This continues a tradition started in 2022 (originally on the Wanikani forums, then 2023+2024 on Natively’s forums, and now…back to WK ) where I read a random Aozora short piece of writing each day. Some of these were short stories, some were essays, some were children’s stories - all were chosen mostly at random and a surprise each day!
I have prepared 2 calendars (to be posted on November 30th to avoid peeking).
One of them is a true Advent style mystery box where every day is a surprise and I personally don’t know the content nor the difficulty of the text - at most I may be familiar with the author.
The second calendar contains Aozora shorts I have read and vetted for being at least somewhat entertaining and this year, also all Natively level 33* or below in an effort to make them more approachable to a wider range of learners. Also, remember - even if a level is higher than you could normally do, maybe a few pages is doable!
* There is one exception for the story of メリイ・クリスマス. It’s not on Natively due to not being on Amazon, but the story is on Aozora. I read it some time ago but am confident it meet the L33 or below requirements
FAQ Can I switch stories for < reason > ?
Feel free to swap out any story you don’t like or which is too high of a level for any other Aozora work.
How do I participate?
Advent runs from December 1st through 24th. In this event we read one short work from Aozora each day. Please feel free to ask questions, write out your thoughts here under spoiler tags. If you have time, please rate and review the stories on Natively to help the community.
What can I do if I struggle reading old Japanese writing?
pm215 helpfully provided A Bluffer’s Guide to Old Kana Spellings in the 2023 Advent which is worth a read! Also, many works have read alouds available on YouTube. If there isn’t already one listed on the Natively page just search for “book title, author, 朗読”. Ex: “人間失格 太宰治 朗読”.
What if I can’t do every day?
Participate as much as you can. Reading 2 or 3 or 5 Aozora stories is better than none!
What is Aozora anyways?
Aozora Bunko (青空文庫) is an online library of out of copyright Japanese works. It’s similar to Project Gutenberg if you’re familiar with that site.
Since it’s just past 9am on December 1st in Japan I put the calendars in the main post. As a reminder, most (all?) of the Natively ones in the pre-vetted calendar should have read alongs (朗読) available on youtube to help with understanding how to read old kana if you’re not yet familiar. There’s also no shame in slowing down the speed of the video if that helps as well!
You also don’t need to read every day. If you’re up to the challenge, please do! But I’m happy to have anyone join for as much as they’re able.
As a reminder, please use spoiler tags to hide your thoughts on each story. It keeps the mystery/anticipation for people who haven’t yet been able to read it.
The exception to this is if something in the mystery calendar has gore/graphic violence, in which case you can alert outside of spoilers so others who wish to avoid that may do so. I haven’t read any of the mystery picks yet, and so can’t vouch for any of their content.
I’m going to wait til December starts in my own timezone to read the mystery pick. Looking forward to hearing all your thoughts on the stories!
Thanks for the reminder about using YouTube to listen with the reading! I was so excited I started right when I got up my time. I managed half of ピアノ and am looking forward to reading the rest tonight! This isn’t as hard as I thought. The bluffer’s guide covered the oddities that came up (except for ゝ as a repeater 々 but that was easy to guess), and it’s actually easier to read from this time period than I thought it would be.
As always, 坂口安吾 is a rough read for me. Somehow his sentences are always tricky. I think I got the main thrust (politicians vs common people’s thoughts on war, tentative peace, worries about the bomb) but I was a little bit confused what it was talking about more specifically. I tried to find more detail online for the context in which this was written, but struck out. Since it seems to have been written in 1952, I think this is in reference to the Korean war, which would be a neighboring country and according to some quick googling, was a year which was largely in a stalemate and matches the 和戦両様の構え which he references. Ready for war, ready for peace. What left me a little puzzled and maybe I’ll re-read to understand latter in the day, is the title and the ending sentence referencing the 茶の間 being empty because people are away gambling at pachinko parlors
Started reading this one thinking it was going to be fiction and had to very sharply readjust
茶の間はガラあき
We’re definitely talking around the korean war here, at least, and more generally placing this in the context of the cold war and the kinds of back hand politicking happening between the 二大強国
To me it seems like he already had pretty negative view of the people in the 茶の間 (ie, just regular folk disconnected from academics and politics and the military) being able to understand what was actually happening. He gives that line about 茶の間にとっては不可解きわまる思惑だ , and then despite being the only country to have actually experienced the bomb, there are still voices in japan calling loudly for war despite being exactly the people who should know what that now means.
But the title and last line I think point to him being even more dejected than that, now not only are the average people not really understanding the things happening, they aren’t even there chatting to trying to care, gone off to gamble instead. Although maybe dejected is me just reading into it through modern ideas about political disengagement
It seems that our author was a notable member of the 無頼派 post wwii and reconstruction, and so may have thought that people disengaging from the same political machine that led to the second world war in favor of personal pleasures was a perfectly acceptable thing for them to be doing.
Thank you for selecting the stories. I read ピアノ just now. It was a short and pleasant read, with Yomitan for some of the more obscure verbs and rarer Kanji.
I liked the mood of the story.
Is there some indication somewhere where I can look up when the story was originally published? Would be interesting to get some context to the time in which it was written. (plays shortly after 1923 earthquake, right?)
I found に違ひなかつた interesting. I’ve never seen にちがいない in the past tense before.
I already wonder again how often I will continue to stumble over 兎に角 before I remember that it has nothing to do with bunnies
The thing that threw me most for a loop was けふ which is apparently きょう and かう which sounds like こう(which makes sense in the sentence) in the 既読.
