Intermediate Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: セーラー服と機関銃

Wow, those reviews on Amazon are bad! :grimacing:

1 Like

I know right, I heard a lot of people hate the author for his outrageous ideas but it his work does better overseas which fuels more hate. I understand if its off-putting. But some of my favorite movies/books have been horribly rated so I don’t mind giving it a chance.

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悪夢のクローゼット 悪夢シリーズ

Summary

Japanese

清冠学園野球部のエース・長尾虎之助は「キラキラ王子」と呼ばれる国民的アイドル。ある日、学園のマドンナ教師・みな美先生の寝室に誘われた。ところが、“いざ、これから♪”という時に、突然の来客があり、クローゼットに押し込められる。虎之助がその扉の隙間から見たのは、意外な人物の登場と、殺人の瞬間だった。明るい未来が約束された虎之助の人生が、一気に暗転。この先、どう乗り切る?!

English

High school baseball star Toranosuke is a bit of a national idol. Known as the “sparkling prince” by his fans, he was invited to the house of his beautiful teacher Mina. Before he knew it, he was in her bedroom being seduced, the dream of any teenage boy.

Some unexpected visitors show up right when the mood gets right, and Toranosuke is forced to hide in the closet. This would destroy his reputation and his blossoming baseball career if a scandal like this were unearthed.

While waiting for the visitors to leave, everyone enters the bedroom. Hoping they leave soon, things turn for the worst. His teacher is murdered right before his eyes, as he peeks out from a crack in the closet door. Sex scandal and now witness to murder? Is there anyway Toranosuke can come out of this unscathed and keep his sparkling prince image?!
Source

Availability

Personal Opinion

It sounds really funny and I think we would enjoy it, and it’s just something really different that we haven’t tried yet and we should!

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • proper length
    Not impossible hard
    funny and interesting

Cons

  • So far as the sample reads, there is isn’t any explicit sexual activity while they do take their clothes off to their underwear and kiss.(as far as I can read, I didn’t look up any words and I don’t know many sexuality explicit words) I don’t think this counts as NSFW as I think scenes like this are in pg13 movies, but may I ask why for some reason are we queasy about NSFW? Like is it that serious?

Pictures

Awkwardly enough, some of the scene is in the first three pages…



Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Just right
  • Challenging
  • Impossible, even with everyone’s help
  • I don’t know (please click this if you’re not voting seriously)

0 voters

Personally, I have zero interest in reading anything sexually explicit. PG-13 is fine for me, but nothing more than that. I think that rule was included to make sure not to scare people off (it was copied from the beginner book club’s rules). With that said, if others want to get rid of that rule I’d be okay with it, as long as explicit books were marked as such so I could know to not vote for them.

2 Likes

Having read some other books by the same author in the 悪夢 series, I guess things will start happening before anything NSFW has a chance of happening.

Your mileage may vary, of course, since the foreplay already presented can make some people uncomfortable, but it won’t get any worse.

Unrelated, but I was reading the reviews of door D on amazon, and the single 5* review is actually a joke (something around the line of “it’s so rare to feel pure anger when reading books, amazing”). The single 4* review says that it’s not so bad, just not very imaginative, so still fun for people who aren’t so familiar with the genre. Reading way too many 1* reviews, I think that’s indeed the case. It’s kinda weird to me that people got so agressive over a “meh” book, but in any case, I think “simple description” and “shallow personalities” will make the book an easier read indeed. Maybe not so fun for a native, but appropriate for an intermediate learner.

5 Likes

I do, and I did!
夜露死苦!

1 Like

涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱

Summary

Summary

「ただのにんげんには興味ありません。この中に宇宙人、未来人、異世界人、超能力者がいたら、私のところに来なさい。以上」。入学早々、ぶっ飛んだ挨拶をかましてくれた涼宮ハルヒ。そんなSF小説じゃあるまいし……と誰でも思うよな。俺も思ったよ。だけどハルヒは心の底から真剣だったんだ。それに気づいたときには俺の日常は、もうすでに超常になっていたー
Kyon, your typical high school student, has long given up his belief in the supernatural. However, upon meeting Haruhi Suzumiya, he quickly finds out that it is the supernatural that she is interested in—aliens, time travelers, and espers among other things. When Haruhi laments about the lack of intriguing clubs around school, Kyon inspires Haruhi to form her own club. As a result, the SOS Brigade is formed, a club which specializes in all that is the supernatural.

