🚬 蟲師 Mushishi Book Club Week 6 🕸

[DIO-Berry]

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Week 6

Welcome to our final week! Thank you for sticking with the club!!

Start Date: July 5
Previous Part: Week 5

Week	Start Date	Chapter	End Page	Page Count
Week 6	July 5	Chapter 5 旅をする沼	222	42

Vocabulary

Mushishi Book Club Vocabulary Sheet

Discussion Guidelines

Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

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.

Posting Advice

• When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.

• Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?

• 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
• I’m no longer reading the book

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

[Belthazar]

A note on this chapter's featured mushi

This week’s mushi is named 水蠱. The meaning of 水 is obvious, but 蠱 means “something that bewilders; something that leads one astray; the work of demons”. As a kanji, it also means “rice worm”, but that’s probably not what’s at play here¹. Taken together, it could be read as “the waters that lead one astray”. No literary or mythological references that I could find, though I do notice that you can replace the second kanji with 子 without changing the reading (provided you don’t mind getting some on’ and kun’ mixed up) and get 水子, “child of the water”, and I can see that having some relevance to the chapter, though whether that would be crossing the minds of any Japanese readers, I really couldn’t say.

(Del Rey’s translator has noted “the name […] is made up of the kanji for ‘water’ and ‘mushi’”, so clearly they weren’t wearing their glasses that day and completely failed to spot the 皿 component underneath.)

¹ As a side note here, in Chinese, 蠱 originally referred to an artifically-cultivated poisonous insect: a bunch of poisonous insects are tossed into a bowl together, and whichever one is left alive when the dust settles is the worst of the worst and, having eaten all of its fellow inmates, it’s now as poisonous as all of them put together. It is, incidentally, why the kanji consists of three insects on a plate. The practice also existed in Japan during the Nara period, where it was called 蠱毒, and the concept has cropped up in a few recent manga like Blue Lock and Jujutsu Kaisen.

[Lisaveeta]

ギンコ’s adorable conniving side