Chapter 1
V1: Pages 9 - 17
V2: Pages 7 - 13
BookWalker: 5 - 10
We’re reading all of Chapter 1 this week!!
- I’m reading along
- I’m planning on catching up later
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voters
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Thank you for organizing this. I started the first chapter, using an audiobook to read along. I’ve read this chapter before so a decent amount is familiar, but although I can parse meaning based on memory and general familiarity with the words, the gramar and vocab sometimes run together. I haven’t gotten that far in the book in the past so I’m wondering how it will feel as we progress and if/when I should make more of an effort to really get diagrammatic breaking meaning down.
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I listened to chapter 1 via audiobook (having already read it recently, thought it would be good to try it in a different format)
Was surprisingly pleasant to follow along with. There were a couple of moments where I lost the thread but overall was able to pick back up and not lose out on too much meaning
I’ll probably give it another read at some point this week in text form
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ワクワク
読みましょう 
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Should I wait until September 1st to start?
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You can do what you want but getting a head start seems wise. Then you can review the material with the group as they are doing so (repetition is the soul of memory), plus you hedge against the risk of falling behind.
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Oh I didn’t realize that it wasn’t meant to start for another week. I guess I’m ahead then! Thank you for hosting this, I need to get back into reading novels.
I checked with an English translation to make sure I understood everything correctly, and I noticed an amusing detail that was changed: the レース下着 became “scratchy underwear”.
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Careful with that translated release. It makes various changes and excludes bits along the way. The 2003 translation by Lynne E. Riggs is more accurate to the source.
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This is why I don’t trust translations…not all lace underwear is scratchy … 
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weird! i read that paragraph as more she was like distracted by the idea/excitement of wearing her first set of “big girl underwear” in a way…wonder why they translated it like that
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I agree, but I guess the translator thought it was a bit too sexual or something like that?
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I really struggled with the last sentence at the end of chapter 1:
やがて女の子も成長し、 猫にかわるような大切な人ができ、 結婚ということになると、黒猫も自分の相手を見つけて、 別れて暮らすようになるのでした。
I read it like 3 times and had to toss it into google translate to make sure I understood the meaning. Turns out there’s nothing wrong with my reading comprehension, it’s just the author’s ideas are absurd.
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How can any
replace a ?? The audacity to claim such nonsense… -
Assuming Kiki gets married around 20-25 years old, a normal cat would be reaching the end of its life so is marriage just a euphemism for sending the cat out to die alone or do witch’s cats live much longer lives???
Anyway, I’m absolutely incensed. 
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Yeah I thought that it was a weird sentence for all the reasons that you outline, and I can’t quite tell how tongue-in-cheek the author is being with this.
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Chapter 1 has been a real challenge for me thus far; reading each page 3-4 times and progressing at a rate of a page per day. Even so, it’s much easier to remember new words and vocabulary in the context of an interesting tale.
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Original was posted in the book club thread instead of this one, but I figured out what had me confused here
I had been under the impression that there was one tree with a bell or bells hanging from it - I didn’t realise that 高い木という木 was referring to multiple trees. I thought it just meant something along the lines of “the tree called the tall tree”. I have now learnt that aというa means “all a”. Here’s an explanation I found.
Hopefully this will help others because this was a grammar point I didn’t even realise was a grammar point
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How embarrassing for you. I understood it immediately because I got it wrong on this very forum mere months ago: Struggling to grasp the full meaning - #4 by schtitt
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At least I’m unlikely to forget this now
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That tripped me up too since it’s not a verb conjugation sort of deal. Feels more like a set phrase.
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I just looked for it in all three A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar books and it was not in any of them!!! Closest you get is “to iu” in the Basic volume but it doesn’t cover the “N という N” structure or “every” meaning. I swear that is the last time I buy paper dictionaries. 
Bunpro has an entry for it in the JLPT N1 section and lists “everything that could be called” as an option. So I guess if you want to translate it literally you could say “every tree that could be called a tall tree”???
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