Availability

Availabilty

https://www.amazon.co.jp/涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱-角川スニーカー文庫-谷川-流/dp/4044292019/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?__mk_ja_JP=カタカナ&qid=1547961968&sr=8-3&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=すずみやハルヒの憂鬱+小説&dpPl=1&dpID=51MEZAig6qL&ref=plSrch
無料まんが・試し読みが豊富!電子書籍をお得に買うならebookjapan

Personal Opinion

Well, I like it. It’s fun, plays with the concept of light novels/manga/anime, and was a huge deal when the anime adaptation first came out. I think it may have faded away as the “anime commenting on anime” thing became common and done worse, but I feel like it has a special place. Also I have a love for Kyon.

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • Style. The narrator is first person, and tends to quip about things. I generally don’t like first person novels, but this one works.
  • Pretty good comedy.
  • 300 pages.
  • Apparently a lot of words to learn.
  • Grammar doesn’t seem bad?

Cons

  • More of an otaku bent.
  • Apparently a lot of words to learn.
  • Some obnoxious treatment of Asahina Mikuru.
  • Might be harder than I think it is.

Pictures

First Three Pages

Extra Pages

Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Just right
  • Challenging
  • Impossible, even with everyone’s help
  • I don’t know (please click this if you’re not voting seriously)

0 voters



I did it hohoho
In seriousness, hearing it was supposed to be so bad made me do a skim through, and I think we could handle it. So here it is.

2 Likes

I really like the writing style, actually!
The (以下略) made me crack a smile too.

I’ve heard of 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱, but never read/watched anything about it. Sounds pretty fun.


@everyone (especially @seanblue @Iwasneverhere @LucasDesu @Radish8 @ditto20 on top of QuackingShoe I am replying to) Concrete question: until when should we keep the submissions open? I heard that the beginner book club vote closes on Monday, should we say one week after that?
If so, we can update the thread title to inform the world about the deadline.

OMG IT’S HAPPENING.
Also summoning @MissMisc and @TamanegiNoKame

7 Likes

Im looking at joining depending on what book ends up getting picked. But how many pages do yall usually read per week?

@seanblue is proposing 15 per week to make it a smoother transition from the beginner book club.

Oof, 2 pages a day? What was it previously?

I guess I should clarify: it’s one of the least weird things I own that isn’t a book I’ve already read, hasn’t already been read by a book club, isn’t likely to be nominated by someone else anyway, isn’t part of a series and not the first book, isn’t a spin-off of something else, isn’t too long and doesn’t seem extremely difficult… but now that I think about it, that only leaves me with ゼロの使い魔、 俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない、こんな素晴らしい世界に祝福を and 妹さえいればいい to choose from. All of those could probably be considered weird in some way. Anyone reading this, which one sounds the least weird out of these? I guess I’ll nominate that one.

Out of the ones I listed above, 妹さえいればいい is probably the weirdest. It starts out rather creepy(in a “what is this even” way, not in a scary way), and has similar segments appear throughout the book occasionally, but actually seems to have a fairly decent story otherwise. It kind of feels like the author wrote a book that’s actually good, then wrote some of the weirdest stuff he could think of, put it in at random, and then called it a day.

3 Likes

It’s not anywhere close what I usually read actually, but it actually sounds interesting. You may or may not have your first voter xD

We should have just swapped :joy: I literally sold my no-furigana copy a few weeks ago.

@Naphthalene I reckon one week after (to let Kino’s Journey be nominated :stuck_out_tongue: ) seems like a sensible timeframe, but I thought seanblue wasn’t able to kickstart things properly for a bit longer?

