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The descriptions of the week endpoints here are confusing me. Do we read up to the fourth star mark (so the last line of this week’s reading ends 心から羞かしかった), or do we read the section that starts at the fourth star mark (so we end with 急に夏が衰え出した) ?
In previous clubs where the week breakpoints aren’t at chapter boundaries I’ve found that the practice of listing a fragment of the final line of the week in the schedule to help make it clearer where to stop has been helpful. Could we maybe do that for this book?
I agree at a first glance it’s not so straightforward (I’ve been trying to count the *** in 風立ちぬ to make sure I have the correct part)
@Magyarapointe , since you suggested the schedule, can you confirm what exactly you meant? If that is clear, then I can check the breakpoints for the future weeks and add the final line to the upcoming parts.
yes, I agree that it’s not clear. When I wrote “up to fourth ***” , it means : “to the end of the third *** part”.
I’m at work now, but I’ll try adding the final line of each part, at least for the first weeks, once I go home tonight (mind you, it will probably be in 12 hours or so…)
Managed to get through this week’s reading with a lot of help from the dictionary. It felt easier than last week’s though as I feel like I’m getting used to at least the old kanji, whether that’s 云う, 其処, 或る or the hundred similar instances.
One of the things that got me a bit confused is the constant いましがた. Is it just a word as defined here? Or is it some conjugation of something else? I couldn’t quite work it out.
The author is quite fond of long descriptive sentences with lots of subclauses and parentheticals where I kind of get the meaning but it’s not always immediately clear e.g. where the subject at the start of the sentence connects in by the time you get to the end of the sentence. The first sentence in this week’s section is a good example.
Also, I think several times in this week’s section the narrator starts with a statement that some period of time was 楽しい日々 or whatever, but then the concrete scene immediately following that statement doesn’t really feel like an example of 楽しい…
The whole of this part of the book feels very affected by the atmosphere where Setsuko is badly ill with a fatal disease and everybody knows this but nobody is mentioning it – there’s a lot of silence and not saying what they mean and actively silencing the other person in a conversation. The doctor clearly does talk fairly clearly to the narrator about it in their private conversations – but the narrator does not tell us, the readers, about the content of those conversations. I wonder if this atmosphere will continue, or if the characters will move on from this near denial of reality.
Also, the scene when they leave her father on the station platform: he is presumably expecting that that might be the last time he sees his daughter…
Is this… an euphemism for being intimate, or am I reading too much into it?
Also a comment from the doctor (who said it jokingly): こうして病気を生捕りにしてしまうのだ」
I am not sure how to interpret this…
In general, though, do we ever get any details on how the Sanatorium as a whole is… financed? Is it a governmental institution? I was particularly curious that the main character lives there with her, and most of the time, seems to just spend his days together with Setsuko (unless I missed anything). I would expect that at least for his part by staying there, he would need to work to cover the costs or at least pay it somehow.
Apparently in the 1910s the Japanese government passed a law requiring cities to open and run sanatoria for those patients who could not afford care themselves. These public sanatoria were sized based on an estimate of how many poor TB sufferers each city had, so the implication is that there were also privately run sanatoria which charged for admission and that the better off would use those. The descriptions of Setsuko’s house suggest that their family is fairly well off, so presumably her father is financing this. There were also private health insurance systems (and employers of more than ten people were obliged to offer such a scheme from the 1920s onwards), but I don’t know if they would have covered long term TB care.
The narrator is probably not that much of an extra cost to the sanatorium, because by being with Setsuko he saves a nurse from having to attend on her and help with minor stuff.
