Week 17: 君の名は - Your Name (Intermediate Book Club)

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Week 17

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Start date: June 5th
Previous Part: Week 16

Reading

Week Start Date End Phrase End Page Page Count
Week 17 June 5th ー君の、名前は、と 252, End 20

Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • When asking for help, please mention the chapter and page number. Also mention what version of the book you are reading.
  • Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun!

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君の名は - Your Name (Intermediate Book Club)
Week 16: 君の名は - Your Name (Intermediate Book Club)
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I, uh, guess I don’t have to clarify where this reading ends in the Tsubasa Bunko edition.

Last week, huh?

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Oof, I made it!! :tada: :tada: :tada: Honestly, this book was probably still a bit too difficult for me. Unlike with other books, where at some point I get used to the writing style and can easily read 15 pages in one go towards the end, it just somehow never happened with this book…so this feels like the end of a marathon to me :sweat_smile:

Because it was a struggle to read, I never quite managed to get absorbed by the story, but I still enjoyed it. I guess I’ll finally watch the movie in the next few days, that should hopefully be easy to follow now. Unfortunately I didn’t really join in the discussions with this book because at some point it felt like everyone had already seen the movie and I wanted to avoid spoilers, at least I can finally go back and read some of those now as well :smiley:

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Overall I think I felt a bit underwhelmed. I think the movie was just so good, my expectation may have been unreasonably high, or maybe as Shinkai himself said, he’s just much better at making movies than writing novels. This last section sort of highlighted one of the things I didn’t like, especially about one of the earlier sections where there seemed to be a lot of exposition about how the characters were feeling. That’s not say I don’t like hearing about feeling, but it’s just so explicit and literal. In the movie, I think the tone is much better communicated through the music, the colors, the lighting, the facial expressions, context, etc. Everything in the book was just so… literal. I like to imagine what might exist beyond the pages, or beyond the screen, and I was stretching to do that in earlier weeks, but the writing didn’t make it easy.

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I really enjoyed the ending myself, but having not seen the movie, I have nothing to compare it to.

It was probably a mistake to read this last chapter at work, as it was quite a bit more emotional than I was ready to experience in public. Thankfully, I work in a fairly isolated corner of my office.

I’m glad we got to see how the supporting cast is doing a few years later as well - I felt all warm and gushy when Taki found himself eavesdropping on Tessie and Saya. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Again, having not seen the movie, I didn’t really mind all the talk about feelings. I’m the kind of person who easily feels the emotions that other people around me are feeling even if I’m not going through the same experience as them - so when I read books that are written this way, it’s really easy for me to be overwhelmed with emotion. Sometimes it’s actually a problem and it will cause me to have to put a book down for a while - but in this case, my stomach was kind of fluttering as I felt Taki’s pain and loneliness while simultaneously knowing they had to find each other at the end and that it was all going to be okay for him soon. There was no way I could do anything other than read the chapter in a single sitting - work be damned. :sweat_smile:

I really enjoyed the book, and it was at a pretty perfect challenge level for me. Unlike, say Sword Art Online, which I read at the same time as this and could typically do no more than 6 or so pages a day while being overwhelmed with vocabulary and obscure, advanced grammar, this was a nice read where even when I hit words or phrases I didn’t 100% comprehend, I could easily follow the plot in detail and let the unknown bits kind of sort themselves out as I went.

I definitely need to watch the movie this weekend. Can anyone who owns the movie give me a hand? I checked out the DVD/Blu Ray combo on Amazon, but some of the reviews are claiming it only contains the English dub despite the item description clearly indicating it offers both. Ideally I’d like to watch it in Japanese without subtitles; is this possible on the US Blu Ray?

Also - this was my first WK book club that I followed from start to finish. Thank you to everyone who asked and answered questions, who wrote about the parts of the story they loved and the parts they found disappointing, who took the time to read my silly, lengthy posts and respond to them, and who made the book even more fun to follow week to week. I’ll definitely be sticking around the book clubs for a long time to come. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Just finished! Even having seen the movie I have to say that I, like @RDavid311, experienced the emotions of the ending pretty strongly. It probably didn’t help that I had RADWIMPS playing in the background, but at least I’m at home alone right now so nobody had to witness the tears.

