Do we think something happened in the professor’s past that gave him abandonment issues? He seemed really upset to hear that Root was hanging out by himself.
or
Did he subconsciously sense that she was grating carrots into the hamburger, and without consciously realizing it, did it cause a physical and emotional panic response that manifested itself as a response to Root hanging out at home.
or
Does he just like really care about kids?
Also,
I kind of like this slice of life thing where we just float along. I’m worried we’re getting set up for some sort of turmoil, or something really tragic to happen. I don’t want to be emotionally devastated.
Wow, you’ve got a good memory. I didn’t interpret that happening when they were young children. Does the rest of the sentence mean that his brother, one year older, took over the family factory? That would seem to mean they were older, at least like high school age. It doesn’t seem to be mentioned, at that time, in a way that implies some sort of abandonment issue, especially since he heads out overseas (rather than, for example, clinging to his brother), but I guess the narrator didn’t have all the information at that time.
Good point–he goes off tocollege, seemingly right after that, so while it might be an “early” death for his parents, it’s maybe not early enough to account for his abandonment issues.
If you look up 一回り, it actually means twelve years (one cycle of the Chinese zodiac signs). So if, for example, the brother was around twenty when taking over the factory, the professor would have been 8 years old.
Of course it doesn’t explicitly say what age they were when he took over, but it says they could only pay the 学費 because his brother made the company big (苦労して大きくし), which implies taking a few years‘ time. But he might have been 12 or 14 even, I‘m not sure.
But then his brother also died pretty early, which might have contributed to his issues?
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