Happy to pause reading til people have got physical copies, but while fresh in my mind my thoughts on this chapter.
Chapter 74
Loved the way this chapter turned dark after first seeming to be just lots of silliness. Hamabe has a mean fighting streak, they should have known not to mess!
I find it hard to believe that both parents forgot their child’s birthday, but even more so that the child themselves forgot. I wondered if there was going to be some kind of enchantment that had made them all forget, but in the end it just seems everyone forgot!
Volley of the Dead - He even made his own exploding heads, the boy deserves extra credit.
Kinda feels to me like the party itself attracted the spirits - they had two weeks to show up, but they only appear the moment of the actual celebration.
(Though I do understand Chinatsu’s bemusement at having to make the decorations for her own party - I once celebrated my birthday with a games day at my place, and I wound up making my own cake, so I had to show my brother where it was, then go back out to the living room and act surprised when he brought it out to me.)
Hamabe talking still just feels weird, though…
Take out the small vowels.
はいっていい？ (入っていい？)
またいでいい？ (跨いでいい？)
なかまふやかしにきた (仲間ふやかしに来た)
しゅくふくないたましいよりそおう (祝福ない魂寄り添おう)
I feel like I should be doing my usual trick of real-world matching some of the locations in this chapter, but I’m drawing absolute blanks on basically everything thanks to the lack of clues in dialogue (or visual references to locations I actually know). For example, page 49 ought to be an absolute gimme, but the Aomori Nebuta museum is only two storeys tall, and lacks the room to display a four-storey one like this, and the Hirosaki Neputa floats look quite different.
Though I did find page 54 - it’s Micho-no-eki Jusanko Kogen. Found it by looking up all of the michi-no-eki in the area and checking them one by one. Though with that context, perhaps I could narrow down some of the other locations…
So, as I understand it, most Norwegians can speak pretty fluent English, but would they really default to that if they came across an Asian stranger standing on the street?
These Norwegian witches sure did their homework on Akane. The room full of alcohol was a stroke of genius! I’m a little surprised she is still alive the amount she appears to have drunk. I guess she had a high tolerance…
Maria’s fire magic was very cool. It’s a shame it could only transport her a short distance, hasn’t really achieved very much so far.
マグロエキスチョコレート - tuna extract chocolate? I really hope this is made up and not a real thing! I couldn’t find any on a quick internet image search.
Makoto’s, uh… “English” is getting better. Maybe she’s been learning from Shirley. Though it’s interesting how they represent (presumably) Norwegian with Japanese written horizontally.
I’ve been thinking that about Chinatsu as well, maybe I haven’t checked earlier volumes.
For Makoto, I think maybe halfway through the series she may have started to be more expressive, with more exaggerated expressions compared with earlier volumes.
I really enjoyed the battling of the witches the last two weeks. Most chapters tell a self contained story, I like it when we get a longer story over two or three chapters.
But what a contrast to last week. One of those very relaxed farming/nature/iyashikei chapters. I’ve no idea whether the detailed explanations of growing tasty apples are correct or not but I was persuaded to believe it! I was also happy when I guessed photosynthesis correctly from the kanji
Aye, back to our regularly scheduled antics. But oof, so much explanation. I’m so glad he didn’t deliver it in the full Tsugaru dialect he was using back at the start of the series.
He even made his own exploding heads, the boy deserves extra credit.
