Oh boy. This is going to be a long one.
After this week’s reading, I’m now at 34:40h. So you are pretty fast already compared to me 
. All the lookups of the places we are at in Tokyo + looking into many of the foods combined with my normal grammar + vocabulary lookups if I’m uncertain I understand everything correctly, take quite a bit of time for this one.
I’m pretty sure I’ll continue with the story even though I’m not super into it. It has quite a good difficulty level and I feel my reading getting slowly better due to the slight challenge.
You are in for a especially grueling week I tell you. The first week still felt manageable for me regarding the amount of detailed descriptions. But now it felt like it really went overboard. Sometimes I lost the plot of the story because the thread is interrupted by 3-4 Kindle pages of some side tangent detailed description.
Especially the first part of this chapter went overboard for me. I get it, it’s butter-rice and cod-butter pasta. Not that great a meal in the grand scheme of things, do we really need 5 pages of explanation for them 
The interaction between 恋人 (already forgot his name, sorry) and Rika was fascinating to me. How she thinks about why she was so bothered by his comment, especially. Even though he seems to have her wellbeing in mind when saying it.
I can see how she takes his comments as a rejection of her cooking. She clearly had expectations of him reacting more enthusiastically (again, “only” noodles with butter and cod…). I think looking forward to his reaction was a big part of why she prepared a serving for him, even if just unconsciously. Combined with the later part one can really feel that she craves a lot of outside validation from others.
Another thing I find interesting is how fast she seems to sympathise with 梶井. I mean, the woman is suspected of having murdered 3 people. But “oow she is in prison for the third Christmas in a row and can’t eat delicious Christmas cake…”. And we even learn a little later that the food in this prison is apparently especially good ^^. I’m not 100% sure if she really sympathizes with her or is still looking for an angle to get closer to fish for information. The lines seem blurry.
In that part I got totally lost. I totally forgot that she had another meeting scheduled with all the musings selecting a present for 梶井, her toilet interaction, and walking to the place. Her relationship with 篠井 also seems fascinating, though. Apparently she doesn’t feel the need for makeup in front of him and can talk freely, share stuff that she doesn’t share with others, all while they only meet once a month to exchange information a little. Fascinating, let’s see how often 篠井will come into play in the future.
But oh my god, from ordering some butter-corn until it arrives we have another 5 pages of musings with only marginal dialog in between. For my reading pace, some of these sections really drag.
What the hell. When she was musing how she was on purpose making her all-girls-school classmates thirst for her. To make herself feel better. I find that part kinda funny to read. Interesting to read her thoughts on manipulating others that way. I’m not sure if I understood everything 100% though.
I’m definitely interested in other people’s takes and what others took from this week’s reading, especially what stood out to others. Were the same interactions interesting to others; did I misinterpret some of the stuff I wrote?