It’s about to get real y’all.
What a cliffhanger. I’ve been slightly struggling to picture exactly what the situation was with the raft for some of this - definitely imperfect understanding of the vocab - but the ending was pretty claustrophobic!
Specific vocab question
Should I be translating うず to “whirlpool” or something closer to “current” or “rapids”? I started with whirlpool and it just didn’t make a lot of sense the further through the chapter it got and the more it sounded like they were still travelling down the river.
Also yes this image was terrifying
Trying to understand the うず
I didn’t understand it super well the first time, so I just reread this part haha.
I feel like the word うず usually means whirlpool? (If you google it, there’s only photos of whirlpools)
But I think in this story, they were never at the center of the whirlpool. I understood it as, they mentioned there was a whirlpool, and that was causing the water to become more erratic and fast. Like the whirlpool is over there, and we’re here being affected.
And then they go over that waterfall, so maybe that area was causing the crazy water as well.
My take on it is probably wrong tho 
Hopefully it helped a little though? This part of the chapter did feel more vague
Thanks yeah I had forgotten about the waterfall too! Makes sense. If I was reading it in English it would probably just be fast-paced, exciting, semi-ambiguous-but-easily-imagined… but my brain struggles to fill in the gaps in 日本語
My favorite part of this week was Snufkin’s zen lesson on attachment and letting go of the garnets. Also his story about walking around volcanic rock on stilts.
Yes! And the artwork is so charming and cute 
it adds so much
Yes!! I read the word stilts and looked it up and I was like, wait, really? Then I looked at the artwork on the very next page and… yes, really 
I felt like this section had a lot of nice artwork, I liked the lizard a lot too.
Snufkin is just too cool to comprehend 
Welcome to week 6 of ムーミン谷の彗星！
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