I read about half of the free preview available on Amazon and proceeded to purchase the book, but haven’t truly started yet. I’m finishing up some other books first and will likely start next week or so.
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I started yesterday, but the beginning was pretty confusing to me. The book is a bit above my level, but I hope it will get better as I read!
I was actually puzzling over the second sentence for a while, before I gave up and moved on. Hoping it would get clearer as I read, but it still feels puzzling to me! (I only read like 1 page so far tho.)
Maybe someone can help:
地名を聞いた時から東郷海斗は漠然と思っていた。
So my guess for a translation would be: "Since the time Tougou Kaito had heard about Chimei he thought “vague/obscure”.
I found that chimei is supposed to be a place name, but is it a place?
After that it sorts of goes into small sentence describing a person’s appearance? So I was wondering if Chimei might be a person? But in the end I guessed it’s the description of Kaitos appearance. Not sure if that is correct.
Sorry for asking such basic things in the beginning. 
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No worries at all! That’s what the book club is about actually 
And don’t sweat it too much - the book is not an easy one, that’s for sure. So just keep asking, and everybody will benefit!
地名 means “the name of a place”. If you look at the kanji, they are “place” and “name”. So my translation would be “Ever since Tougou Kaito had heard the name of the place, he thought that it’s obscure.”
Yes, it indeed describes Kaito (whom we just learned about through his thought).
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Ooooh now that makes more sense! I was thinking that 地名 is the name of a town/country or something due to the “the name of a place”. Thanks! 
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I started it earlier today, I’m about halfway through chapter one now.
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Still truckin’ along in chapter 1. I’m super slow; about on page 19 (Kindle-wise, at least). 
I’m jealous of everyone who was able to speed through, haha. I don’t end up with much time/energy to read after getting off work, so here we are. I’m glad to be reading it with you all, though.
I’m still enjoying it so far; even if I’m slow, I’d say I’m picking up at least 90%, if not 95% of what’s written on the page. I’ve also been marking words to add to the vocab sheet, and I’m hoping to add those tomorrow/Friday. One thing I noted in the reading: Kaito mentions that his hair is dyed red, and as far as I know his hair is still red on future covers. I wonder what justification the author’s going to go through to keep it that way?
Right now Kaito’s finished giving an overview of his living situation, and he and Kazuya are, I believe, going to look for a place to spend the night. Fun fact to spice up this post: I looked up the word プリマス (Plymouth) and found out that there’s actually a breed of chicken called Plymouth Rock!
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Don’t worry about that, that’s absolutely not a problem. Admittedly, while I’m looking forward to continuing the series, I have a lot of books and clubs lined up as well, so I don’t mind waiting a bit longer
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It was a 4 day long weekend (public holiday) for me last weekend so I had way more reading time than usual. I am now moving much more slowly 
(especially because I’ve got distracted by playing fire emblem three houses again….at least it’s in Japanese so maybe all the lords and nobles ye olde talk will carry over to this )
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This conversation about parallel dimensions and “other yous” is interesting and unexpected (especially the X-Files reference), but I’m gonna be so mad if I read through all 20+ volumes of this and it ends with an “it was all a dream”, lol.
I don’t think it actually will, but I had the thought while reading, haha.
Edit: Aaand finished chapter 1. 
Amazing what you can do with three uninterrupted hours. I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this chapter to end on such a note; makes me curious how things will work out from here. I don’t envy either of them the fight they’re in.
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I’ve started adding vocab to the chapter 2 tab of the spreadsheet. I’m pretty horribly behind on chapter 1 (going slowly but surely), but I’m not far enough in to ch. 2 to be too behind quite yet, haha. I hope the spreadsheet is useful for someone!
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How’s everyone enjoying the book? It’s not just me here, right
I just read through the section where they talk about Drake’s Drum, which is a super cool topic! I’d never heard about it before, and after a little bit of independent research it looks like the author’s dug up some fun stuff. I also found the English original of the poem (by Henry Newbolt) the author quoted:
日本語版
わがドラム、イングランドに持ち帰りて岸辺に吊るし、
汝らが力、足らざるときに打て
スペイン軍、デヴォンをうかがわば、われ急ぎ天国の港を出でむ
昔、軍勢を集めたるごとく、海峡へ彼らを呼び出さむ
英語版
Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.
