I started just now with the text, and it is surprisingly dense, especially for an intermediate pick. I only finished the prologue, but it was more challenging than I’d hoped for. Probably takes some time until I get used to the writing. Totally different flavor to the other more long form books I’m reading at the moment.
Prologue
I was surprised by how fast the prologue moved. 2 months of imprisonment in 3 pages + blowing up of the hostages as a bonus on top. Then another jump by 2 years. Some background information on how the recordings came to be and how they were released.
I haven’t had a sentence that totally stumps me for multiple minutes in a long time. But “元々テープは、故人の最後の姿をしのぶせめてものよすがにと、特殊部隊の一人が個人の判断で遺族に渡したものだった。” got me. I had to untangle the string of kana combined with 2 words I’m not familiar with; this time with the help of AI
I’ll add my thoughts of the complete reading after finishing the part of chapter 1 if I have something more to add.
It is Natively Level 34 after all… Ogawa’s books vary a bit in difficulty, that makes it somewhat hard to predict. We read another one of her books in the Intermediate club, https://learnnatively.com/book/492783402f/ which is even Level 36, but we have another nomination by her, ミーナの行進 | L32, which is only Level 32
Plain jisho.org is also usually quite good at disentangling kana strings fyi:
This is definitely the hardest book I’ve attempted so far, but I think I’m getting the gist of what’s going on. Agree with what @downtimes has said about the pacing, my jaw nearly hit the floor when the hostages were revealed to have been blown up - I was not expecting that. I really enjoyed the prologue and set up though with the wire taps and everything. I found the first part of night 1 a bit harder to follow, and I’m doing a really insane number of lookups. Luckily I anticipated this would be the case and finally took the time to set up a way to read all my ebooks with yomitan, which was totally worth the 45 minutes it took to set up. I’m really enjoying reading along with this audio readalong I found on youtube. It’s not professional, but it helps me keep my pace up for a tough book like this. Excited to see where night 1 takes us next week.
Feel free to ask questions if you have anything more concrete
Not much to go on for night 1 yet. Not sure where it is going
Rough summary of part night 1
It’s essentially a recounting of some memories of some women. She lived in a small town opposite to a iron factory owned by her family. She liked to play in front of the factory to get as many glimpses as possible of the going ons inside without rousing suspicion. She is a girl after all, and shouldn’t show interest in iron work.
She describes in detail what the factory produces, some of the processs, the mask the workers are wearing etc. A big focus is put on the destructive nature of it all and her impressions.
To be fair my first post was not meant as a criticism for the pick. Just that my own (non researched) preconception was off. The page count of the week is really low so I could still finish in essentially one sessions.
Didn’t know jisho is good at breaking up sentences. Good to know. I normally have no problem breaking them up myself and use a dictionary on my smartphone for manual lookups. Works for me
Having read ミーナの行進 | L32 (which has a number of connections to real-life events) I got curious whether this book (and especially the hostage crisis) had any parallels in real life as well.
Thank you for posting the YouTube 朗読, I’m trying to do listening only although I’m probably missing a few words here and there (like all the tool names that they have in the shop), but it’s really good practice.
It also made me realize how nice it is to be able to listen to a book while doing other stuff around the house, which is something I’ve been doing with YouTube videos / documentaries for ages
I’m late to start but the speed at which I got through this first section makes me hopeful I’ll have no issue catching up. Also delighted the @jablekanji linked a 朗読！ A 朗読 of 朗読s, how fun
For some reason I found the beginning very easy (I’m probably just used to that style of speech and the vocab, given the sorts of things I enjoy reading/watching) but the first night section felt much more vague and took more concentration. Maybe a bit of whiplash from the tone shift?
I also found this (and a few other sentences) very hard work.
actually I think that せめてもの at the very least is a single word
よすが keepsake is particularly hard to parse because it looks like it could be よす・が or よ・すが, but is actually a single word. (The more familiar kanji 縁 might have been helpful, though I would not have known this meaning or reading)
Oh, so interesting!
I had kind of assumed that this event was an echo of the Munich hostage crisis, which appeared in ミーナの行進
But you are right - there are many more parallels with the Japanese embassy crisis.
although I’m probably missing a few words here and there (
