I am not sure what Tomoka’s boss means
with his reply to her report on the unfriendly customer:
「そいうのさあ、うまく処理してよお」
Shouldn’t it be treated by himself now?
“Do it well” (next time? - but how?)
I was puzzling over the same sentence. I thought at first he was saying that when the customer comes back in the afternoon she would have to handle it herself. But that doesn’t make sense with そいうの - that kind of thing. So I think he is saying she should be able to handle that sort of thing herself.
I’ve eaten it in Nagasaki, where it’s considered a specialty because that’s where people got the idea from the Portuguese. It tastes like the most common, cheapest type of sponge cake available everywhere throughout the Western world, so it was a bit weird to see it treated like such a special thing. Never knew that you could make it in a pan, though. I’m half tempted to try it.
I was tempted to look at the ebook version of ぐりとぐら since I’m suspecting it will have some important lesson that 小町さん wants to covey!
Alas, Amazon.jp doesn’t seem to carry it and I’m not sure it even exists . Oh well - still curious about its relevance..
I liked 桐山くん’s reflection of work at his previous employer - 「食うために仕事しているのに、仕事しているせいで食えないなんて、そんなおかしいと思ったんだ」
And I’m really rooting for Tomoko finding her own voice and self esteem, I was a bit devastated by how self critical she was when compared to 沙耶’s admiration!
Since it is a book aimed at very small children, it seems understandable that there is no kindle version. You can buy the hardcover or tankobon version for ¥1,100 at amazon.jp.
I’m afraid I already permanently confused myself by googling recipes and seeing how different they are. Much like Tomoka herself, except it didn’t give me a burst of motivation to try them all, but an urge to lie down on the couch and not eat cake.
I’m a day late, but I finished the reading! I liked this week, particularly her call with her friend, how she listened to her for a long while because she felt kind of like it was making up for her guilt. And then her conversation with 桐山くん.
The only question/thing I had to look up and dig into this week was on page 35
Page 35
Tomoka mentions tells her friend on the phone that she’s reading ぐりとぐら, and her friend gets it wrong, thinking that the castella was a fried egg.
Then Tomoka thinks 「うわてがいた。」and then 「ホットケーキだと思っていた私のほうがだいぶ近い。」
I’m pretty sure the うわて here is like the upper hand, or like surpassing someone. She kind of has the upper hand/higher ground because she then explains that her guess to what the castella was was closer haha.
I guess I don’t really know why the verb(?) is 「いた」, because dictionary wise I could only find 上手を行く… But oh well!
About castella! I will never forget, the first time I went to Japan, it was with my brother. And at the time the only Japanese friend I had met up with us at an event, and afterwards put together a few people to go out to eat afterwards!! But there was kind of a weird block of time in the middle where he had to do something, so his friend let us wait at her apartment with her, and she served us 麦茶 and カステラ!!! So ever since then that’s always what I think of with castella hehe
I think it’s more the other way around, and her friend is the うわて: the sense is “I thought I was good but there was somebody better out there”. It’s like “wow, there was somebody more amazing than me in the ‘how far adrift is your childhood memory from what the book actually was’ stakes”.
There’s an example of this in this blog post and its comment thread – the blog post author describes how they couldn’t decide whether to eat a supermarket danish pastry as it is or reheated, so they tried both. The first commenter says they taste tested it three different ways, and the blog author’s response is なんと！3通り うわてがいたわ.
As usual I’ve fallen behind due to … life. But now that I finished this week’s reading and read all the comments
Summary
I really appreciate the discussion around the meaning of Uejima-san’s comment 「そいうのさあ、うまく処理してよお」(p39) and around Tomoka’s うわて comment (p35). In both of these cases, I made the complete opposite interpretation thinking Uejima-san was complementing Tomoka for her customer management and also Tomoka thinking she was better than her friend Saya.
Looking back, neither makes sense contextually, because Tomoka then gets even angrier at the customer after Uejima-san’s comments (plus he runs away when he learns the customer was coming back in the afternoon), and in the case of Saya’s recollection of the picturebook, it seemed odd she was congratulating herself for being better than Saya at recollecting the story. Rather うわて reflects a kind of humor at how bad they were at remembering the story I guess?
These kinds of misinterpretations alarm me, because they aren’t nuance misunderstandings, but more material. It’s like I’m reading a different book than the one Aoyama wrote Ah…so much more to learn I guess, or as Kiriyama-kun says 「今の自分にできることを今やってるんだ」possibly another way to say Do the best you can with what you have (and leave the rest to serendipity or fate or something) ?
I had one other question: The customer uses the term 下良品 which I thought would be pronounced げりょうひん, but my dictionary app says it is しもりょうひん. I searched google for ふりがな and was unable to confirm this. Is しもりょうひん how you pronounce this? It is easy to understand what it means by reading the kanji, but saying it out loud…
Ps. also loved learning the word 小春日和 for late or second summer. It feels different than viewing the weather as a summer that lingers.
home thread
. Oh well - still curious about its relevance..
So ever since then that’s always what I think of with castella hehe
うわてがいたわ.
Ah…so much more to learn I guess, or as Kiriyama-kun says 「今の自分にできることを今やってるんだ」possibly another way to say Do the best you can with what you have (and leave the rest to serendipity or fate or something) ?
