Day 9
Today I read 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん、as a part of the IBC.
I felt really inspired by everyone in the book club for paying close attention to grammar while reading. So I took my time today, settled into a cafe and read most of chapter 2! 
My Home Post
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April 9
Haikyuu book club today! Read aloud chapter 63.
Gonna count that as well as the reading involved in translating my research plan. I got fed up with my slow progress and dumped it into deepL. I know that’s not great and I’m gonna go back and reword it. But at least I can send something “complete” to my tutor before Tuesday.
Right now though I’m gonna watch the start of season 3 Kaguya-sama and first episode of Spy x Family anime.
Probably won’t read any tadoku books but I’ll update this post if I do.
Progress on Tadoku graded readers
44 / 44 level-zeros
4 / 12 level-ones
x /10 level-twos
x / 18 level-threes
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There was a scene in the movie that gave me pause and kinda soured me on it. This link gives content warnings without spoiling if case you want to check before viewing.
Day 9: April 9th
What did I read?: ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂 Vol 2
How much did I read?: 10 pages
How long did it take me?: 50 min
Finished this chapter! I’m glad things turned out well :3 And I loved the nostalgic/sentimental feel of the ending - I like thinking that Chisato grew up to be a real doctor one day, that’s so cute. I can’t believe the “villain” of the story turned out to be the town doctor, who was basically jealous that this five-year-old girl was stealing all his business because her medicines work better 
Good words
- かしげる - to tilt (esp. head); to lean; to incline; to slant
- 景気づけ (けいきづけ) - putting life into; animating; cheering up
- めそめそ - sobbing; weeping; whimpering
- すりかえる - to switch (secretly); to substitute; to sidestep (an issue)
- がぜん - suddenly; all of a sudden; abruptly - when written with different kanji (瓦全), it can mean “meaningless existence” lol
- なにくわぬ顔 (なにくわぬかお) - innocent look; nonchalant look; look of ignorance; air of innocence
- ぼろ負け (ぼろまけ) - decisive defeat; rout; thrashing; losing big
- まるつぶれ - losing (something) completely (e.g. face)
- 見っともない - shameful; disgraceful; indecent; unseemly; unbecoming; improper
- 脱水症状 (だっすいしょうじょう) - dehydration
- へろへろ - completely exhausted; dog-tired; dreadfully weary; terribly frustrated; limp; weak; flimsy
- よろよろ - tottering; staggering; faltering; reeling
- おぼつかない - unreliable; unsteady; insecure; shaky; faltering
- なえる - to lose strength; to become weak; to disappear (of energy, drive, etc.) - can also mean to feel demotivated; to lose interest; to become disappointed
- なすりつける - to lay the blame on
- 死にものぐるい - desperation; struggle to the death
- うたいまくる - to sing energetically; to sing with abandon
- 紙吹雪 (かみふぶき) - confetti; ticker tape
- せっせと - diligently; assiduously; industriously; beavering away
- うんともすんとも言わない - keeping silent; saying nothing at all
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April 9 
Home Post
More VLR! 
I think I’m at the point where all of the endings are long lmao, but man that leaves so much room for wild stuff to happen 
It’s been quite a time!
I did feel like reading something more book-like at some point today so I ended up finishing the first volume of ヴァニタスの手記, that’d been a while coming huh I really liked it though! I’ll definitely have to get more of them next time I order books, whenever that’ll be 
but anyway VLR
Like I said all the endings feel long now, but I think that’s mostly because I’m running into locks I already have the pre-requisites for, so I just get thrust in head-first But yeah there’s a lot going on, 天明寺 has a picture of 茜?? I should’ve known, pictures are always her but like?? What’s the deal?? 天明寺 what do you know??
It’s also continuing to become even clearer that time is not working the way they thought it was, like… no idea what year it actually is, but it sure isn’t 2028 anymore, way too much has happened, also maybe we’re in space?? Or Nevada, you know, the two classic choices But like when they went in the depressurization chamber the air pressure went to 0 which like… space, you know? At any rate I’m skeptical that the red thing they saw was actually the eclipse moon - actually theory I just came up with, maybe they’re on the like man-made satellite around Mars they were talking about in theory? If so yikes lmao, but who knows!
But yeah what’s currently happening is I’m talking to a hologram? He claims to be ゼロ but I don’t know who this man is, but I’m curious to see what he has to say about termites
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April 9th (Calendar Post)
Bookclub day 2! Managed to read the following:
- Shimeji Simulation => 12 pages (75 min)
- Yuru-camp => 26 pages (40 min)
- 極主夫道 => 32 pages (48 min)
- 夜カフェ => 10 pages (49 min)
- 三日間の幸福 => 5 pages (44 min)
That Shimeji Simulation chapter was heavy. I feel I spent more time googling things than reading. I still feel this manga is amazing and worth all the extra effort.
