What are those "drops" between the lines?

Anyone know what are those?

It’s between the lines and not selectable. There’s few of those in the book I’m currently reading (時をかける少女).

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Emphasis. You’ll also see them as interpuncts. The use is similar to emphasising something with italics in English.

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thanks! I couldn’t find anything, but adding emphasis to my search returned a reddit thread.

It’s called 圏点 apparently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/bpsjxo/strange_punctuation_in_a_book_what_do_these/

TIL :smile:

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I find it difficult to find sources corroborating this idea, but I feel like occasionally they are also used to pick out e.g. a noun as an aid to parsing when there’s a long run of kana that would otherwise be a bit confusing and need reading several times. Emphasis is definitely the most common use, though.