Just a heads-up, we’re voting on reading speed for the latter half of the book here (poll open open until 2023-05-14T20:00:00Z.). Come vote if you’d like to have a say!
I was fully expecting the teddy bear that Hanuki dropped to be picked up by Ozu when he fell off the bridge the next day. It’s only about a 600m distance down the river from one bridge to the other, but if it got caught in some reeds or something it could happen.
And now we get a crazy story of a neverending feud that started before the war, and is continued by successors for generations.
Narrator still got a whole Castella cake, straight from Hanuki this time. He started to eat it alone but this time he ended up sharing it with Akashi, and even Higuchi had a piece. And the コロッセオ oracle came up again during the cake eating, in a different way. The moth invasion happened again in exactly the same way, Narrator again ended up with Akashi on that same day after protecting her from the moths, Ozu still fell off the bridge. This time Higuchi disappeared though, by “riding the moths”? His parting words were again praise towards Ozu.
Narrator was more likeable in this chapter I felt. He complained a bit less, even though I thought he actually had more reasons to complain, and he engaged more positively with others. Still, I find it strange that he’s not content his misadventures got him to where he is now, happy in a relationship with Akashi, and instead wishes everything had happened differently. Does he believe he would still be with her if he had chosen a different path, or would he be happy with anyone as long as his student life had been more fulfilling from the start?
Me too! That was… interesting! I quite liked the feud thing. It was partly predictable, but still managed to surprise me (obviously there weren’t gonna fight for real but I wasn’t expecting じゃんけんぽん ^^ ).
What I’m really curious about is how the overarching story (if there is one, but I think there is?) will develop in the next chapters.
That was so funny! After all the epic battle setup too!
I suspect that the next chapter will more or less follow the format of the previous ones, and so will the final chapter until the very end when everything somehow ties together? Looking forward to finding out!
Yeah, we’ll probably get a vague hint, but I’m unsure whether we will be able to make any sense of it yet. For example, I have no idea what that コロッセオ is supposed to mean. But it seems somehow significant, as do the teddy bear, the castella cake and the moths.
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