I think I agree with pretty much everything I’ve seen posted so far. Like @NyappyTiramisu, I think that this book didn’t get all that much easier as it went. I think this is because it jumped around stylistically a lot, especially during scenes that were meant to pack a more emotional punch. It’s a big contrast to Murata who delivers everything in the same deadpan style and tends to reuse the same vocab much more often. Also, I generally like to pick apart and try to perfectly understand everything I read but I’ll admit I “cheated” a bit and read some sections a little less carefully when I had particularly busy weeks, falling back on my familiarity with the story from the movie.

@maskedkoala I do think that I preferred the movie to the book. Or rather, I don’t think that the book added all that much. There was definitely some value, like characters’ specific thoughts and feelings at certain moments. I also think the book made the “dreamlike” quality of the body-swaps much more clear than the movie did, which made some of the plot leaps a lot more plausible. However, the music and the visuals of the movie make it something special among movies, whereas I don’t think that this book would stand out as much among other books on its own. I wouldn’t say I was underwhelmed because I didn’t expect the book to be much more than what it was. I suppose I was just whelmed.

That being said it’s been fun to see the reactions of those unfamiliar with the story! If I could go back in time and do it differently I would read the book first, then watch the movie. I’d probably be blown away by each. So in that regard I definitely envy Nyappy and David. Please post your thoughts after you watch it for the first time!

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Still four more pages to read here. Gonna do those tomorrow. :slightly_smiling_face:

The first time I saw the movie, I genuinely thought until the last second that they were never going to meet again. They’d pass each other on the stairs, and just keep on walking. That’s essentially what happened in all of Shinkai’s previous four movies.

It’s streaming on Netflix here in Australia. Is that not the case where you are?

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Seems like it’s pretty limited…

https://unogs.com/title/80161371

Generally anime is in an extremely sorry state here, as well :sweat:.

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Ooh, I see. I actually bought the novel version of 天気の子 because I wanted to read it anyway and because there’s a chance it will come up in the book club. Though I may watch the movie first since it seems pretty clear that’s how Shinkai’s work is meant to be viewed. Guess I should prepare myself for some sadness in some of his movies though! :sob:

Unfortunately, it isn’t streaming here. But then again, I use a VPN so…even though it’s not streaming here, it is…you know, cough…streaming here. :shushing_face:

I’m weirdly into physical media, so I figured I would buy it anyway, but I may check it out on Netflix first and then decide from there.

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Well, I won’t comment, except to point out that 天気の子 is not one of Shinkai’s previous four movies (it’s the next one he did after this one).

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And finished! The third novel I’ve completed.

My English translated copy has an afterword by Shinkai and an essay by producer Kawamura Genki that aren’t in my Tsubasa Bunko - are they in the regular version? Interesting connection here in that Kawamura wrote If Cats Disappeared From The World, which was also read here at WaniKani in an unofficial book club.

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Yep, I’m reading the regular version and I have both at the end of mine.

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I finally found the time to watch it :tada:

I’m really impressed by the animation quality, some of the best I’ve seen in a while. And I feel like the book and the movie were a good combination for me to get the whole story - some scenes that were too difficult for me to understand in the book suddenly made sense in the movie, and I didn’t mind that I couldn’t understand some conversations in the movie because I generally remembered the gist of them from the book.

Definitely agreed!

That being said, I kind of wish I had gone into the movie blind. I still got really emotional watching it but I kinda wish those plot twists had hit me by surprise…I mean, they did when I read the book, it’s just that because I had such difficulties reading it during certain parts, I couldn’t really get immersed in the story as much as I just did watching the movie.

On the other hand, I also enjoyed understanding what’s going on in the movie from the beginning…so I’m not too mad about it. I’m just glad I finally watched it, and I really get why there was so much hype around it back when it came out :smiley:

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