where things are starting to develop. We know more about the experiment, the main characters feelings, and really get to see the relationships of wife/husband/hookup all interact together.
Also it looks like I caught up! Very cool. Not sure if I’ll read ahead or slow down…
I confess that I found the first two sections of this week’s reading not very interesting. Amane and her husband reflecting on the latest news from Chiba and what that means for the future of reproduction, and then the meeting with Amane’s school friends. Some of these discussions (about having children, about human vs ficto-sexual relationships) seem a bit repetitive.
But the last section with more details on Mizuto’s marriage was interesting. The emerging theme for Amane recently is about the meaning of family. If family is neither about sexual relationship, nor about having children (Mizuto’s marriage seems to be an example of this), then what does ‘family’ actually mean? The suggested answer is
自分と人生が繋がってる人
There are several references in this section to Mizuto and his wife resembling siblings (姉弟), which seems to reinforce this notion of family. One interesting question here (that I think the characters are uncertain about, but I may have misunderstood) is what the new ‘system’ for reproduction is going to mean for this notion of family. Clearly the old ideas of family being about sex and reproduction will no long apply. It seemed like Amane was worried about the Chiba process being a threat to ‘family’, it also seemed as though Mizuto was suggesting that the desire for family was instinctual.
人間の本能じゃない？
But I confess I wasn’t sure that either of these made sense to me. Surely, the kind of family relationship that Mizuto has would be entirely capable of existing even if children were artificially conceived (and/or gestated) and raised by the community? And the idea that it is a non-sexual, non-reproductive sense of family that arises from instinct doesn’t make much sense (from an evolutionary perspective at least).
It’s cool, though. I kinda like it.
when Murata characters start talking about 