Home
And today marks the first day of my long “weekend” of being too tired to do much of anything because of work. Fun.
[Updated with commentary]
I was too tired to read any 2.43, unfortunately. I did still do some reading, though.
Since I saw at least one other person reading the New Penguin Parallel Text Short Stories, I decided to finally pick up my copy, and instead of a Satori Reader story, today I read 夜中の汽笛について、あるいは物語の効用について by Murakami Haruki, in both JP and ENG.
I’d seen 汽車 before, so I knew 汽笛 was a steam whistle, but I didn’t know the reading (I didn’t know any of the readings for 汽, and, before, I’d only known ふえ for 笛). Conversely, I correctly guessed the reading of 効用, but I only knew it meant “efficacy” because of the translation.
The story was short, but beautiful. I liked it, though I do wish we coulda heard the girl’s story too. I’m definitely not used to reading vertical text on such large pages, though. I lost or nearly lost my place more than a few times, which hasn’t happened since I first started reading vertical text. If they’d broken it up into two lines (? columns are only vertical, and it doesn’t feel right calling them bars, so…?), it woulda been easier to read. Well, hopefully I’ll get used to it.
I also read Seed 6 of GREEN.
Summary
Makoto and Wako return to the farm the next morning because they can’t very well take a break from work, and now Makoto’s strategy is to just ignore his sister lol.
It seems Makoto went along with Sayuri’s expectations of him and entered med school because he didn’t have anything he particularly wanted to do, but then when his grandfather died (and this is when I realized I hadn’t seen him since Seed 1, set nearly a year before the main story. I’m observant), he found what it was he really wanted to do: be a farmer. He quit during his residency.
And now Sayuri’s complaining about being put to work on the farm lol. “If you eat an elephant’s worth of food, you have to do an elephant’s worth of work!”
I’m not entirely sure what was going on at the end of the chapter, though. Sayuri and Wako started fighting over whether Makoto should go or stay, and when he tried to intervene and they told him to stay out of it, they pushed him back and he accidentally tripped over and cut his upper arm on a farming implement, I got that. And that he patched it up himself when the doctor wasn’t in, I got that too. But when he had gone off to the doctor’s, baa-chan showed Sayuri and Wako a room in the house that’s Makoto’s that was just like a small lab and which seemed to appease Sayuri, I don’t get what was going on with that. But she dropped the matter and left before Makoto returned, so, that’s good.