人質の朗読会 (‘the recitals of the hostages’) is another work by Ogawa, like Revenge, that is only very loosely a novel and is composed of a series of essentially distinct stories – nine of them. The set-up, or framing device, is quite striking – bizarre even - and naturally colors the reading of the pieces themselves: a short prefatory section explains that a minibus with seven tourists, their guide, and the driver, travelling somewhere on the other side of the globe, was attacked by a group of local anti-government guerillas while on its way to visit some local ruins. The tourists and their guide were taken hostage; negotiations went nowhere, and after more than three months the government launched an attack against the rebels; the hostages were all killed in the rescue attempt. Two years later recordings from their time in captivity were made public, recording of each of the eight hostages recounting a story or memory they had written – a task they had been able to focus on in their otherwise so difficult situation.
The rest of the book then consists of these eight recitals by the hostages, one for each evening. […]
To be honest, reading is much more about knowing grammar and vocab than about knowing kanji. Depending on the book (or the edition of the book you choose), you might even have full furigana, and then you technically don’t need to know any kanji at all.
(Or if you read a digital book, you can usually look up the kanji without too much trouble.)
For grammar, this is also a mixed bag as we are reading native material which may use grammar from all levels, but usually if you know the N5-N4 grammar and have dived into N3 grammar for a bit, then you should be able to follow along (with a fair bit of grammar research and the like). If you have N3 under your belt, you should be pretty well-rounded for reading most of the picks here.
Vocab is much trickier as it very much depends on what words you already know. Also, each book tends to have a bunch of vocab words that are specific to that genre. In other words, the more you read, the easier it gets! But of course you gotta start somewhere, so it’s very common to need to look up a lot of words initially. If you learn the words as you read, the book will become easier over time as authors of course tend to use the same words in multiple places.
Having said all that, I think it would be best if you could have a look at the sample pages that you can find in each of the book nominations and judge for yourself how well you get along with them.
If you want to try out digital reading, you can always look at the Bookwalker links in each nomination as you can usually read a few pages of each book on their website.
Happy reading, and looking forward to seeing you in one of the reading clubs!
In 1958, the 8-year-old Akihiro moves from Hiroshima to the Saga prefecture countryside. A poor life with his grandma and other family members awaits him. But there is always laughter…
In 2019, @KazeTachinu read this book and reviewed:
That’s enough for me
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
Pretty short at 237 pages (in paperback) but Bookwalker reports only 174 pages, so I guess there is a little bit less text per page compared to normal books.
Sounds like an interesting slice-of-life story that shows us a bit of Japan in former times, and in the countryside
Cons
The story is set in Saga (Kyuushuu) and so there is a chance of Grandma and others having a thick dialect. - Maybe @KazeTachinu can shed some light on this?
This is maybe my favorite Japanese book and I really want you all to read it! It’s really short, too – maybe half the length of the books we usually read here (~60,000 characters).
There’s a bit of dialect here, but it’s not too hard to figure out. Maybe takes a few pages to get used to it, but I think Shimada deliberately wrote it in a way that it’s not too hard to parse. I personally found it a lot easier than the old guy from ヨコハマ買い出し紀行, for example.
Thanks for the clarification! Now all we can do is entrust this matter to the next poll
Speaking of which, I will start the next poll some time this week (Wednesday, I guess) so if y’all could have a look at the nominations and rate them if you haven’t done so already, that would be amazing!
You make it sound like its a funny story. But except for one part in the first 3 pages (the one where he probes into his “creation”) I found the (edit: start of the) story rather tragic than funny…
Ah, I have no idea actually! I just tried to translate the Japanese summary. Sorry if that’s misleading in any case. What would be a good summary from your point of view? (a spoiler-free one, of course)
Have a look at the List of Proposed Books section in the first post for details on each book. Every book has a difficulty associated with it (based on book club members voting, thus subjective) out of 5, where 1 means “no effort at all” and 5 means “impossible, even with everyone’s help”. The difficulty is annotated in the poll in square brackets after the book’s name.
Do not rely solely on difficulty when making a choice. Please have a look at nomination posts if you haven’t already.
Expected reading pace: We aim to read books at ~15 pages per week (that number might vary a bit throughout, depending on the book’s breaks and chapters). For manga, depending on difficulty and chapter length, we will probably read one to several chapters per week. The pick’s exact reading schedule will be negotiated before the book club kicks off.
Short book rule: If the first place ist taken by a book that will take us 6 weeks or less to read, we will read the book in second place directly after it, without running a poll in between. I haven’t checked in detail, but I’d assume that this basically applies in case one of the manga wins the poll.
Start of Book Club: We will start the next book on April 2nd (after a one-week break).
Poll duration: I will close the poll within a week (and most likely before that), whenever it looks like voting has dried up. You can choose up to 5 options .
Struggling to limit my choices to 5 this time around, which is great because it means there’s so much I’d be excited to read! Anybody have any strong opinions or recommendations?
There’s a 50% off deal on some Kindle books. It ends tomorrow, unfortunately. But it seems the current #1 pick is discounted (only 275 yen!). リング is also discounted (295 yen).
Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. Because ‘the second book’ sure seems to be the ‘main’ book. So I wonder if it’s more like a spin-off sort of thing than a series per se.
Reading a bit on Wikipedia, it seems it was first published by a different publisher and under a different name (maybe that’s book 1 according to Amazon?), then revised and published as it is now. Probably due to its success lots more books were added later.
It’s definitely the first book Shimada wrote and by far the most famous one. He has written more about other parts of his life later, but 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん came first and is supposed to be read standalone.
The one that Amazon lists as #1 was written much later. It’s in fact about his relationship to Takeshi Kitano, dealing mostly with his life as a manzai comedian and how he felt after his short burst of overwhelming fame came to an abrupt end.
Short summary of the Amazon chronology:
1: Relationship with Takeshi Kitano, showbiz life and thereafter. 2: The main book – elementary and middle school years at his grandma’s place in Saga
3: Loose collection of anecdotes about his grandma
4: How he eloped with his future wife and trained to become a manzai comedian in Osaka
5: His relationship with his mother before, during and after がばいばあちゃん
6: Moving back to Saga prefecture in his 50s/60s(?)
7-8: Saw these for the first time. More anecdotes? A compilation? Not sure, the books themselves seem to be much longer.
So yeah, it’s pretty random.
There’s actually one more book about Shimada’s high school years when he wanted to become a professional baseball player. It’s by another publisher, so it’s not in the Amazon list and not available digitally.
When I read 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん I actually didn’t even know Shimada was a famous comedian in Japan.
@omk3 The book was first self-published and sold hand-to-hand at events before being picked up by a publisher. The original title is the title Takeshi Kitano decided for Shimada, but Shimada later changed it because he thought it sounded to complicated.
Thanks everybody who took part in the voting! This time we had 40 participants, which is a huge number for this club! (In the 13 polls before this one, we only reached/exceeded that number 3 times).
I’m happy to announce that 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん is the winner!
I guess @KazeTachinu is as curious as I am to hear what y’all think about it. I will set up the home thread soon, and we can start discussing the reading schedule in there.