Often at the bottom of the piece there is a date associated, although sometimes it’s the date of the publication it was pulled from rather than the date it was first published. And yes - it’s definitely in relation to the big quake in the 1920s from my memory of it! There’s actually a few really excellent pieces of writing that came out of that tragedy (as is usually the case with anything so impactful)
I read both 茶の間はガラあき and ピアノ as I was excited to start, had some free time today and still don’t know which calendar I want to stick with.
ピアノ
A very pleasant read, I enjoyed the descriptions and the mood of the story overall. Once I got used to the old kana style, it became also quite fluid.
茶の間はガラあき
I definitely struggled with this one, which felt harder than ピアノ. I didn’t even realize - as others mentioned - that it could be a reference to the Korean war. I’ll probably re-read to see if my understanding improves.
I also struggled with the ending, and wondered if I had missed some kind of cultural cue or something else from the story.
Overall, both stories were a bit challenging in terms of language (I learned some new vocab!) and slightly out of my comfort zone and usual genres I read, but still approachable enough due to their short length. I’m enjoying it so far! Looking forward to the next days.
First, thank you @pocketcat for setting up this Aozora Advent and for all the effort to make a vetted calendar! ピアノ was far above my reading skills, but because it was short, I persevered with heavy reliance on jisho.org and cheating with google translate. There were so many things I liked about this selection: Being exposed to older style writing, learning a little about the (sad) life of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, the founding father of short stories, and getting a feel for his writing style in this story (loved it!)
On the language learning side, it was neat to learn the kanji for words I’m familiar with:
兎に角― とにかく
勿論 ＝もちろん
或家＝ある家
成程= なるほど
And it was also neat to learn how familiar words were once written (these are my guesses - [note: is it possible the つ in the Aozora version is written as a regular つ but should be small っ ]:
変つてゐなかつた＝かわっていなかった？ [the ゐ is now い]
伸びてゐる＝のびている？
違ひなかつた= ちがいなかった？[ the ひ is now い]
I read ピアノ last year but I decided to read it again! Nice start to the season Love the vibes of the story, and this year the old kana felt a lot easier to decipher and not as much of a burden.
Made it about 2 paragraphs into the 茶の間 piece before giving up Ok, at least I tried!
Mmm, I had trouble deciding where the author came down on things, but I think he is siding with the “common sense” views of ordinary people and criticising the political class for not being able to reach the same conclusions. The bit about pachinko parlours I read as “everybody’s given up on understanding what the politicians are doing”, plus it’s probably a reference to some at the time well known social phenomenon. This history of the pachinko industry says there was a massive boom in the early 50s which reached more than 45,000 pachinko parlours before the government cracked down with regulation in 1955 and it collapsed to fewer than 10,000 parlours. In 1952 this essay would have been written when the boom was well underway, making it a natural kind of reference to make, I think.
Alright I dunno if I’m gonna manage to stick with this long term cause things are kind of a pain right now but I read 茶の間. I guess this is fitting for an introduction to the mystery calendar, no guardrails, starting off with an essay I’m so lacking in context on that I’m kind of reading it as abstract thoughts while I try to put together what it is this guy is talking about. I guess broadly my understanding matches what you all said and I didn’t miss much that wasn’t missed by everyone else.
Like yeah man, that sucks that that happened I guess. I’ll take his word on it. Besides the specific references to things I dunno about, the vagueness of what he’s saying makes it difficult more than the language itself. He sort of hints at having a point and then darts away from it a lot. I think the thing that makes the pachinko reference weird is just how it comes after その国では戦争のカケゴエがメガホンづきになるばかりであるから but I’m not really sure how people encouraging war is causing the disengagement. People tired of hearing that? You’d think stoking the war fears specifically would keep people more anxiously paying attention (or out for blood if they’ve already lost the understanding of how bad it is, like he seems to think some have). What would lose their attention is the way they’re in this vague limbo of uncertainty for a prolonged time. It’s a weird line in a weird essay.
The trouble with this sort of newspaper editorial essay is that it’s written for an audience familiar with the current events of the time, so it gets to comment on them without particularly spelling out what it’s talking about.
Possibly relevant, or possibly not: 1952 was when the US occupation of Japan finally ended: this essay was written in January, after the signing of the Security Treaty between the United States and Japan the previous year, but before it went into effect; that treaty put Japan firmly on the US side of the Cold War. 1952 would also be an election year: that plus the end of the occupation probably meant there were a lot of politicians out there taking stances on foreign policy.
I hadn’t even checked to see where it was published, but yeah this was in the 読売新聞. It kinda read a bit like the 天声人語 column in the 朝日新聞 does, so was kinda just assuming that’s what the publication context was
Pachinko industry history is a great pull! The time period and pachinko mentions were putting me in the headspace of 生きる, which coincidentally also came out in 1952! Although, that film ends up rejecting both the self-centered hedonism of the new tokyo nightlife as well as the old japan bureaucratic and social norms
Come to think of it, the guide who takes the main character around in that film is a young author… wonder if he’s more explicitly supposed to be one of our 無頼派 guys. Oh no, it looks like I’ll just have to rewatch 生きる again, heaven forbid
I read ピアノ. It was good practice for old kana, which I’ve encountered before in 夢十夜 and a nice story overall. I didn’t realize that these stories would be so short! I feel like I can definitely keep this up, especially with the help of 朗読 on YouTube.
Happy (Early) Advent! 
) where I read a random Aozora short piece of writing each day. Some of these were short stories, some were essays, some were children’s stories - all were chosen mostly at random and a surprise each day!
FAQ 
Love the vibes of the story, and this year the old kana felt a lot easier to decipher and not as much of a burden.
Ok, at least I tried!