This felt like a harder week than previous weeks. Quite a bit of work and pregnancy related vocabulary. 安定期 apparently is the “stable stage of pregnancy”, ie after 12 weeks when the risk of miscarriage drops. makes sense once you know it I guess. I was a bit disappointed I didn’t recognise つわり when it was such a prominent word in one of the 妊娠カレンダー stories in the IBC book before last.
Is chewing mint gum a good way to deal with tiredness? Might have to try that one!
つくした - took me some time to work out this was くつした in mispronounced toddler speak.. This is always a difficult area when reading in another language. I find drunk characters slurring their words can be quite tricky too.
首を縦に振ってくれた - an interesting way of saying that she said yes!
I enjoyed the first part of this character’s story. It was a real shame that having rushed back to work, even putting her child in a daycare facility that wasn’t ideally located to make sure she got back, that she was kicked out of her job and into a position she didn’t want. Especially when she’d been such an asset to the department previously. It does sound like she had massively overestimated what it might be like to work her job and look after a baby, but I still don’t like the way they made the decision without any discussion with her. She sounds like she’s in a tricky place in life - I hope the librarian has some good advice for her…
I can sympathise with the idea of feeling guilty about leaving work even though it’s past your finish time - and also know it’s nice to have family commitments that force you to leave sometimes!
This story hits even more home than the one before.
Being demoted at work without consulting with you first, just because you are a mother, being constantly stressed out and with a bad conscience because you try to juggle work, a constantly non-cooperative toddler and a household with a husband who is constantly on business trips, I can relate to it all. So while the other stories were also not unrealistic, this one feels the most real and bleak out of all of them so far.
I’m very curious as to how Komachi-San will help to resolve this. And I dearly hope it’s not, that the situation stays like that and she just doesn’t mind it as much, but that there will definitely be a development for the better in her life.
I was thinking the same. Having established the pattern in chapter one, it was fairly clear where the character in chapter two’s life needed to go. But much less clear where life needs to go for this character. Perhaps she will just end up accepting the change in her career and embrace her role as mother now. But I hope that the story leads us to a place where she strikes a balance of home and work responsibilities and is able to get back into her career and continue to show her talents as an editor. Perhaps a less than full time role in the editorial dept. Or perhaps we go nuclear and hubby becomes a house husband!!
The main characters in chapters 1 and 2 both took steps towards positive changes in their life, they did not just find new satisfaction with their life before the visit to the librarian. So I am confident that this will happen in chapter 3, too.
I also didn’t like how they treated her after her many years of great work. Unfortunately, such stories happen left and right. So I also hope she’ll find her way to shine at work she would like once again.
oof. That was a struggle reading this week’s section. A lot of new vocabulary for me, but also some sentences that were more complex, so I had to read and re-read, and in some cases just resort to google translating the sentence to understand the meaning, especially
the description of Natsumi trying to convince the author みづえ先生 to publish a serial in her magazine
Thoughts about Natsumi’s current station in life:
As others have remarked, the story really resonates. This feeling where at some point you were excited about the future with the wind at your back, a clear road ahead. And then due to life’s twists and turns -unexpected child care, elder care, health issues, job loss etc - you end up swirling around in a back eddy barely doing either and reassessing your self-worth or what it means to be successful. Natsumi seems to feel like a failure in both her career and family goals - kind of caught between two parts of her life where neither gets the attention she feels they deserve.
The so-called work-life balance that her boss imposed on her (for her benefit) left her feeling like she wasn’t succeeding at either. Natsumi’s situation is unlike the previous story with Ryo, who wants to create boundaries on his full-time company job so he can balance it with an emotionally satisfying antique-shop venture (a dual job situation with no master or slave relationship). Natsumi on the other hand, seems to think that she can only succeed if she is fully in one world (publishing) or the other (full time mother), although she doesn’t seem to keen about devoting her life solely the daily grind of caring for a child.
Speaking of which, I looked up Futaba’s water bottle that Natsumi has to disassemble and clean with bleach. It’s one that has a cute little straw that pops up when you open the lid. Seems so great until you realize how difficult it is to clean. I think this is the waterbottle type she describes. These should be illegal !
PS. Almost forgot, my favorite word for the week: お茶を濁す (to muddy the tea) which my dictionary states is “to be evasive, to give an evasive answer” I wonder if this expression comes from using tea for fortune telling…
It’s fascinating how many different ways one can introduce a character (and wool felting) without it feeling too repetitive. This time Baymax from Big Hero 6 becomes a point of association. Hehe, cute.
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