I mean, it looks like there are lots of nominations already, so you might want to have a short deadline anyway.

I stopped watching the anime because of that :pensive: I was enjoying it otherwise, but eventually that was too jarring and frequent for me to be able to get past it. I can imagine it wouldn’t be so obnoxious in book form though.

3 Likes

It may not be possible, but it would be super helpful to have a decision in time to order both books at the same time (for beginner and intermediate club) for those that read in both clubs (e.g. probably me, I don’t actually know if anyone is planning to do the same).
I think the beginners is starting the next book sort of mid February, so maybe that’s not actually feasible, but I thought I’d bring it up…

Again, I’m also happy to help out a bit if it helps kick things off earlier

4 Likes

Glad you said that! Actually I read the first page, and although I knew most of the words and most of the grammar, it did not feel like I really understood what the text was supposed to mean… So if it gets picked, brace yourself for lots of questions from my side :joy_cat:

2 Likes

I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen that written in Japanese before. Romaji, sure, but not proper Japanese.

2 Likes

You could always have a quick vote and then a long lead-time on starting to read. That would still require someone to add all the nominations to the OP, set up the poll (calculating the difficulty scores) and then collate purchasing information afterwards.

I’m essentially just a glorified lurker in this club though :grin:

2 Likes

I’m planning to start adding nominations to the OP from tomorrow.
I also just made an ugly python script to compute difficulty averages, so it should not take too much time to do that.
I don’t know about the purchasing info, I guess we’ll see when we get there.

@Darcinon I don’t know if it’s such a good plan to have both start at the same time, since that might prevent some people who are on the fence from joining both. I’d say we could start one or two weeks later, so that such people have first time to get in the grove of things. Plus, that would require a tight tight schedule otherwise.

8 Likes

青春ブタ野郎はバニーガール先輩の夢を見ない

Summary

In Japanese:

Summary

――ねえ、キスしよっか。そう言って僕をからかってきた彼女は、しばらくして僕の前から消えてしまった。 図書館にバニーガールは棲息していない。その常識を覆し、梓川咲太は野生のバニーガールに出会った。しかも彼女はただのバニーではない。咲太の高校の上級生にして、活動休止中の人気タレント桜島麻衣先輩だったのだ。数日前から彼女の姿が“周囲の人間に見えない”という事象が起こり、図書館でその検証をしていたという。咲太は麻衣に協力する名目で彼女とお近づきになるが――? 海と空に囲まれた町で、僕と彼女の恋にまつわる物語が始まる。

In English(I’m too lazy to write something myself, this is copied from tvtropes):

Summary

Sakuta Azusagawa’s life takes a turn for the unexpected when he meets teenage actress Mai Sakurajima after she wanders into a public library while dressed in a bunny suit and realizes only he can see her. Mai admits she has taken a hiatus from her acting duties and has been attempting to live a normal life, but people are unable to see her, except for Sakuta, who is no stranger to this phenomenon, which he calls “Adolescence Syndrome”.

Availability

Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.jp/青春ブタ野郎はバニーガール先輩の夢を見ない-電撃文庫-鴨志田-一/dp/4048664875/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1547978035&sr=1-4&keywords=青春ブタヤロウ
ebook(also on kindle): 無料まんが・試し読みが豊富!電子書籍をお得に買うならebookjapan

Personal Opinion

To be honest, I mostly want to read this because of the anime. Quite a bit was supposedly cut out, so I figured it’d be nice to read the actual book. It also seems to have gotten fairly good reviews on Amazon, so it seems like at least some people think it’s a good book too. Beyond that, it also has both romance and some supernatural stuff, two things I tend to like in books.

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • Not the kind of story the title made me think it would be
  • Has a vocab list on floflo
  • Has some furigana

Cons

  • Really long at 360 pages(but very precisely 350 if you don’t count the pictures!)

Pictures

First Three Pages of Chapter One

Summary



Additional Pages

Summary



Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Just right
  • Challenging
  • Impossible, even with everyone’s help
  • I don’t know (please click this if you’re not voting seriously)

0 voters

1 Like