⛩ Week 3 | 帰命寺横丁の夏 | Children's Novel Club

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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:black_cat: Welcome to week 3 of 帰命寺横丁の夏！:black_cat:

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Week 3: June 27

Chapter Pages Page count Ending line
1-2 26-37 10 どうしてそんなことになってしまったのかが、わからない。

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The plot thickens… I think I’d feel similar to Kazu if I started hearing invisible mothers next door.

Phrase of the week for me is 何が何やらわからなかった - just captures the feeling of not having a clue :exploding_head: nicely. I’ve read this before somewhere but it’s a fun one. Often how I feel when trying to read Japanese…

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thoughts on this week

Whoa … Things are escalating quickly … The beginning of chapter two is reminding me that this is the author who Miyazaki drew inspiration from for Spirited Away.

I’m guessing the pink bone parasol is not made of actual bones, but rather, missing the cloth sections you expect a parasol/umbrella to have. So that’s one thing that’s maybe not quite as wild as I initially assumed. But still.

Oh, another note, I was reading something else earlier today and one of the characters says something along the lines of “it’s so hot out, I’d expect for dead people to come out”. I think it was treated as an odd thing to say, but still makes me wonder if that’s how they think about ghosts in Japan, like the hotter it is the more likely you’ll see one.

And apparently it’s quite hot where Kazu is right now!

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I was imagining the umbrella to be something like this, with the things sticking out being the bones:

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Probably the most reasonable explanation. :sweat_smile:

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Very mysterious! So it’s not just Akari that’s supernatural, because she has an invisible mother too… :thinking: I wonder if our main character has some kind of reason why he can see what’s going on when others can’t. Maybe an ancestral connection, like his dead grandfather also had ghost related powers?