Week 2: ユージニア 🌹

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ユージニア :rose: Home Thread

Week 2

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Start Date: Nov 12
Previous Part: Week 1
Next Part: Week 3

Reading:

Week Start Date Chapter Start Page Page Count
Week 2 Nov 12 Chapter 2 45 29

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 embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun! :durtle:

Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll.
(Please feel free to update your status whenever you like!)

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I am no longer reading the book

0 voters

Proper Noun Readings

Previous Proper Nouns
Name Reading Notes Proof
青澤 緋紗子 あおさわ ひさこ the blind girl (ca. 12 yo at the time of the event) (Week 1)
Name Reading Notes Proof
雑賀 満喜子 さいが まきこ ch. 1 narrator
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And the thread opens just as I finished reading this part! :grin:
Have I mentioned I’m loving the book?

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I caught up to this week’s reading. The one sided interview style of the chapters reminds me a lot of モテ薬 (in which every chapter was an interview, slowly giving background to a single incident), except the unreliable, vague narration in ユージニア is a lot more fun. モテ薬 tried to force literary prose onto normal speech, and so the narration came across as forced and unrealistic.

I’m curious about
who else 雑賀 might be trying to give a message to with her conscientiously made mistakes. The constant references to the 百日紅 is also interesting although I’m less sure if it’s just for mood or actually relevant somehow.
Also 緋沙子 seems very sus, but she was just a child at a time.

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Right? It’s only the second chapter, and it’s about something that happened so long ago and supposedly solved, yet it’s so full of intrigue, I tend to second-guess every word I read.

So many questions:

Why did 雑賀 even need a helper for the interviews? Why did she choose him specifically?
Why didn’t she take him to see 緋沙子? Did they have something private to discuss?
Was the message intended for her helper after all? And what was it supposed to be?
What’s with the crepe myrtle and the blue room? Is the crepe myrtle from somewhere else, and is she leaving a hint by mentioning it constantly?
Is the Eugenia poem a quote from somewhere? Is it a sort of code?
Is 緋沙子 or even 雑賀 involved in the crime somehow?
Can 緋沙子 see after all? Or is her perception so sharp exactly because she’s blind?
Did 雑賀 plan everything carefully from the beginning, instead of her work being turned into a book by chance?
What is the identity and purpose of the unknown interviewer? Why the interest all of a sudden after so many years?

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So intriguing! I love her writing style, this kind of unsteady-rambly-feeling but then again fully spot-on. Curious to see who else we will meet in the next chapters!

At least she seems to be extremely sus to 雑賀, given her remark at the end of chapter 1 (“if 10 people are at a crime scene, and 9 get killed, then who must be the murderer?”) Curious to see whether this was a strong foreshadowing or just a red herring!

First I thought she was giving a message to the murderer, in the sense of “I found you out”. But if she altered the statements of more than one person, then that would not be understood by any single interviewee, just by her helper.

Given these flowers were in the room at the time of the crime, and given that it seems to be an unusual color for these flowers, I bet it is one of the key elements.

That doesn’t seem to be clear to him either :rofl: I guess it’s because she counts on him being able to decrypt the message? Which he eventually seems to do… The other question is, why did she do it this way? Because nobody would have believed her anyways, as the murderer had officially been found?

I’m not sure at which time she started to strongly suspect her, but I can imagine that she wanted to confront her on that issue, maybe?

When she started to talk about encrypting a message somewhere, I thought she was referring to the poem and how somebody would have encrypted something in it. Especially when you look at the poem, it’s sort of in a very romantic mood, except for the part with the crushed insects :cold_sweat: which sort of sounds very cruel and weird to me. So I could imagine this to be a code? - But then he talked about her encrypting a message in the book, so maybe it was just about that? Or about both? :thinking:

I found that part pretty suspicious as well. But maybe she just heard the rustling of the leaves…

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My feeling is it wasn’t intended for him – she talks about “what if you can’t arrange a code in advance?” but if she’d wanted to give her helper a message or set up a code scheme he was right there. So I think it must be aimed at somebody who she either couldn’t contact or else didn’t know the exact identity of.

How long did it take people to realize this chapter was a different narrator? I’m not very attentive to speech style so didn’t twig until the 僕 near the end of page 2… Also I wonder if it’s harder to make the narrator shifts clear in the English translation…

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It was the 僕 for me too :joy:
The fact that talk was still all about the heat didn’t help either.

