I enjoyed a part of this week‘s reading again a lot (not too hard to guess, I suppose: 果物), but a quick question to you others reading along: Do you also feel that the story is progressing at a rather slow speed? No pun intended, I know we are on a 新幹線.
Mmm, it does feel a bit slow. I think that’s because of the narrative structure – half the page count is not progressing the on-the-train events but is instead flashbacks to past events between Ouji and Kimura. And the latter don’t feel very exciting or fast moving because we already know the outcome and the author is deliberately dragging us slowly through how we get there. (Personally I really don’t like “show bad outcome and then in flashback wallow in all the bad decisions and mistakes by the characters that led up to the bad thing” as a narrative structure in any story. I don’t want to read about things going irretrievably wrong.)
寺原 appeared again in this week’s reading and I became curious. I wonder if there’s a connection between 王子 and 寺原.
I’ve collected the sections that provide information about 寺原 so far.
Oh, thanks a lot for collecting those bits, because when I read the name, I went „who was that again?“. I am either bad with names or not paying enough attention to the contents of the book - probably both.
Rereading this bit from one of your quotes made me wonder if that might possibly be how the kid that Lemon and Mikan were supposed to be guarding got killed…
Yes, it might be the work of スズメバチ. It is also mentioned before that a rare snake is stolen. A deadly snake on the loose in a shinkansen would be chaotic. Imagine, Mikan finds out that ぼんぼん was bitten by a snake and just died. Also, the first one to discover the snake would be Nanao
I read that this quote was made up by the author, and was very surprised. It felt like a quote from one of the holy books to me. Interview with the author, Q37
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