well this is fun… trying to start this tonight and experiencing “fun with vocab”…looked but didn’t see a vocab list…am I lame and not finding a spreadsheet or there isn’t one for this book? 
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Regarding the sentence
当座 、その二つの国 の間 には、なにごとも起 こらず平和 でありました
I’m aware of the grammar 間は & 間に, but does the term 間には exist outside of that grammar as “between”? This is the first time I’ve come across this and I just want to make sure I got that correctly or if there is a wrinkle of context to be added.
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The は is marking all of その二つの国の間に as the topic of the sentence.
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Reading through this takes a lot longer than I initially expected. 
Took me about 15-20 minutes to reach the dialogue, where they’re talking about the weather. 
It’s a bit daunting, but I’m aiming to finish on time, and to have some time left to also understand what’s going on. Hopefully. 
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I’m with you … it’s definitely harder to read…but still wondering why we don’t have a vocab sheet for this club…(feel like I’m missing something)…would sometimes be a bit faster 
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Second the request for a vocab sheet! Would happily contribute to filling it out.
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I can set up a Google Sheets for vocab for those who are interested.
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お願いします！！！楽しんでいます。
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Currently-unofficial Now-official vocab list.
I’ve added most words for the first story, and I’ve created tabs for other weeks. It’ll be up to anyone interested in seeing it populated to add words for later weeks!
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prepopulated even!!! You are a rockstar! Maybe I will be able to keep up with this book club after all…at least keeping up with the other one for sure
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It was a bit difficult to get into at first. Commas keep popping up in places that don’t make sense to me and I’m not used to the old-timey/polite style. Thankfully there has been an explosion of activity in this thread, so I could just look up all the difficult stuff here, hehe 
I’d forgotten how active the official book club picks are!
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Thank you for mentioning the commas! I’ve been trying to make sense of Japanese commas for ages. Is there any logic behind them that I just haven’t grasped yet, or are they used completely randomly, where the narrator wants to take a breath?
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In my experience, this…
Though I have noticed that some authors like to use them to separate different things that modify the same noun:
ペットショップで買った、私の犬
Which is super counterintuitive for me, because I am used to commas indicating the end of a clause.
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I feel like this is a lot more active than Hanako was - I’d imagine for quite a few people being one of their first exposures to prose writing (for me my main exposure has been going through 時をかける少女 and a lot of the stuff I learned from that has helped with this - though there’s certainly been some strange grammar in any case)
Often I see them breaking up clauses (like we do in English), to help make clearer where logical breaks in the sentence are. Can help you to work out what’s modifying what etc. I think overall the punctuation is less grammatically emphasised than in English, so it’s more loose and a stylistic choice overall
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I was the one who was missing something I haven’t run a Beginner Book Club in ages and totally forgot that vocab sheets are a thing…
Millions of thanks to @ChristopherFritz for providing such an excellent sheet! I’ll add the link to the OP in a minute.
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sounds like you’re already level 60 - lite
don’t need no stinkin’ vocab sheets
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I found the story being read out loud by a NHK reader. You will find mostly your answer in there(it has Japanese subtitles too).
- inclusion sentence
- seperating modifying nouns
- easier to read (too many same letters like Kanji and Hiragana can confuse ad even produce new not existing words, especially if a わ is hitting on the particle は)
- logical breaks and breaking up clauses.
- Making it more fluent to read and correct pause, so the flow of Japanese can stay the same
However, in Japanese comma are not needed as far as I know. So it is completely up to the person himself, what is good and what not.
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so been super stuck…but after quite a bit of fiddling around finally figured out a sentence with some help from a native speaker…(doesn’t help I don’t know shogi - special vocab)…
Will see if I can get through this story but it’s not looking good for me…hopefully it’s just this one story…
初めのうちは、老人のほうがずっと強くて、駒を落として差していましたが、しまいにはあたりまえに差して、老人が負かされることもありました。
don’t know if this was in the list of vocab but this little bit was helpful:
駒を落とす
specifically means
to drop lose a strong piece (strong is implied)
this is the one that made me understand what it meant…from weblio:
The other one that gave me trouble
あたりまえにさす
Means
play without a handicap
don’t have a proper reference and haven’t searched everywhere but if you use the kanji
当たり前に差す it does make sense.
What I ended up with (not pretty and not great English was this (if it helps anyone):
At first, the old man’s way of playing was much stronger (than the other young soldier) and he dropped his strong pieces but finally playing normally he was defeated as much as he won.
Apologies if this was already clarified above somewhere and I missed it…but wanted to capture it while it was still fresh in my mind.
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Thank you for sharing that! It makes a lot of sense. I had sort of skipped that sentence because I thought I had gotten the gist of it (and I had given up on the Shogi terms), but I had interpreted the あたりまえ part as the old man playing in an “obvious” (predictable) way, but that was just a creative translation on my part. It makes much more sense that playing あたりまえ means playing without a handicap.
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Well, here is my take for you. Actually, I never do this stuff without asking a native speaker before, however I will try my best. Every of your assumptions are basically correct (In my point of view) but here is some more indepth.
First of all.
Here a small part from the Japanese Wikipedia of 将棋
棋力に差があるとき、その差に応じて上位者側の駒の一部を盤上から取り除いた状態で開始する。これを 駒落ち （こまおち）という。取り除かれた駒は、対局が終わるまで使用することはない。駒を落とした側の対局者を 上手 （うわて）、落とされた側を 下手 （したて）という。[振り駒]は行わず、上手から指し始める。
which basically says (Please do not mind my bad english, as I am not a native person)
[spoiler] In order to response if there is a difference in players ability at shogi, the game will start with a part being removed from the higher players figures. This is being called コマ落ち。The removed figures are not being allowed to being used in the whole game(until the end). The stronger shogi player is being called 上手 starting with a fallen piece (The one who 落とす), the other one 下手 (The one who is doing 落とされた） .振り駒 is a term to decide who is starting first, they simply seem to let a tile drop and look which side it is fallen. They do not do this, the better player just starts. I confirmed everything in a video I watched about shougi. (If you are interesting, the first minute will show you basically what I explained.
Furthermore
当たり前 has two meanings actually (If you look up in a Japanese - Japanese dictionary, I highly recommend 三省堂 スーパー大辞林)
- だれが考えてもそうであるべきだと思うこと。当然なこと。
- 普通と変わっていない・こと（さま）。
- (Like everyone should think. It is obvious)
- (Like always, No change to normal. Can be a thing(action) or a person)
Both of them are helping, to get a broader view on that word, I hope. It is not just “obvious”. Together it comes pretty easily together, I do think.
Edit: I wanted to respond to shuly post. However I do post just rarely and made a mistake. My bad. Though, I see you read it. So there is no need of correction, haha.
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