I WAS way behind (still in the final pages of chapter 3) but didn’t see your message in the past day so I read the whole chapter last night and this afternoon… hooray for the looming sense of obligation to accountability… I thrive on deadline…
I have really enjoyed the book so far. Like you two, this is among the first novels I’m reading in Japanese. This IS the first novel above a 2nd grade reading level that I’m reading without furigana.
Background that I passed the N3 in 2019 and am currently studying this year for N2, but I have been so pleasantly surprised at how easily I’ve been able to read it! It is such a pleasure to read! That said @eainge, I cannot imagine having not seen the film and attempting this. I’m certain that would make it much harder. I haven’t seen the movie in about 5 years but it was one of the very first VHS tapes I ever owned. I believe I got it for my birthday when I was 4 or 5 (we did not own a TV before then) and I must have seen it at least a hundred times in my life, if not more than that!! While the movie clearly deviates from the direct plot at moments, those deviations have been brief and so practically every scene I read I can directly envision the adaptation in my minds’ eye. It is more a question of scenes they clearly ADDED to the ghibli version (the rainy night in the train… and the crows knocking the stuffed toy from the cage) than scenes they have altered or eliminated… from my memory at least. You’ll see what I mean when you finally watch it after the book!
One of my major goals in reading this though is so that I can read it aloud to my kids in a couple years (see my study log here for more background there since that goal seems to come out of left field without context, I guess), and that will be before they see the film (we have plans to watch it when my youngest baby that I’m pregnant with now is 2/2.5 years old). I hope that my reading aloud can capture some of the brilliance of these scenes and really put them in the story with me… the descriptions are so vivid and lively! I don’t want to make it sound boring!
Anyway I’ll be back tomorrow or Monday with more thoughts about the chapter specifically but that’s me getting caught up on the earlier talk!