The June Tanuki Den: Date 20220609 
No Longer Tanuki Progress: 12.33%
It’s a lot more motivating now seeing that I’m moving by a percentage each read, rather than a tiny fraction.
I’m having fun too. Look forward to reading each day, even though I know how everything pans out, it is like reading it from new again. The humour really comes across in this first chapter (and the overall feeling of egotistical self-loathing that, even without knowing how the novel turns out, it’s used so well that you just know things aren’t going to go well), the tone is really well set.
Taking it a sentence at a time so I don’t get too frustrated with the start-stop of having to look up a lot of words and “what even is this grammar? WHAT IS THIS”, but that isn’t always smooth, today the record was beaten for longest sentence at 243.
Japanese found in the tall grass
Learnthings
博士「はかせ」ー Expert; learned person; Doctor (the PhD kind)
馴染「なじみ」ー Intimacy; familiarity
講談「こうだん」ー Storytelling with a highly dramatic delivery (usually chronicles of war, revenge tales and the like)
剽軽「ひょうきん」ー Facetious
嗚呼「ああ」ー Ah! Oh! Alas! (the line it’s used amused me: しかし、嗚呼、学校！)
殆ど「ほとんど」ー Almost; nearly; practically; basically; virtually
或る「ある」ー A certain [thing]; some [things]
全知全能「ぜんちぜんのう」ー Omniscience and omnipotence; all-knowing, all-powerful
赤恥「あかはじ」ー Great shame; great embarrassment
病み上り「やみあがり」ー Convalescence; to gradually get better after illness; the late stage of an illness when it starts to pass
人力車「じんりきしゃ」ー Rickshaw
綴り方「つづりかた」ー Way of writing (in a literary composition kind of way); way of spelling something; school composition (in other words: 作文)
滑稽噺「こっけいばなし」ー Funny story, focusing on humour and ridiculousness
痰壺「たんつぼ」ー Spittoon; spit jar
職員室「しょくいんしつ」ー Staff room
通信簿「つうしんぼ」ー Report card