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I’m currently reading this and Kino’s Journey, and I have to say, the Intermediate book club got the easier read this week!! So much new vocab for me in this book! I’ve put some into the spreadsheet. I think one page per chapter is fine. We can always insert more lines if we need to.
Made it through three (and a bit more pages) on my first day of reading along with the book club, so I’m pretty confident at this point I’ll be able to keep up I did have a couple of questions from what I read:
Page 14, third paragraph(?)
ちょっとぞくりとするような、色っぽい声だった。
In particularly, the first phrase. I’m having trouble with the ぞくりとする.
For the とする part, I found this, but I’m lost as to what ぞくり means–the only definitions I found were “petty official” and “a subordinate”, neither of which seem like they would make sense here to me. Even looking in a J-J dictionary didn’t help.
Since that doesn’t make sense to me, I assume I’m missing something. The only meaning I could think of would it being a sort of monotone, but that seems at odds with 色っぽい being used to describe her voice as well. But it’s possible “sexy voice like a petty official” makes more sense in Japanese?
Page 18, paragraph 1
今のは夢だったのかと思いかけたが、手の中にはしっかり「型ぬき人魚グミ」のはこがにぎられている。
I understand the sentence, I think, but I don’t understand the の in 今の. 今 is a noun, so it doesn’t seem like it would be a nominalizer, so is it making it possessive? How does that change the meaning from just having a plain 今は…?
Not really sure what かいたとき would mean here. From context I feel it is scratching (since 真由美’s foot got itchy in the previous paragraph), but can’t find anything to confirm.
Then after that sentence there is:
かり。
I am guessing this is just a sound effect of something falling to the floor, but can’t find anything that confirms this either…
Not sure how to explain it in grammatical terms, but my understanding is that のは can be used like that to work like a pronoun. In this scenario, it would literally mean “that just now”.
For example, suppose you are visiting a friend and while you are chatting you suddenly hear a loud bark from the other side of the wall. Your friend could explain by saying:
今のは、お隣さんの犬。
That just now, was the neighbor’s dog.
I had exactly the same thought!
After that I decided it wasn’t crucial to the plot and just ignored it, but maybe it indicates a slightly officious tone?
Japanese uses a lot of sound effects. When in doubt, I google “manga sfx” and the word, and something usually comes up.
According to this page, かり is a crisp sound.
Hmmm. I’m not completely sure that’s what is happening in the case of のは. I don’t feel that “今” is getting turned into a noun.
I used the term pronoun back in my post because I feel that this construction is hiding an actual noun. In my example we had
今のは、お隣さんの犬。
which is actually sort of an abbreviation of:
今の(音)は、お隣さんの犬。
so のは is just hiding the implicit 音. I feel this is very similar to how in English, pronouns like “he” hide the name of an actual person (e.g, “Jack”), to avoid repetition.
Then again, I am not really sure. Maybe someone with a more solid grammar foundation can give us the proper term for this…?
I don’t have the book to read the context, but what you’re describing sounds similar to this (though this article seems to be mostly about adjectives, it does briefly mention nouns as well):
I think I understand the sentence (As soon as she entered the water, her feeling of violent thirst subsided), but I have no clue what the ばしゃんと is supposed to be.
Definitely felt myself looking up words more frequently this week than last, but overall still not so much that it’s unenjoyable or impossible to understand! I actually enjoyed it so much that I finished the first chapter before I finally forced myself to stop reading… guess I’ll just be ahead for a little while
I did have a couple of questions from what I read:
I had exactly the same thought!
