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I’m reading along
I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this chapter yet
Hah. The furigana on the chapter title is interesting.
Page 184, it bugs me a teensy bit that they’re sitting on cushions Japanese-style with their shoes on. It looks… weird.
Paga 191, that’s the same pizza shop from two chapters ago, innit?
Also page 191: I don’t quite get the meaning of Akira’s operation name, aside from establishing that perhaps she’s not great at naming operations. According to Wikipedia, Catenaccio is a soccer tactic ephasising a strong defence. Tokyopop has decided to sidestep the issue, continuing their trend of weird localisations by calling it “Operation Uncover Undine”. A scanslation I’ve found calls it “Operation Love Defence”, but then there’s a footnote blaming the Chinese translation they started with, but honestly, that kinda works for me…
The soundtrack for pages 198-200 is the same one we had a few chapters ago.
(Fun fact: this volume is the last one that Tokyopop translated into English. I did spot the new English Masterpiece edition in Kinokuniya the last time I was there. Didn’t buy it, though…)
I’m still here! Just a little late as sometimes happens.
They were the best of times, they were the worst of times…
I noticed a couple of variations to Aika’s catchphrase.
Actually I don’t have too much to say about this chapter.
it’s still good reading practice though.
She’s being つんでれ, I reckon. “Oh, you look so miserable, I guess I’d better join you. It’s not like I want to be friends or anything.”
She face-planted because she was just involved in a head-on collision. I figure 顔面ゴケ means “face-plant”, but both Jisho and Google are coming up blank for me…
I suspect I only knew it because she does the same thing in the anime - last I checked, straw wrappers aren’t really all that common around where I live. Yet(?)
So I finished this chapter without any more confusion (or maybe ignorance is bliss!) and I think it would be one of my favourites for this book. The poignancy of realising that the time you can spend together with people you really care about isn’t necessarily going to last forever really resonated with me.
Exciting news all! I found a straw in a wrapper, and sometime over the weekend I’m going to see if it will do that trick for me!
This is what my life has become, oh my goodness…