Reading this really makes me want to look up facts about the historical Drake, but I can’t decided if that would be a bad idea or not. Should I just go with the flow or do some extracurricular study?
I also had a question about a sentence; it’s got so many negatives running around it’s twisting me up. It’s on the third page of chapter 2:
ただ、このまま旅を続ける姿勢を見せているということは、完全に決裂する気がないと見なしてもいいのではないだろうか。
Well, I answered my own question while I was typing it out, but I’ll leave it here regardless. Turns out 見なす was the missing link I needed. I was assuming its meaning was closer to 見る than it actually was.
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I’m still here with you ^^ (not sure if that counts though hehe)
While reading the book, I looked up historical facts All. The. Time. And I never had the impression it was a bad idea tbh. I even made a section in the overall book club for historical links - please feel free to add interesting links to it! I think this story is so dense with history that it would be really interesting to try to capture a lot of it through real occurrences.
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I, uh, might have fallen completely to fire emblem addiction this last week but I should have some reading time tomorrow to be getting back to the pirate boys 
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I’m having a lot of fun reading it with everyone so far! 
I thought that the stuff about Drake’s Drum was really interesting as well. It kind of feels like I’m studying some history at the same time as Japanese. Thanks for including the English version of the poem, I can’t say I understood all of it in Japanese so seeing the English version was a lot of help 
Read about half of chapter 2 today, up to page 58 in my version.
It feels like the first chapter and this one so far have covered a lot of different topics so I’m having to look up a lot of vocab, but thanks to that I’m learning some interesting words and phrases (血湧き肉躍る threw me off for a bit until I realized it was an expression)
These two are always having some really interesting conversations, this time there was history, ghost stories, and really fittingly, time travel. I’m getting really curious about how the time travel is going to go down, will it be like the theory they discussed? Is Kazuya going to be involved? Or is the whole if I disappeared conversation from the last chapter also foreshadowing? I’m very intrigued, gotta keep reading and find out 
I think I’ll try and finish the chapter tomorrow if I can.
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Of course it does! You’re who we’ll summon via the NicoleRauch Drum in times of trouble. 
Nice, nice, that decides it for me then. I’ll add anything interesting I find to the links as well!
I know how it goes. As soon as IS announces the next FE game I’ll be falling into that hole myself. :X
I’m right with you there. I gave an attempt at the Japanese version when I got to it, but any language old enough still throws me for a loop.
Dang, I completely missed that that was a set phrase. Thanks!
I totally agree; they’ve got a lot of fun topics set up, and I’m half/half on wanting to see what the author does with it all. One one hand I love me some foreshadowing; on the other I can see it getting messy real quickly if the author lets things get too out-of-hand.
I figure Kazuya has to be involved somehow, right? My current theory is that he also time travels with Kaito, for no other reason than the author’s put in so much work into him as a character already. It would feel really weird for me for them to go through their whole mini falling out for the author to drop that plotline and never come back to it.
Can I also say, dream foreshadowing is one of my favorite things in books when it’s well done. I just loved the spooky scene set by Kazuya’s dream. I think Kaito said he had a similar-ish dream as well, right? Where he was watching a different version of himself? This is the first time I’ve wanted to go back in a Japanese book to double-check the details, haha.
Wasn’t able to read any last night due to staying late at work. @.@ Was just too tired to read anything. I should be on schedule to finish chapter 2 this week though, I hope.
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Finished chapter 2! Gonna see if I can finish my vocab sheet entries for ch. 2 tomorrow, maybe see if I can push through and finish ch. 1’s.
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Finished chapter 3 this weekend! What’s the secret of my success, you may ask? Well…
Me playing myself
So I peaked at the first couple of pages of chapter three when I finished two and saw it was more historical setup. Cool, no problem, I’ll read when I get up Friday morning, push past it, and be ready for more action Friday afternoon/Saturday. Well, it’s Sunday before I can pick the book up again, ready for hijinks, only to find out that immediately after that historical section is some dude standing on a cliff thinking about the current political situation, haha. So by the time I got through that I was ready to see our boy Kaito again, and when he did finally re-enter the stage, I ended up reading through the rest of chapter 3 because I was so excited. 
