I read ピアノ without listening (yet). Vocabularies are usually either known or not, rather than too much looking up (successfully) or too hard grammar.
I stumbled upon けふ, but someone explained anyway.
或 needs to be guessed, but not hard one realized. I keep having to look up 藜 (with Yomitan on Firefox for Android).
It has 3 vertical scroll length on smartphone, but in 1 page on laptop (though small text).
I finished reading ピアノ late last night and found it very immersive (despite all the lookups I needed). Happily, the challenge to read this wasn’t as much as I thought, I consulted the bluffer’s guide linked in the home post and that answered most questions and made the reading a lot smoother after the first paragraph.
Thanks everyone who commented on some of the harder words - your comments got me through the last 2 paragraphs faster when I was getting pretty tired.
The youtube link on the Natively page didn’t work for me (EU), but I found this great narration on the Aozora Roudoku (huge Aozora audio book collection)
I already notified Brandon at Natively to add the link the page if he has time and went ahead and added to my review hoping that is helpful.
I started the day 2 story 一房の葡萄 which is longer but a lot easier!!
Here is a nice audio for that:
Day 2, 鼻: this is a pretty well known story, I think. I’d read it before years ago as it’s one of the stories in the parallel English/Japanese reader Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text - Revised Edition | L31 so this was a reread for me.
Any views on that book you’d like to share? Do you think it is worth it or is reading along during this challange equally as good?
I read 鼻 this morning and it was a new one for me, but also kind of in a similar vein to other things I’ve read by this author. He doesn’t always write like this, but he has a few which are the same old fashioned moral lesson types. Not my favorite, but also nice to read something without having to think as hard as yesterday, haha
I think it depends a lot on your learning level. If you’re happy reading the text from aozora with perhaps occasional dictionary lookups, the book probably won’t add that much. If you would struggle with the raw text, then the parallel English text to check your understanding and the same page vocab definitions make it much more approachable.
I haven’t read it but it’s on a list I made and here are some content warnings that you may want to know about
Content warning: some stories are dark, bordering horror, and there is depiction of sexual assault.
Read both the entries for yesterday, but only read 鼻 today.
I read 一房の葡萄, this was quite a bit easier than ピアノ and included modern spellings so was not too hard, but a little longer! It was a nice story I guess, I assume the point was something about friendship between westerners and Japanese people. I found this blog post about the story that I skimmed/read a bit and that gave it a little more context.
Maybe I’ll read the other story later. All this random classic short story reading is starting to remind me of high school.
Read 一房の葡萄. Was not bad but didn’t like it as much as the first story. The protagonist being a small child wasn’t appealing to me and the moral of the story is a little strange. It was significantly longer as well.
Most interestingly to me was the kanji usage. I love 辷る and am in favor of bringing it back. Just looks cool. 這入る was also interesting to see. I hate the confusion sometimes with just 入る.
Lastly there’s 泣寝入り, not sure I could fall asleep while crying. Is that really a thing?
I always took that as “go to bed crying” rather than the act of falling asleep
I listened to and read part 1 today, and will read the next 2 parts in the next couple of days. So I’ll make my comments when I’m done!
Very small children do that without difficulty 
But if it’s not about a small child: I just noticed that the word has another meaning as well:
i.e. wanting to complain to someone but being unable to do so (I think in English there is something like „crying into your pillow“? Or am I wrong here…)
I also went for 一房の葡萄 (thought of doing 鼻 too, but the other one was so much longer than I expected…) I found 葡萄 to be a cute story, I could sympathize with the main character being a socially awkward kid who just wanted some new colors to draw, and having a crush on his kind and pretty teacher. Overall, I enjoyed the mood of the story.
I thought the setting was quite interesting, with so many foreigners in the school. Would have been nice if it had been explored a bit further.
I think the story does explore it, he’s jealous of the Westerner with the special paints- Jim doesn’t just have them for no reason, the paints were probably watercolor pans that had just been introduced to Japan and were therefore expensive for Japanese people (according to the blog I linked). The main character has a persecution complex, assuming that the Westerners are thinking about him as the ‘poor Japanese person who can’t even get paints,’ but we don’t know that they were actually thinking anything of the sort, and Jim seems pretty happy to be friends at the end, symbolized by sharing the grapes. I don’t know if the choice of grapes has a particular symbolic meaning but maybe it does.
I have a Japanese friend that I talk with and I told her about Aozora Advent, she was totally surprised and then gave me loads of recommendations, so I’ll do a combo now and work in some of hers that are not already on the calendar.
Already on the pre-vetted calendar:
ごんぎつね
手袋を買いに
Already read yesterday on the mystery calendar and I saw a lot of discussion so I’ll read that one:
鼻
I didn’t see these on the calendars:
セロ弾きのゴーシュ (@Akashelia recommended it to me a while ago, and Aozora advent seems to be a great time to finally read it!)
蜘蛛の糸
I really enjoyed today’s story from the pre-vetted list, マスク. I have not read many first hand accounts from the Spanish Flu Pandemic, so to see the parallels with COVID times was very interesting.
Today’s Mask was fascinating to read. The second half with his thoughts about why he’s wearing masks and how it makes him feel when others wear masks in different situations was interesting to read.
The first half of the story, that serves as an introduction, could have been shorter. All that backstory felt a little too long. I would have preferred to lead faster into the mask part of the story.
