JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Book Club (Volume 2) 血の渇き![Volume Finished]

Just curious around what WaniKani level everyone in our book club is!

  • 1-5
  • 6-10
  • 11-15
  • 16-20
  • 21-25
  • 26-30
  • 31-35
  • 36-40
  • 41-45
  • 46-50
  • 51+/god-tier

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I really can’t figure what this 流島 is, but let’s look at the rest of the sentence:
ディオーブランドの父親 - Dio Brando’s father
流島 - the mystery word
刑 - punish
してれば - if
こんなこと - this thing
ならなかった - not have happened
んだ - explanatory particle + copula

So, ignoring the mystery word, I got “If I had punished Dio’s father, this wouldn’t have happened!”

The sentence on page 80:

Jonathan’s father says “死んでいく”, which is 死ぬ put together with いく to mean dying (going to die). The というのは is likely modifying and putting emphasis on the sentence before to mean “the thing which is dying”, but that’s unnatural in English, so I’d just say “dying” and leave out the extra nuance. So it’s “Dying in my son’s arms” or “The act of dying in my son’s arms.” I’m no expert, but this is how I understood it! The whole panel would be: It’s not bad, JoJo… Dying in my son’s arms… (Dying in his son’s arms isn’t bad)

Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong! :sweat_smile:
Edit: If I forgot something or explained something poorly, let me know. Explaining things is not my expertise, but I try!

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I think it’s supposed to mean something like ‘prison island’. It’s exile+island. 流 with the reading of る is an archaic term for ‘exile’.

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You’re probably right! I had googled around for that word and saw something like that, but I didn’t want to give out information that I was only 45% sure of! :sweat_smile:

This is correct! This chapter was such a slog for me that I went back and read it in English to make sure I was getting it correctly. That’s pretty much exactly how this line was translated.

ディオと青春その1 - This was by far the worst chapter for me so far. The text was pretty dense and there were lots of vocabulary I needed to look up. It took ages to get through it. It’s much harder for me to get the details when someone is relaying a story vs. just dialogue.

I was curious where this prison island might have been (assuming Araki didn’t just make it up, which it looks like he did) so I did some googling. Apparently the British Empire was sending some prisoners to Bermuda and Australia around this time, but it doesn’t make sense that the cop would have taken George Joestar a great distance to visit Brando in prison. I came across a historic prison on the Isle of Wight, not too far south of London. It was mostly a controversial children’s prison, but the history of it was pretty interesting to read about!

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Yeah, the 流島 part just seems to be a total throwaway reference. I just checked Crunchyroll for this scene and their translation doesn’t even mention it and just says a very terse:

It’s my fault. If only I had banished Dio’s father.

The subtitles from the Netflix version says:

If I had run his father out of town, years ago, like I had a mind to, none of this would have taken place.

And I also double checked the Viz manga you can preview on their site and they translate the bubbles as:

This would have never happened had I put him in that island prison.

:man_shrugging:

At my next Japanese class on Wednesday, I’ll ask my teacher if she has any insight into the phrase. I’m curious how a native would interpret that sentence.

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Digging a little more, I’m thinking more now it’s possibly just a take off on the phrase (人)を流刑にする which means something like ‘to drive someone into exile’ according to ALC.

流刑 itself meaning exile/banishment so maybe the 流島の刑 is maybe just giving the implication that it’s banishment to some unnamed island?

Still curious to ask my Japanese teacher, though. It’s not like it’s a super important point in the big picture of the story, but I’m still curious how she would interpret it.

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You know, I always treated Jonathan’s character and many other characters and the whole stuff in this series as a parody, to me, I feel like Araki was doing it on purpose, and there are many things that are a solid evidence to prove this.
Like how the characters do it in a style, for example when Erina was taking care of Jonathan then she just fell down on his arm in a dramatic way, that’s just what I felt while watching the series, I can tell the big self-awareness the writer has.

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Yes, I think that word that was new to us was just a way of compounding “prison island” an island where the exiled go. Makes total sense in context, I just didn’t consider 流’s secondary meaning, “exile”.

I agree, this chapter was chock full of vocabulary I hadn’t seen before. Considering how explicit the characters’ movements are in this manga, once you identify the meaning of all the vocab words on the page, it is very easy to tell what they are saying. This doesn’t apply to the parts where the panel just shows landscape or an idle character, and the word bubbles are either a long monologue or historical background. But Dio surrendering his hands to Jonathan and saying the word 手錠 instantly tells us he wants Jonathan to cuff him., for an example.

