Please blur/hide any major events in the current week’s pages (however early they occur), like so:
(that’s [spoiler]text here[/spoiler]).
If you have a question about grammar, vocab, the story, cultural things or anything else related to the book — ask! There’s no need to be shy. If it’s something you are wondering about, chances are someone else will be thankful you asked first, lots of people enjoy answering questions, you learn something new, and the thread gets more lively. It’s a win-win on all fronts!
Sadly, this section was really painful to read due to the format. Unlike manga titles, the Kindle reader doesn’t adapt well to this “images inside a text-based book”, even on PC. Specially with my poor eyesight.
There’s no way to zoom in, except using external magnifying tools, and those do a very poor job. In many places it was not only hard to discern each kanji, even the furigana was unreadable. I skipped a few sentences I couldn’t quite grasp correctly just because I had no way to check the words in a dictionary.
How is it 2026 and Kindle doesn’t have a decent reader app to deal with this correctly?
Technical issues aside, the story-inside-the-story seems pretty interesting so far and I’m intrigued as to what’s going to happen to this girl and her unexpected buyer.
Yeah the technical annoyances with this chapter were real. The images were readable on my iPad though - resolution was fine to read the furigana. Just made lookups harder - I ended up taking a screenshot of the page and then loading it into google translate. Not actually to translate the whole page, but to then click “show original text” and then have (occasionally funky) one tap translation of words I didn’t know. @2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz if you have some kind of tablet / large phone you could try the kindle app on it.
Anyway I actually ended up really enjoying the story-within-a-story. I kept rereading things thinking I had misunderstood and then being like oh ok they really mean digging through a muddy graveyard. It helped that I read all of this week and half of next week over two days for the Readathon. I was sort of half forgetting the fact that this is within the wider book (and still no idea what the connection is ha).
Me too! When Kazu-kun said he got carried away reading the story I was like ‘uh oh, that’s a pretty high bar to set for yourself as a writer Kashiwaba Sachiko’ (plus, it’s hard to start a completely new story in the middle of a different story) … but actually I feel like she pulled it off.
@2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz
I used the kindle app on my Android tablet where you can zoom into pictures, which made the text and furigana quite readable. Of course I missed the kindle’s in-app translation (which works only on text and not on images) and had to look up many words in Jisho and some sentences in deepl.
Yesterday (shame on me!) I ended up buying the English ebook (‘Temple Alley Summer’') to be sure that I understood the story correctly. It showed me that there is still much room for improvement in my Japanese reading skills: I read the first 10 weekly assignments (chapters 1 to 4) in less than an hour. And surprise: the English ebook has the story-inside-the-story as plain text!!
Welcome to week 15 of 帰命寺横丁の夏！
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