I just finished the Dec. 2 pre-vetted selection, 一房の葡萄 by 有島武郎 and I really enjoyed the story.
It took me two days to finish this, mainly due to my embryonic reading skills, but also because I kept stopping to read about Arishima’s background (which is equally, if not more tragic than the first selection!!), his stay in the US, his complicated relationship with Christianity and socialism…etc etc. It is all new to me, so I found it really interesting. Maybe the fact that I took so long to get through the story forced me to chew on it longer than I normally would have, if I had better reading skills…not sure… the blog post @soggyboy shared was great, thank you!
Tdlr: blah blah blah
This should be taken with a grain of salt:
It’s a children’s moral story on the surface I guess, but it is really about Arishima’s feelings of inferiority and “outsider-ness” in his own hometown of Yokohama living among a lot of foreigners and going to a school where he is possibly one of very few Japanese students. It was in an era when missionaries were teaching a different/better way to live and therefore foreigners seemed superior in some ways in the minds of some Japanese. So he’s having an identity crisis of sorts.
Conflicting feelings about foreigners - Jim is the foreigner who possesses something superior the boy doesn’t have and that he covets. He has the paints, the friends, he’s big and confident. Yet, the boy also implies that Jim himself isn’t superior and may not deserve such high quality paints when he says 「それでもその絵具をぬると、下手な絵さえがなんだか見ちがえるように美しく見えるのです。」So he’s both envious and dismissive of Jim… ?
The significance of colors - The blog post shared by @soggyboy goes into detail about the paint colors that were stolen. There are three colors that stand out in the story: blue, red and purple. The Blue/Indigo (藍色 - あいいろ) is a uniquely Japanese color that comes from a traditional dyeing method and is highly praised by the West. The Crimson Red aka carmine (洋紅色 -ようこうしょく) was introduced by the West to Japan in the late Edo era. The boy wants to paint a beautiful picture of the deep indigo sea with the masted ships that have a crimson red line just above the water-line. He needs both the blue and the red paints. But no matter how he tries with this own paints, he can’t get the color right. That’s because he doesn’t have the good paints like Jim has. Following the theft & confrontation, his beautiful (western?) teacher resolves the conflict and gives the boy Purple grapes. The story specifies they are European grapes that are growing in Japan and are delicious. By breaking the bunch of grapes into two and giving each of the boys half, it’s a resolution and kind of peace offering between the two boys. So… blend red and blue together and you get purple… To me the story ends with the message that you can’t make the beautiful painting without both the Japanese color and the Western-derived color, and that embracing the two (purple) is better than being envious of the West…
If you look at Arishima’s own personal history, he appeared to struggle with his identity and values, trying to find a place he was mentally comfortable inhabiting. First jumping both feet into Christianity and its values, studying and even volunteering with the Quakers in the US, but then rejecting it years later out of dissatisfaction with the practice not producing the desired results in society. In his next attempt to find a solution to inequality or injustice, he embraced socialism to the point where he ceded ownership of a gigantic tract of inherited farmland in Hokkaido and handed it over to a farming cooperative. (sadly that cooperative in Niseko seems to have been dissolved and privatized a couple of decades later at the end of WW2)
I had an earlier theory about the boy’s affection for the teacher. Arishima’s wife died of tuberculosis in 1916, leaving him and his three children behind. A year later he renounced Christianty. And a couple of years later, he began an affair with a married woman who he really loved. I thought the affair and the moral/ethical quandary it produced may have occurred around the same time A Bunch of Grapes was written and could explain the story themes. However, the story was first written in 1920 and later published as a collection in 1922. From what I could find, Arishima met and began his affair with Akiko Hatano (editor of a women’s magazine and wife of an alleged womanizer) in 1922, so the timing is off…
The story also reminded me a popular children’s poem & song called 赤い靴 (red shoes) written by Ujō Noguchi (野口 雨情) right around the same time, in 1922. It’s really sad because it’s about someone (the mom?) who misses a little Japanese girl who is taken away by missionaries to live a better(?) life overseas. In the song, the person wonders if her eyes have turned blue from living over there, and imagines that the girl asks the foreigners when she can go back to Japan. In the same time frame as A Bunch of Grapes, the song/poem is about similar issues - the influence of foreigners on Japanese, and the feelings of loss from how Japanese identity is being affected…? I found out about the song because I came across the statue in Yokohama’s Yamashita Park many years ago.
[disclaimer: who knows if any of this makes sense, but it was really fun for me to read and think about the story and the author. It is unfortunate, but I will probably continue reading the awesome pre-vetted selections at a much slower pace than the group 
, but I look forward to reading comments as I finish each reading 
]
I put off reading けすとえくえろ 探偵小説は芸術か until after work today since I was a bit groggy this morning:
First person mentioned: 甲賀三郎 (作家) - Wikipedia
He wrote a book called 乳のない女. I’m intrigued.
Another bit I looked up: スカラ座 - Wikipedia
Anyways, I found the writing in this essay surprisingly easy to understand and I also agree with him wholeheartedly. It’s the whole “what is art” argument that circled around (and still circles around) genre fiction. Particularly crime fiction I’ve read this type of essay for before.
芸術の形式は時代とともに変りつつある […] 昔のままの文芸の概念を持ってまわるのは死人の屍体を抱いていると同じだ。
yes 
I want to read more of his essays, and also the writing he’s replying to. I’m so intrigued!
