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As expected, I ended up doing eenie meenie miney mo to pick which manga I’d read next, which got me GREEN~農家のヨメになりたい~. I read Seed 1 today. I’m enjoying it so far. Our protagonist Wako-chan is a Tōkyōite born and raised, but ever since living in the countryside for a year during 5th grade, she’s had a sort of fascination with rural life. She falls in love at first sight with Makoto, the son of a farming family who’s training to take over his grandparents’ farm, and starts helping out when the guy who usually does so can’t make it for a week. Despite her ulterior motives of wanting to spend time with Makoto, she does genuinely want to learn to help out around the farm and do the job well, but she’s… bad at it. Which it seems will be the main source of conflict (and humor?) for the series.
I happened upon all 4 volumes last time I stopped at Half Price Books, and I’m glad I did. It was difficult to stop with just one chapter today, and I might not have, except I had a novel in English (Inkheart by Cornelia Funke) that I’ve been (re)reading for a while and I wanted to finish that too. I probably won’t read in English every day, but I have been wanting to read more again in general because I’ve got a lot of books that I still haven’t read as well as a bunch I haven’t read since middle or high school and who knows if I’ll still like them anymore, and now that I’m buying books in Japanese, too… Well, my unread-book situation was already out of hand before this.
I read 6 pages of 2.43, up to the first break in ch 1-2, putting me at pg 34 of 281. It’s actually fewer than 257 pages that I gotta read this challenge. These books don’t have pictures aside from on the 目次 (unfortunately; Yamakawa Aiji-sensei’s art is very pretty), but each chapter has a cover page, and one chapter ends only a couple lines into a page, so it’s more like 254 pages, probably. That’s still an average of 4 pages needed per day, though.
1-2 starts in the same place that ep 6 does, with Fukuhou failing to advance past the 3rd round at Inter-High, which is about as far as they ever get in national-level tournaments. They’ve represented Fukui at Nationals for 8 straight years, but they’ve never won. The title SETBACK could refer to their loss yet again here, especially as this is their second-to-last chance to win at nationals, but also the very first word of the next section is 怪我, so I think we’re still getting Ochi’s injury. I mean yeah, Subaru’s injured both his knees too, but it makes sense to get Ochi’s background here not just because this chapter’s from his POV but also to explain why he’s their manager and not a player.
Some vocab of note:
苦虫を噛み潰したよう (にがむしをかみつぶしたよう) [expression, な-adjective] sour (expression); as if having swallowed a bitter bug
駒を進める (こまをすすめる) [expression, 一] to advance to the next stage (e.g. in a tournament)