Aria the Masterpiece: Chapter 3 Discussion

Japanese Language Reading
#1

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Aria the Masterpiece Chapter 3: 水没の街

Aria the Masterpiece Volume 1

Start Date: July 7th
Previous Chapter: Chapter 2
Next Chapter: Chapter 4

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#2

Fun fact: The Himeya company building is based on the Danieli Hotel

http://www.danielihotelvenice.com/

Finally, the first appearance of Aika’s catchphrase. 「恥ずかしいセリフ禁止！」 「えええ？？」

I’m a little bit amused by the possible triple meaning of 上がっていきなさい on page 93 - or, at least, what I’m taking as a triple meaning. First, in Japanese, when you invite someone into your house, you don’t say “come in”, but 上がってください, “come up”, because when you enter a traditional house, the 玄関 counts as part of “outside”, so to enter the house proper, you step up to the wooden floor. Second, Aika is inviting Akari to her room, which is literally upstairs. And thirdly, 上がる also means “to get out of water, to come ashore”.

Page 94 has another fun use of furigana - the kanji 姫屋 ( = the undine company Himeya) is subtitled as うち = us, we.

So, page 96, they talk about the cats having blue 瞳, pupils. Surely this should be 虹彩 (iris), or is the usage different in Japanese? Or can cats literally have coloured pupuls? Though, I honestly cannot find any evidence that “Aquamarine” was ever the name of a sea goddess.

Page 99, the cat bowls are labelled “MAN :fish: MA”. Jisho says まんま is a childish way of saying 飯, but is that what the bowl means? Mind you, the bowl Akari puts on the the table on the previous page appears to be of a similar design, with a tomato and (illegible) text on either side, so I guess maybe they’re part of a set.

Page 104, just where did she pull her laptop from? She clearly wasn’t carrying it earlier. Also, what’s written on the top edge? It’s starting to bug me how it’s juuust not quite legible.

Think someone’s gonna have to explain why the kanji 遭 is used for 会う in the top left panel of 104

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#3

I don’t know about a goddess named Aquamarine, but I have always heard eye color referred to as 瞳 in Japanese. While it does not make sense from a biological point of view, nether does saying “blue eyes”. Eyes aren’t completely blue, it’s the iris part that is blue. Just did a 5s google and there’s even a song titled 青い瞳 (trans. in English as “blue eyes”): https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/青い瞳

Yes, it is :slight_smile: People do use the word まんま with kids and pets.

You can read it at the beginning of chapter one. 落下注意
The handwritten stuff is unreadable, though…

There’s no kanji in my edition… However, based on the sentence, it makes sense to use 遭う. It has the nuance of encountering a unfavorable situation. In this case, crazy rain.

Edit: @seanblue This is the part that made me change my opinion about the email writing thing. Specifically the fact that she says へへへ秘密〜〜〜 about the person she is writing to. Using 前略 allows the author to be completely neutral and give us literally zero info about that person… So I hope they are going to have some relevance on the plot…

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#4

p96
アクアマリンは 昔から海に女神として
航海のお守りとされていた

True, but

I found this, on a dodgy crystals website

According to legend, Aquamarine is the treasure of mermaids, and holds the power to keep sailors safe when at sea. The stone is said to be a particularly strong charm when immersed in water. For these reasons, Aquamarine was dedicated to a number of sea goddesses, including the Greek love goddess, Aphrodite, whose name means “born of the foam”.

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#5

The other top. :stuck_out_tongue:

#6

Presumably from that backpack she had on when she headed out to buy cat food…

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#7

… How did I completely fail to notice her backpack?

Mind you, I often fail to notice Hime when she’s not actively taking part in the action…

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#9

I have a question about the art! So, on page 85, アリア社長 is understandably shocked and upset by the loss of their food. I get that the, um, streams coming from their eyes represent streams of tears, but their mouth…? Or is their mouth supposed to be wide open / tongue hanging out in shock…?! I also don’t really get what happened - is that a hole in the floor?

#10

I don’t think it’s a spoiler when we’re currently reading the chapter.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure he’s just crying with his mouth open. It’s not his tongue, which is drawn in a different shade of grey (compare page 95, bottom left panel).

As for the floor, he’s standing on the counter.

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#11

Same. For me, his mouth is just comically wide-open.

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#12

I also spent some time staring at that page trying to figure it out yesterday! And I still don’t get how he managed to knock every box of cat food into the water…(unless he wanted to go out) or how the low furniture on p52 copes with inundation… (although maybe Alicia moved it)

But I am a Star Wars fan and thus have coped with plot holes you could drive a semi-trailer through for many years now. :joy:

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#13

On page 103, I’m a little confused by the bottom panel. I don’t really understand what Aika is saying. And is the ひどっ said by Akari along with the あ 本気で言ってるね or by Aika in response to the あ 本気で言ってるね? Surely my inability to figure that second part out goes back to not understanding the first part by Aika.

Is Aika saying that it would have been nice if Alicia was the one staying over? Then Akari is saying “ah you actually said it” and then Aika responds with ひどっ? That’s what it seems to be after reading it a few more times but I’m still not sure.

(The clipped version of ひどい doesn’t seem like something Akari would say though.)

@Naphthalene I doubt they’ll ever say who Akari is corresponding with, but you never know. To me it seems like a plot device to give us some insight into Akari’s thoughts.

Other comments on the chapter:

  1. I really like the stylized version of 姫 used for the company’s logo.
  2. The two page spread on pages 108 and 109 is really impressive, particularly showing the shimmering reflection in the water.
  3. Apparently ヒメ社長 is an Earth cat. You can certainly see the difference compared to アリア社長!