I don’t think this was a Shonen Jump satire, this is very apparently a manga that was piggybacking on the popularity of hero’s journey stuff, Fist of the North Star’s art style and fights (characters yelling stuff like くらえ!暗殺拳!and rapid punching) at the time. I’ve heard a lot of JoJo fans say as a defense “Dude, it’s a parody of mindless Shonen anime, duh” when people say it’s a shallow story. There’s nothing wrong with this being a “punch-punch, good guy big muscle win against bad guy” series, it’s creative, colorful, and just fun as hell to read/watch. This series certainly feels like a parody, but that’s just because this was one of the flagship corny Shonen series that embraced tropes that shows like One-Punch Man parody today.

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But I actually think it’s a shallow story at least for some parts even though I said I sense parody in it, and I couldn’t care less about it being this way because as you said it’s incredibly creative and all about fun, and I’m not saying this as a defense, I just finished jojo a while ago. I honestly just said what I feel about all of this, maybe part 1 and Jonathan was really meant to be like that and not a parody, but in many scenes you realize that again as you said that the story embraces its cliches in a way that they don’t sound cliche anymore.
However, I heard the series got much better in terms of storytelling and writing in the manga, and I’m looking for the rest of the parts to be animated.

I’m still on level 3 so I can’t say that I’m in this club, I was just curious about the topic :smiley: once I finish N5 I might try participating in some book clubs. Have a nice day :two_hearts:

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It’s Wednesday. What could that mean? New week of JoJo reading! Welcome to week 3 of volume 2; this week should be a great opportunity for those calling behind to catch up, these week’s chapters is a whole lot of pictures and not a lot of talking. I already finished reading and with very few words I had to look up. Definitely more action oriented.


「試してやる!」

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Ureyyyyyy!

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Last week’s chapters had a lot of text, so it’s nice to have a bit of a break with these more action-heavy chapters! :sweat_smile:

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Indeed, it’s a nice break for all of us I’m sure. I skimmed through next week’s chapters and it looks to be the same situation: light on the dialogue and most of what’s said is basic stuff. Yet, the story gets more text-heavy in the last two chapters of this volume. Still two weeks of light reading, pretty nice.

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Unrelated to the manga, but woo-hoo, all 48 episodes of Stardust Crusaders just got added to American Netflix! Gonna have to rewatch some.

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Sooooo nice to have an easier week after last week. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the story last week, but it was a slog to get through with so many unknown words.

This week, I decided to start adding grammar points I come across to bunpro. I took formal Japanese classes 15 years ago and have been self-studying vocab/kanji/reading for the last few. Even though I have a decent passive familiarity with the language, since I’ve largely ignored grammar study in recent years, a lot of the grammar is really “fuzzy”, like I have a sense of what it means, but don’t grasp the exact nuance.

Did anyone else think it was strange that Speedwagon was talking like a world traveler? I kindof got the impression from his character intro that he had lived his whole life on the rough streets of London!

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So this is somewhat spoilerly if you haven’t come upon this yet but:

Part of his backstory revealed in ディオとの青春その③ is that he actually was a world traveller as a youth.

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This is one of many details I had forgotten, so I was also confused about how Speedwagon went to Africa, considering he’s a thug in the Victorian era.

Yeah, the difficulty gap between some parts is pretty amazing. A few months ago an exchange student from Nagoya stayed at my place, and at one time she showed interest in reading a few of the JoJo volumes I had at the time. As she was reading the volume we’re on she commented (through shaky English) that even Japanese kids get annoyed by all the exposition in their manga. Because of her phrasing, it sounded like she meant the Japanese kids aren’t LITERATE enough to read it, but obviously she was trying to get at how they come for action and fists but get a lot of actual reading.

But just because this manga has a lot of talking doesn’t necessarily mean it’s crazy difficult. A lot of the grammar is fair to parse through, in my opinion what’s worse is reading a text with provincial or super exaggerated characters, using slang terms that usually only Japanese people know, or irregular constructions of words. With those, your best bet is finding a native speaker that’s willing to explain the nuances, at least with long sentences with (usually) regular grammar that we’re reading, we can rely on Jisho, Bunpro, etc.

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This is why I’m somewhat confused by the frequent recommendation of よつばと! as the best starter manga. I think a beginner without a lot of exposure to spoken language quirks might have a hard time parsing it. Jojo isn’t too bad as long as you know the vocabulary. The hardest thing for me is something like 極主夫道, where there’s a ton of puns and yakuza slang that I can’t even google an explanation of in English.

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This always confused me as well; due to her being a little girl, Yotsuba herself uses a lot of informal speech that can make sentences hard to parse. A similar issue occurs when people recommend children’s books (the ones for very small children) to beginners. These books often have a lot of casual language quirks that native children are familiar with, but are completely foreign to older people learning the language, as you won’t learn such improper language, or even “baby talk” using a textbook. I’ve found reading JoJo easier than other manga that use lot of slang or informal grammar patterns because of this reason!

Now, can we all agree that Jonathan had some sick skills with that spear? :joy: Too bad Dio basically played a reverse uno card on him…

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