Edit: I guess that’s why there are titles in the translation about who is being interviewed and where…

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I also didn’t make the connection until that 僕. I might have made it earlier if we’d known the first narrator’s name, haha. Just like a lot of people have already mentioned, I really like the rambling, meandering style this is written in. Unreliable narrators are one of my favorites. :slight_smile:

I feel like we don’t know enough yet to really make meaningful guesses. So I’m just enjoying the ride for now!

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Also this town is definitely now on my list of places I’d like to visit. But probably not in summer :slight_smile:

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I think it was not before the 3rd or 4th 僕 when I started to deeply wonder what was going on here and who on earth 雑賀 is :woman_facepalming: :grin:

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I agree :laughing: I am very exciting to read the book too :blush:
I read usually such a mystery faster, but as here, reading a book at a steady pace and discussing about various points about a story with another readers is amazing approach to the book :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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これ、おもしろいです！
私は英語で読んでますが、
第2章は第1章とは違う語り手だとすぐにわかりました。第2章は（英訳では）語り手が自分の思い出や印象を、サクサクと具体的に話すので（英語も分かりやすかった :sweat_smile:）「あ、これはきっと男の人だろうな」と、すぐに想像できました。
逆に第1章は、男の人が語っているのか、女の人が語っているのか、ずっと分からなくて大変でした。話も抽象的で、語り手の個人的な記憶ではなくて「結局、本当のことなんて誰にもわからない」って言っているようで、こうミステリーの始まりにしては出鼻をくじく感じでした。

百日紅の花言葉は「あなたを信じる」だそうです。関係ないかもしれませんが :sweat_smile:
https://tenki.jp/suppl/grapefruit_j02/2021/08/29/30589.html

I think, that is just a reason, why Makiko choose him as a helper… :joy:

第1章で、雑賀マキコさんが話す様子から、彼女は緋沙子さんに強い憧れを抱いていると感じます。お金持ちで病弱で薄幸な美人、という、マンガに出てきそうな緋沙子さんに、憎しみや嫉妬の気持ちをほとんど持っていない、というところがマキコさんのキャラクターのポイントな気もします。
さらに、それを思うと、緋沙子さんを助けたい、という気持ちがマキコさんにある気もして、そうなると、緋沙子さんはもしかして何か事件と深い関わりがあるのかな、と思ったり。

Please come on!! You are very welcome :confetti_ball: I was born and grown up in this city incidentally :blush: :grin: :laughing:

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I also have some questions about english…

  1. What means the last sentence of 2.3? “…, but nobody appeared to put two and two together.”

  2. “But I think she went there on her own a number of times.” (2.4, he described the house of Aosawas) It means maybe, “she went to the house when she had time/on her account”. Is it right?

  3. “I’d never seen her try to reach out to other people before, which is the kind of action that reveals what a person is really like.” (2.5)[/spoiler] That means as such like [spoiler]“I didn’t know, whom she had liked, because she never tried to get in touch with someone who she perhaps liked.”

I am glad when someone could help me :sweat_smile: :bowing_woman:

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put two and two together = work it out, understand, realize.

Despite the initials, no one understood it was him. The Japanese text goes: 僕の周りであれが僕だと気付いた人間はいなかったようです。

on her own= alone, 一人で

Reaching out has the meaning of communicating with someone, especially for asking for help. I think it means that working with others reveals your personality? I think the relevant Japanese text may be this one: 人に働きかけるところはあまり見たことがなかったし、ああいう時に、性格出ますよね。

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To add to this:

  1. “a number of times” = a few times, 何回か

  2. “what a person is really like” = the true nature of a person. “To be like” is not related to “to like”.

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Thank you very much!
Well, how nice I feel now and I can understand much better :rofl:

どうもありがとうございます！

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細かいところまでありがとうございます！
Thank you for your kindly addition :hugs:

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I wish the narrator had mentioned anything at all about the mistakes he noticed :thinking:

100%, it has to mean something. Perhaps some of these memories are of events that didn’t happen where - or when - we think they did…

I noticed immediately :sunglasses: because the ABC thread had a post that mentioned this aspect of the book.

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I think I also picked up immediately that it was a different narrator, but at first I thought it was a woman (based on politeness of speech), until that first 僕 indeed.

Anyway, I also like the writing style a lot and I’m thoroughly enjoying the book so far!

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I finished ch2 and excitedly came into this thread to un-blur everybody’s comments. Happy to see that I had similar questions to what everbody had back in November :grin: I noticed the change in the narrator because I could read ch2 smoother than ch1, or maybe I’m slowly getting used to the author’s writing style and vocab :sweat_smile: I thought after ch2 I’d switch to another activity for a change, but seeing the way ch2 ends with more questions and suspicion, I have to continue to ch3 :flushed:
Ch2 time: 1h34’

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