紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 👘 (IMC) - Week 4

[simias]

紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 1
Intermediate Manga Club
Home Thread

Week 4	June 29th, 2024
Chapter	4 + 5
Start page	37
End page	56
Previous week	week 3
Next week	week 5

Vocabulary

• Google sheet:

紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 Volume 1 Vocabulary

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

Characters

Picture	Name
	藤川(ふじかわ) 紡(つむぐ)
	末延(すえのぶ) 唯月(いつき)
	万里小路(までのこうじ) 旭(あさひ)
	蜂須賀(はちすか) 初野(はつの)
	賀川(よしかわ) 七緒(ななお)
	狸(ネコ) 五白(ごはく)

Discussion Guidelines

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 (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.

Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).

Hide Details results in the dropdown box like below:

Example

This is an example of the “Hide Details” option.

The “Blur Spoiler” option will simply blur the text it surrounds.

This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?

Will you be reading with us?

• I’m reading along
• I have finished this part
• I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
• I’m reading this book after the club has finished
• This is the joke answer but this time it’s meta too. Woah.

• Votes are public.

If you’ve already read this book but are still going to join the discussion, please select “I have read this part.”

[simias]

p38

Why is tsumugu saying that itsuki is going to be most “damaged” if she ends up rewriting the future? Or am I misunderstanding what she’s saying here?

[simias]

Of course 煩い has two possible readings with the same okurigana… Bloody hell Japan, fix your spelling…

p40

Well I certainly didn’t expect that we would get a vivid depiction of tsumugu committing sudoku this week. This manga is full of surprises!

chapter 4 impressions

Very fun chapter. All the main girls and their relations have now been introduced, shenanigans can ensue.

[2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz]

Page 38

@simias

Why is tsumugu saying that itsuki is going to be most “damaged” if she ends up rewriting the future? Or am I misunderstanding what she’s saying here?

It’s not completely clear to me either, but it seems to be simply that Itsuki is currently the person whose life is receiving the highest degree of influence from Tsumugu’s actions, so Itsuki’s future is likely to be the one most affected by any changes that come from Tsumugu’s time travel.

[2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz]

It’s taking a while to get used to having even horizontal writing be read right to left…

[Micki]

I’m enjoying this so far although it’s a tough read for me. I’ve got used to the girls’ names now. There are some tricky kanji, I’m getting lots of use out of the “draw a kanji” function in my dictionary app!

I found chapter 5 particularly hard, it didn’t help that I was reading it intensively and there were lots of old fashioned vocab words. Think I need to come down a notch and read it in a more relaxed way for the rest of the volume.

[simias]

Ooh, that’s how you read that…

[simias]

That image where itsuki reads the old fashioned text almost ended me.

EDIT: oh that’s in chapter 4, I haven’t read 5 yet. Now I’m worried.

[Micki]

@simias

That image where itsuki reads the old fashioned text almost ended me.

Which page is that?

It’s a pain there are no chapter numbers, I keep getting muddled which chapter is which. It’s not helped that I thought we were reading two chapters last week and have got myself out of sync with the schedule.

I put quite a bit of vocab in the spreadsheet for chapter 5 so I hope that helps!

[simias]

p38

[seanblue]

I decided to join the club for real and reread the manga with the club. I was originally just going to follow the discussion and skim to answer questions, but after seeing all the comments the last few weeks I decided to join for real. I just read chapters 2 and 3 (had already read chapter 1) so I’ll read chapters 4 and 5 in a bit.

@simias

That image where itsuki reads the old fashioned text almost ended me.

Like Tsumugu herself, I don’t think you’re really supposed to understand it.

@Micki

It’s a pain there are no chapter numbers, I keep getting muddled which chapter is which.

The table of contents has chapter numbers and their pages, though yeah it would have been nice if it was on the chapter itself too.

[simias]

@seanblue

Like Tsumugu herself, I don’t think you’re really supposed to understand it.

I eventually realized that, but not before going through an existential crisis.

[Jintor]

Fun chapter. Wasn’t expecting to learn how to read 徳川 from this lol.

pg46

Anyone know what the characters/phrase 小路 is holding in the final panel is? It looks like 上目遣い which means ‘upturned eyes’… is she telling 蜂須賀 to look 紡ぐ in the eyes?

[polv]

pg46

It also usually means acting coquettish. But why she is holding the sign is open to interpretation. (Make the shipping, perhaps.)

@simias

pg38

I also think along the line of, more interaction by time traveller, more affected by butterfly effect.

[simias]

p46

@Jintor

It looks like 上目遣い which means ‘upturned eyes’…

My interpretation is that Asahi told Hatsuno to ask Tsumugu out so she’s coaching her to have puppy eyes: 上目遣い at DuckDuckGo

Alternatively maybe she’s just surprised seeing the badass 武者 Hatsuno acting so coy and remarks on it.

[simias]

“Japanese is such a poetic language, it’s so hard to translate because of how elegant and evocative it can be, it leaves so much to the imagination…”

Japanese: 爪の垢を煎じて飲みたいぐらい

[Micki]

This is Tsumugu reading right, not Itsuki?