Also finished chapter 12 of 三日間の幸福. Three more to go!
Some fun manga panels from today:
＝^.^=
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lol I learned 汽 today on WK (although I still wouldn’ta been able to read 汽笛 since I won’t learn 笛 for another level).
I read Seeds 8-9 of GREEN, finishing vol 2! I had planned on reading the あとがき comic too, but it’s completely handwritten and I didn’t feel like trying to puzzle that out. Ninomiya-sensei’s handwriting can be hard to read sometimes.
Seed 8
We meet old man Sakurai, who lives 4 houses down from the Onos and owns mountain land on which grow trees whose fallen leaves are used in fertilizer. Fitting for someone named after a tree lol. Obaa-chan and Wako both don’t like him and refer to him as things like ヒヒジジイ and クソジジイ. Wako’s convinced he hates her, but according to Makoto, he’s just shy/socially anxious (人見知り).
Sakurai’s son ran away with a woman from Tōkyō years ago, so now he hates all Tōkyō women. So it may be that he’s not good with strangers, but he does actually dislike Wako. Makoto takes Wako with him to rake and collect leaves one day when Sakurai won’t be accompanying him, and when they’re bringing the big cylindrical baskets back, Wako gets ahead of herself and accidentally goes careering down the mountainside, crashing into and breaking a stone grave marker (she thinks it’s Sakurai’s wife’s, but it’s actually his pet goat’s). Sakurai finds her there and she runs off (which Makoto doesn’t learn about until later), so when he confiscates Makoto’s baskets of leaves, he calls him クソジジイ in a fit of heatedness. That evening, Wako goes back to apologize to Sakurai, and it seems at first that he might have come to like her. When Makoto called him クソジジイ, he remembered his son shouting that at him as he left—a Tōkyō woman didn’t steal his son away, he decided to leave all on his own. …But he considers Makoto like a son, so he tells him not to marry any women of questionable background (馬の骨) lol. Wako-chan can’t win 'em all, it seems.
Seed 9
Wako’s staying with the Seiwas because she and Makoto are fighting—though the word she uses is 交戦中 lol—because she doesn’t want to go job-hunting despite graduating in a month (and she lies about it too) since she wants to stay with the Onos as Makoto’s wife, but Makoto isn’t planning on getting married just yet.
lol and we still haven’t met Nozomi’s mother and grandmother, as the two of them had won a trip to Hawai’i and are there currently. Last time, it was Saipei. I wonder where it’ll be next time.
For half the year, the Seiwas grow grapes, and for the other half, they grow strawberries, so Nozomi takes Wako strawberry-picking. いちご食べ放題! For 30 minutes, at least, since she’s technically a customer. But after lunch, he shows her their “secret weapon,” 幻のイチゴ、「彩のイチゴ」!! Yeah, I dunno what 彩 is supposed to mean as a standalone kanji since it doesn’t seem to be a word with that reading, but I did find out that 光彩 means “brilliance; splendor; luster,” so maybe the name has something to do with that? Anyway, they just look like regular ol’ strawberries, but they’re the best strawberries Wako has tasted in her life, although the way she tries to express it, it comes off as the exact opposite lol (firm like a hard banana, melts in her mouth like a fully-ripe peach, sweet like a slightly bitter old mikan). A single one of them costs ￥200! They’re Nozomi’s pet project, and he’s planning to sell them to rich people and get rich himself and buy a strawberry-red Porshe.
lmao her day began with Seiwa-san flipping the table at breakfast, and it ends with her flipping the table at dinner. Both father and son were drunk, and their extolment of Nozomi’s good points (for why Wako should marry him instead) turned into them dissing Makoto. She got fed up with it, flipped the table, and ran out into the night, where she ran into Makoto who was on his way to come to pick her up. She tearfully proclaims that she’ll look for a job, and she overhears later Makoto telling obaa-chan that he does plan on proposing to her eventually, but he’s fine with waiting since she seems so excited about finding a job lmao she’s like, “So I didn’t have to find one after all???” but she can’t exactly take it back now.