Things from the current chapter can absolutely be considered spoilers. Many people will read though this thread and shouldn’t be spoiled about story details in the current chapter. Content from previous chapters is of course fair game. In the case of what @Radish8 said, I probably would just have blurred the loss of their food part and not the whole thing. But regardless, I think it’s important for people to be able to scroll through the current chapter’s thread and not be spoiled.

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#14

You are up late tonight! :grin:

I think so. And I read the あ 本気で言ってるね as what Akari thinks in response, knowing that Aika has a crush on Alicia before she replies ひどっ. I feel that both girls are saying things which are almost insulting as a form of friendly teasing.

p96 I really like the style of the picture at the bottom, with the cat on the prow of the boat.

p100, am I right in assuming 姫社長 rejects the fish?

p113, is Akari really using アリア社長 as a pillow? And does the もちもち refer to how comfortable he is as one?

#15

Thank you everyone! I figured it must be mouth wide open, but that wasn’t what my brain immediately leapt to when I first saw it so I wanted to check.

It makes so much more sense realising that he’s standing on the counter, too… I was debating for a minute whether they were looking into something a little like those ice cream freezers in supermarkets :sweat_smile:

So, a question about page 95.

姫屋の社長のヒメよ - when I first read this, I thought it meant this is the president’s ‘princess’, implying that this cat was a pet of the president (whether princess was her name or meant to imply she was precious to the president or whatever). Obviously, the next page / rest of the chapter makes me realise that the cat is also their company president.

So… how is the last の particle functioning here? Is it literally [name] of [president] of [company], and I just got confused because she’s a cat? Also, is she called ひめ more as a title, because of the company name (or is the company called after her… so many questions…)?

Then, Akari’s speech bubble in the top-right of page 96 - 社長なわけないでしょう - I don’t understand any of the hiragana part D: what does わけない mean? and what is the な doing after 社長?

I think not understanding that one speech bubble means I don’t remotely understand the context for why Aika launches into her explanation, or how it relates to what “Akari doesn’t understand”…

that’s what I thought :thinking:

As for the chapter itself… that double-page spread on page 108 with the reflection on the water is pretty incredible, but my favourite part was actually pages 88-89. アリア社長 looks so darn cute being towed around in that little boat, and you can feel Akari’s excitement building like a little kid - really getting into it as she takes her boots off and everything :blush:

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#16

Aika’s line is:
泊っていくの = the one who came to stay the night
アリシアさんだったら = if it were Alicia-san
よかった = that would have been good
のに = if only

So yeah, “I wish it were Alicia-san who were staying the night”

And yeah, that’s Akari saying “Ahh, you actually went and said it”.

Yeah. It’s covered in slobber.

Think it refers to how comfortable she is.

Yeah. It’s one of the freaky side-uses of the ownership-の. The grammar dictionary mentions one of the functions of AのB is “A is an attribute of B”, translated as “B, who is A”. So （姫屋の社長）のヒメ = Hime, who is the president of Himeya.

As for Hime being a title or name, remember that Aria shares his name with Aria Company, though whether it’s named for him or he’s named for it is something we’re yet to learn.

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#17

Haha, thank you! I feel better about having been bamboozled by it knowing that it’s a freaky side-use :grin: I guess it also makes sense in a kind of "this is the ひめ of ひめや’ way.

Yeah, this is what made me question whether it was even her name or more of a title, and which way round the naming happened, and so on… I assumed in previous chapters that Aria Company had either been named after Aria or that アリア社長 was more like a title, but Himeya seems like a long-established company (though I don’t know how long Neo Venezia has even been in existence) and the name seems less like… a name :stuck_out_tongue: though fairly appropriate for a cat, so who knows

#18

Cats do have nine lives…

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#19

We were having a barbecue for Independence Day, but I still wanted to finish the chapter and post my questions. Now it’s morning and I’m tired. :sweat_smile:

Unfortunately it’s a fairly common usage as far as I’ve seen from my reading. Now that you know about it it shouldn’t be too hard to get used to at least.

I’m splitting this dialog bubble a bit to make sense of it. またまたぁ、にゃんこさんが社長な、わけないでしょ？ (though the comma after またまたぁ may not be necessary depending on the exact meaning you want to go with)

またまたぁ is expressing disbelief. Like saying “again?” in a “you’re messing with me” kind of way. I think in this context it does actually mean again/another while still expressing disbelief. [Jisho]

にゃんこさんが社長な = I think the な here is used like when someone says な at the end of a sentence, not like for a な-adjective. Hence why I added a comma in my version for clarity.
See Kyasurin’s answer below about the な part.

わけないでしょ = There’s no way that ____, right? [Jisho]

So the whole thing means something like “You’re kidding! There’s no way another cat is President, right?”.

I think the handwritten sentence afterward (アリア•カンパニーじゃ、あるまいし) shows that Akari doesn’t really believe that アリア社長 is even truly president.
じゃ = では
まい = probably isn’t [Jisho]
し = showing reason [Jisho]

Seems that way to me.

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#20

わけではない is a grammar construction meaning “It doesn’t mean that…”
e.g. http://maggiesensei.com/2012/01/13/request-lesson-わけではない-わけがない-wake-dewa-nai-wake-ga-nai/

As far as I can tell, if you put a noun directly before わけではない, you need to put in a な
e.g. うそなわけではない (taken from here)

So I came to the same understanding of the meaning of the overall sentence as Sean did, but not with the な

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#21

Ah of course. Some grammar requires the な after nouns as well, not just after な-adjectives.