I copied the text from the page she is reading into Deepl, and it detected it as Classical Chinese rather than Japanese.

The verb in the previous panel 読み下す has two meanings;

• to read (a text) from start to finish
• to transliterate classical Chinese into Japanese

So I guessed she was being asked to look at Classical Chinese text, which is why it was it looks particularly difficult to us!

The text in the speech bubble in Japanese gives a similar meaning to what Deepl translates for the writing on the page.

我黄州に来たりしより已に三たびの 寒食を過ごせり―

@seanblue

The table of contents has chapter numbers and their pages, though yeah it would have been nice if it was on the chapter itself too.

Yeah, I’ve been using those. If you’re just reading it straight through as an individual it’s not an issue at all having no chapter numbers on the individual chapters. It’s only for us discussing in a bookclub that it becomes an issue!

[simias]

p38

@Micki

This is Tsumugu reading right, not Itsuki?

I’m a bit confused about this whole sequence but I think it’s Itsuki:

• 1st cell: the teacher reprimands Tsumugu for being inattentive and tells her to read page 13 as punishment

• 2nd cell: Tsumugu panics because it’s 全部漢字 and she doesn’t know how to read that. Somebody reads it/translates it into Japanese.

• 3rd cell: Itsuki is apologetic and says that because she likes the poem so much she got carried away and read it in full. Tsumugu cries tears of appreciation(?) because Itsuki saved her. So presumably Itsuki was the one reading in the previous panel.

• 4th cell: The teacher says 仕方ないですね… and tells Tsumugu to keep reading after that (presumably this was a particularly difficult page and the rest is easier/actual Japanese?). The image shows Hatsuno being all foreboding but I think it’s pretty much unrelated to this strip.

Honestly I couldn’t really make sense of this until the beginning of the next strip where Tsumugu thanks Itsuki for being her 助け船 and I pieced it back together by keeping that in mind. That’s the only way it makes sense to me.

I often feel like the 4koma structure really forces the author to jam a lot in every cell when in more free form manga things would be split in multiple images. There’s a whole lot going on in these 4 panels.

[Akashelia]

@seanblue

Like Tsumugu herself, I don’t think you’re really supposed to understand it.

This is a fun concept. I wonder how much “French” I would understand and how many faux-pas I would make if I ended up in France in the 1800s. (and not to mention the clothing, I don’t go around with a tiny skirt but I wonder if wearing jeans might be worse). Also maybe something they don’t touch on, that would be even harder for me, would be getting used again to getting around without a smartphone / Internet :o

[simias]

@Akashelia

I wonder how much “French” I would understand and how many faux-pas I would make if I ended up in France in the 1800s

The accents would probably be strange (I think most French people rolled their R like in Spanish back then for instance) and of course many of the cultural references would be confusing but beyond that I don’t really expect that you’d have too much trouble. The French language and culture have been reasonably stable over the past few centuries compared to Japanese or even English.

The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Miserables are almost 200 year old but you couldn’t really tell that from the prose:

Nous lui avons fait les funérailles ordinaires, et il repose, décemment enveloppé dans un hamac, avec un boulet de trente-six aux pieds et un à la tête, à la hauteur de l’île d’el Giglio. Nous rapportons à sa veuve sa croix d’honneur et son épée. C’était bien la peine, continua le jeune homme avec un sourire mélancolique, de faire dix ans la guerre aux Anglais pour en arriver à mourir, comme tout le monde, dans son lit.

— Dame ! que voulez-vous, monsieur Edmond, reprit l’armateur qui paraissait se consoler de plus en plus, nous sommes tous mortels, et il faut bien que les anciens fassent place aux nouveaux, sans cela il n’y aurait pas d’avancement ; et du moment que vous m’assurez que la cargaison…

— Est en bon état, monsieur Morrel, je vous en réponds. Voici un voyage que je vous donne le conseil de ne point escompter pour 25,000 fr. de bénéfice.

You basically have to go back to Rabelais to really struggle with the language:

Il vous convient doncques noter que au commencement du monde ung peu apres que Abel fut occis par son frere Cayn, la terre embue du sang du iuste fut une certaine annee si tresfertile en tous fruictz qui de ses flans nous sont produictz, et singulierement en mesles, que lon lappela de toute memoire lannee des grosses mesles : car les troys en faisoient le boysseau, au moys de Octobre ce me semble ou bien de Septembre, affin que ie ne erre : fut la sepmaine tant renommee par les annales, quon nomme la sepmaine des troys Jeudys : car il y en eut troys, a cause des irreguliers bissextes que la Lune varia de son cours plus de cinq toizes, le monde voluntiers mangeoit desdictes mesles : car elles estoient belles a lœil : et delicieuses au goust.

Pantagruel, 1530. I understand most of that, but there’s some guesswork involved. You can imagine that the pronunciation back then must have been very different: they actually pronounced most of those letters unlike us!