All of this is a long way of saying that I finished chapter 3 and immediately wanted to continue onward to chapter 4. 
Some thoughts on chapter 3, in no particular order:
Spoilers for the second half of ch.3
- I really appreciate how, when spelling things out in Japanese, you can really show off pronunciation differences between words/names where it might not have been as clear as in English. Example: our boy ビセンテ, who gives his name to the English-speaking Kaito as ヴィンセント. (Is ビセンテ an actual historical figure? Does anyone know? A two-second Google search has not yielded any results other than F&B ones, and I don’t want to dive into his wiki page for fear of spoilers.)
- I’m torn on Vincente’s choking Kaito out once he opened his big mouth about the time-travel/Spain’s going to get wrecked thing. On one hand, seemed like an overreaction. On the other, maybe it’ll be a hint to Kaito not to stand out too much.
- Despite the strangling thing, Vicente seems like a stand-up dude.
- I gotta give Vicente a hand for his thorough rationalization of this random kid he found lying on the ground. “I’m from the future, Spain’s going to lose its upcoming naval battles” → “This kid’s family was imported from Japón by Elizabeth I for their mystic future-telling practices. Also he got hit on the head really hard.”
- I also really enjoyed Kaito’s brief foray into Spanish. Reminds me of the days when I wasn’t neglecting mine for my Japanese. I hope we get to see him really flex his language skills!
- Vicente’s plan to bring Kaito to Spain to use his mystic fortune-telling powers for their side is intriguing. Here’s hoping he gets kidnapped again down the line.
And that’s all I got for the moment! Looking forward to chapter 4 shenanigans~
EDIT: I can’t have more than three consecutive replies in a thread, so someone needs to post so I don’t look like a serial double-poster. 
Finished chapter 4. These chapters definitely feel like they’re getting shorter as I go; I don’t know if they actually are, or if I’m just getting into the swing of reading the book. (Probably a little bit of both.)
Not many major thoughts for chapter 4, given that it’s a bit of a bridge chapter. I already miss ビセンテ, and I’m sure Kaito does at this point too. ジェフリー seems like an…interesting sort so far; I don’t feel like I know enough about him to say more. Kaito seems to be taking the safer route of feigning amnesia now (unless that choke by ビセンテ was more intense than I realized), so hopefully that works out for him. I hope he gets his photo back, too; I’d be pretty upset if one of the only memos I had of my former life got taken.
I’m…super behind on filling out vocab on the sheets. 
I will definitely try to get some filled in before I start chapter 5.
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I had a super long flight and was able to make it through the rest of chapter 2 and finish chapter 3. I’ll come back and write some more detailed thoughts later but this one was really interesting, it was definitely very dense on the political and historical stuff at the beginning, I dont think I could have read it in one go if I had any distractions (and wasn’t dying to know what happened to Kaito). Hopefully I’ll be able to get a start on chapter 4 soon.
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I am only just nearing the end of chapter 2 hahaha. Hopefully I can catch up though, things are starting to get moving so I can see myself picking up the pace! It is still one of my slower reads due to the amount of unknown vocab.
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Got to the end of chapter 2, things really picking up, getting exciting though I do really like Kazuya and I hope this isn’t the last we see of him! Tbh I could probably quite happily have read more of the two of them chilling on holiday but I am also excited for Plot……and then the start of chapter 3, oooft. The history stuff all about Mary Stewart is tough going . Also feels very odd as a Scottish person reading about Mary queen of Scots in a Japanese light novel lol
Some kind of related trivia about the history stuff at the start of chapter 3
I was actually in a park nearish where I live the other day and was reading about Mary Queen of Scots! There is a hill in the park which I guess used to have a very good view down on the city (now there are trees that block most of the view) and which has a plaque on it telling the story of how apparently she was up there watching as her forces got defeated, prior to her being locked up by Elizabeth. She certainly didn’t have much good luck! Wikipedia link here: Battle of Langside - Wikipedia
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