I read 2 pages of 2.43, putting me at page 51.
mostly off-topic today
We learn Hata-kantoku is 40. And I am reminded that one day not long after the anime ended, a short smut fic between Yori and Hata showed up on AO3, and I was just desperate enough for 2.43 fic to try reading it. In my defense, I’d thought Yori was already in college when Yuni was in middle school and he was mid-20s now and whatever age difference between them didn’t really matter that much. Luckily, the person’s writing is absolute shit and I noped my way outta there. Yori’s actually only 3 years older than Yuni, 1 year older than Subaru and them. He’s the same age as some of the kids Hata coaches (and maybe teaches; idk what class he teaches). Oh, I can only hope that person hadn’t read the novels; I’m pretty sure the person translating them on tumblr was already past when Yori’s age is mentioned at that point. I wish I could scrub the memory that that fic exists from my brain tbh
So Ochi apparently has really nice handwriting, though he just thinks it’s normal. When Hata goes off praising him on it, he just kinda thinks, “You’re not dying, are you?” lol. He doesn’t understand why he’s being praised just for writing some things in magic marker. That makes two characters now who canonically have pretty handwriting: Ochi and Aoki (and Oda apparently sometimes gets lost admiring it; Aoki’s teased him about it before).
I’d wanted to read more, but I was tired.
Some vocab of note:
椚* (くぬぎ) [noun] sawtooth oak
枹* (なら) [noun] oak, especially Quercus serrata
欅* (けやき) [noun] Japanese zelkova
ごま塩頭 (ごましおいあたま) [noun] salt-and-pepper hair. Though, literally it’s sesame-and-salt, which I find interesting.
*all of these can be written with other kanji (though of course, being plants, they’re usually written in katakana), I just chose the one I liked best. 枹 though, while I could type it with my phone’s IME, I couldn’t type it with my laptop’s using literally any of its 6 readings. Which makes me sad, because it’s prettier than its more common counterpart, 楢.
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10th of April
Day 10
Thankfully my laptop returned to normal after restarting it, other than my desktop wallpaper disappearing.
Today I read pages 15 to 31 of 君ノ声! With the additional pages and also with the help of the Amazon summary, I’m starting to get the story more.
My understanding of the story and what has happened so far
The story is set in the Taisho era. A businessman called 京 極一 成 can hear the voices of people’s hearts.
In order to get assets and powerful connections he proposes marriage to なな of the powerful family 諏訪部家. She cannot hear the voices of people’s hearts, nor speak aloud (I think he only realises this after meeting her).
When he attempts to propose with a gift (a hairpin), she runs off?? I stopped reading around that point, so I guess I’ll find out what happens after that tomorrow lol.
I don’t have much access to internet from tomorrow until Thursday morning, so I probably won’t post for the next three days.
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Thanks for the heads up! I think that has decided it for me and I’ll read the manga first as if I come across that there then it’s easier to just flick past. There is a lot of extra content added by the anime that isn’t in the manga so far so hoping that also might be the case here, will be disappointing if not though as so far it’s avoided the kind of stuff that BL usually gets a bad rep for (the kind of things flagged in that link). Will see I guess!
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I’m back for my (hopefully) weekly update! I’ve had a really busy and kind of… bad… week, but I’ve been able to read a little bit anyway. I never summoned the energy to continue playing Ace Attorney, but I’ll hopefully get to it during easter break.
I’ve read at least one NHK News Easy article a day, and today I finished reading week 6’s pages for ハピネス. I’m struggling to find things to read that fit my level. I’ve realized I’m moving out of the “absolute beginner” stage, which should open up more possibilities for me (yay!), but I keep picking up books and games that are still too advanced (boo!). I’m thinking of joining the beginner book club next just to test the waters.
I was recently asked to come back to the job I worked last year, so I’m starting after easter. When I get paid I’m treating myself to a bunch of manga 
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Day 9 
三毛猫ホームズの推理 ~32% to 36%, halfway through chapter 2.3
Back to Holmes! And finally at the point where I could read some of @pocketcat’s past spoilers.
RIght? She looks exactly like the classic seemingly innocent and very desirable beauty that is actually behind it all. But then she’s being quite open with Katayama (apart from that thing they kept hinting at with Morisaki) and, as you say, the cat seems to like her. I guess we’ll see.
I think it works. She was horny, she had a really bad day, she had already heard about the casual prostitution thing and she was feeling reckless. Apparently the guy looks deceptively safe, so she lowered the defenses she initially put up. And she had a couple of drinks, and it’s explicitly said that she couldn’t hold her alcohol. Still, amazing skill from the part of the killer to do the deed without even a muffled scream from her to alert the rest of the students.
So apparently the killer can’t be from within the university, or the girls would recognize him. Is it the case that we haven’t met him yet? Come on, I need to have someone to suspect!
It was hilarious. I love Holmes. If I didn’t know she’s the protagonist of about a million more books, I’d suspect she’s behind it all. She’s easily the cleverest and most manipulative of them all.
Seriously? 
I had no idea cats actually did that, I’ve never seen it before. So jealous!
And one minor gripe about the way the main character is handled: It seems to me like Katayama’s aversion to women and blood has been entirely forgotten, and now we’ve found another way to gently laugh at his expense, with some minor physical comedy at the end of every scene (books and volley balls attacking him come to mind). He seemed perfectly functional around dead bodies and girl students, which felt out of character to me.
Words and phrases
泣き面に蜂 - making matters worse, adding insult to injury
当てつける - to do something in order to spite someone, to have a dig at
命中 - direct hit
痺れる - to become numb
寄ってたかって - in a crowd, ganging up
手のひらを返す - to do an about-face
とやかく言う - to find fault with, to say all kinds of things about
心当たりがある - to have an idea, to have a clue
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A bit about story
What a way to leave us on such a cliffhanger.
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三毛猫ホームズ
Read to the end of chapter 2.4
I am uncertain whether or not we just got some clues about the girls’ killer. Is this a red herring? I’m trying to remember back to when this character was first described (there are so many)… I flipped back to previous sections with him and there are some things which are potentially suspicious.
Place name
世田谷（せたがや）A nice suburban part of Tokyo, not far from the crowded Yamanote area
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Day 10 - April 10
- 美少年探偵団 1 - 17,33% → 17,47%
- 無職転生 ～異世界行ったら本気だす～ 1 - 11,78% → 11,78%
- キノの旅-the Beautiful World- 1 - 39,02% → 39,02%
Still having Covid, so I only read a little and that’s OK 
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Yes, that’s it! 
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And so another reading week is about to come to a close.
Short daily updates are in my home post.
At the beginning of this week, I started a new Aoitori Bunko book titled 好きって言って！（１） カレは秘密の王子さま！？. I finished the book just a couple moments ago.
Some no spoiler thoughts on 好きって言って！（１） カレは秘密の王子さま！？
This part of the synopsis: “A secret that even himself doesn’t know… and he’s going to disappear in two more days if we don’t fulfill the promise made to some monsters!?” was what made me buy the book. I wanted to know what the secret was and why one of the main characters was going to disappear.
Although the secret and reason did not disappoint, the solution the main characters embarked on to solve the issue felt a bit too… childish for me. Understandably the book is targeted at elementary school students so the theme won’t be too dark. Still, it’s a pity since I thought it had a good starting premise. The heroine is also a rather lovely character.
Unfortunately, I likely won’t be continuing this series.
It’s difficult to read much during the weekdays cause of work. But the challenge is really pushing me to read at least one chapter of something per day. I really enjoy being able to binge read during the weekends.
I’m eyeing 探偵チームＫＺ事件ノート next. I see almost 80 volumes in this series listed on Aoitori Bunko site. Might end up going down a rabbit hole if the first volume is interesting…
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Day 10 - Calendar
Finished 夜カフェ today 
It’s my second Japanese book to finish. In the end it turned out a little different then I expected it to be (which is a good sign). Overall I did like the book and it was an okay read for me. I had troubles at the beginning, but the further the book continued, the easier I was able to read it. At first I thought I would continue with volume 2 right after, but for now I want to switch to a physical book again. Personally I just like physical books better than ebooks.
Next up will be 魔女の宅急便 which I have lying around here for some time now. I actually started it once some months ago, but it was too hard to read. But I think it will be doable now.
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Only read two pages of 三毛猫ホームズの推理 last night. I had a very busy day, got home late, had to make dinner and didn’t have much energy left after that. I need to finish the book by next Saturday though (since I won’t be able to go to the library after that until May) so today I will probably jam a lot of reading in to catch up and then some.
Spoiler replies
I suppose but I just have trouble putting myself in that mindset. Being a somewhat reckless drunk 20 something myself at one point that’s still beyond even what my idiot self would have done 
But yeah, IIRC the way he was described in the first scene also heavily implied the girls didn’t know him. I’m open to him being one of the guys working on the buildings but also I feel like his expensive coat was mentioned twice? So that feels like some kind of clue.
Agree with all of this. He seems totally chill around 雪子 now, unfazed by seeing a dead body, and generally just calm under pressure. Like it makes the story go smoother, but it makes the opening description feel cheap.
Ohh do tell. All I’ve got is the coat thing I mentioned above.
Yes! They’re also called ‘pirate cats’. 
Googling around there was a cute little photo competition with shoulder cats (and other animals… )
Congrats!
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Day 8 
I spent most of the day reading それでも歩は寄せてくる. Lots of chores had to be abandoned for the sake of it, can’t be helped though. The story actually develops (!) I wasn’t expecting that and I’m all enthralled. It had so many precious moments so far that I’ve lost count.
I’m halfway through the fourth book still a whole volume behind the book club but I definitely made incredible progress today.
At the moment I’m totally exhausted, my head’s heavy, and my brain is in shutdown mode. Note to self, [in goofy’s voice] don’t do it again like that.
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