殺人出産 🤰🔪 Book Club ・ Week 1

殺人出産 ・ Week 1

|Week 1|24 April 2021|
|–|–|–|
|End page |18|
|End loc (Kindle) |111|
|End phrase |話が纏まってしまった。|
|Next week|Click!|
|Home thread|Click!||

How is the reading going?
  • I am reading along
  • I am catching up
  • I am dropping this book

0 voters

Vocabulary

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

Discussion questions (cheers @jhol613)

  1. What sentence/passage gave you the most difficulty? Feel free to request some help, or if you figured it out on your own break it down for the rest of us!
  2. What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?
  3. Was there any passage that you found particularly intriguing? Did it resonate with you (either positively or negatively)? Was it surprising? Offer any insight or new perspective? Was it just beautifully written?
6 Likes

It took me a while to tell the different characters apart, but I think it’s this:

瑞穂 みずほ a prospective ‘Birthgiver’
チカ colleague of the protagonist
育子 いくこ the protagonist
佐藤早紀子 さとうさきこ 瑞穂’s replacement
There were a few nuances I didn't quite get.

What does 想う mean in the context of this story? It seems to be used when referring to the person they want to kill? Does it have a specific nuance when 想 is used instead of 思?

I couldn’t figure out how to parse 先生からこっぴどくられていた.

What does 子宮に処置をする entail? Just contraception in general, or something specific?

What on earth is a 環の部屋?

The most 'whoa' passage for me was....

… the passage discussing the punishment for murder: forced birth. It says that women have their contraceptives forcibly removed and men have an artificial womb forcibly implanted, but that’s not all that is required to get pregnant… there must be other things forcibly happening right? :scream: :confounded: Or are we assuming they’re free to remain abstinent? :thinking:

7 Likes

I think you skipped a kanji here? It is こっ酷い - Jisho.org + 叱る - Jisho.org in passive - was badly scolded by the teacher

(haven’t read everything yet so I cannot really comment on the other stuff, sorry!)

5 Likes

Heh, you’re right, that’s what must have happened. I downloaded the Kindle book and then stripped it into plain text, but that kanji must’ve been culled in the process :thinking: When I open it in the Kindle reader I see it! That does make me paranoid about how many kanji got culled LOL

EDIT: I looked into it a bit and I notice that when I select the text and copy it within the Kindle app and then paste it in another app, that kanji is not included :thinking: So at least it’s a problem with the Kindle book itself, not with my script :sweat_smile:

3 Likes

環 is a name.

I don’t think we have this explored further, so these are mostly guesses, but I assumed in vitro (IVF), and some sort of supervision during pregnancy, possibly while still in prison/prison hospital.
I mean, they have to make sure that prisoner won’t hurt a fetus in any way by drinking alcohol for example, right.
Also I hope this doesn’t count as a spoiler, but even normal pregnancies get a lot of medical care here, so these special jail cases should get even more.

Also I’m fascinated by the disappearing kanji issue. Why this one in particular? :thinking:

7 Likes

Ahh, that sounds (ever so slightly) less horrific. They do mention artificial insemination a lot! So not quite as bad as the Handmaid’s Tale then :wink:

3 Likes

Finished this week’s reading. Really interesting so far :slight_smile:

I took it the same as you, that 想う人 is being used to refer to the person they want to kill.

処置 can also mean disposal, so first I thought that would mean removal of the uterus, but later on we learn about the punishment of having to give birth, where the removal of the contraceptive device is mentioned. I think that’s the thing that gets implanted here when they talk about “treatment of the uterus”.

Yes, I also assumed that.

I understood the passage to say that they get imprisoned for life, so they would be in some sort of prison + hospital, I guess.

7 Likes

Tyat has to be 世間様. :see_no_evil: I also like 乖離 and 挫折. I think the kanji are beautiful.

The content is… As expected, haha. I expect this book will be quite challenging to read, thematically.

4 Likes

So I am reading on Bookwalker, and want to read through and mark the words I don’t know so I can look them up when I am done with the week’s section, but I don’t have any more highlights/markings after page 14, and have used them up. Do anyone know of a way to get around this?

I remember some discussion on another thread about how reading passages like this hits differently in Japanese somehow…I really felt it with this one. Usually I’m not that squeamish but somehow I still feel a bit uneasy after reading it :upside_down_face:

5 Likes

Unfortunately there is no way around this other than deleting highlights :frowning:

Maybe if you have so many unknown words, it might be a good idea anyways to break the week’s assignment in smaller chunks and work through them one by one? (I remember there were some breaks, maybe you can use those as natural stopgaps?)

4 Likes

Thanks, the only things I could find when googling was when you said something similar in 2019. I just hoped that things had changed since then :sweat_smile:

2 Likes

Unfortunately not, sorry :tired_face:

(But they recently did an overhaul of their mobile app (the stuff that’s around the actual reader), and I like the new bookshelves much better, so maybe one day…)

2 Likes

Don’t worry. It’s the ebook. Maybe there was a typo and they fixed it by replacing it with the correct kanji as a picture for some reason? 00003
However, I scrolled through it and it only occurs again once in the second story (at about 65%) with the very same kanji.

Sentence for reference

お母さんのお小言と違って、誠に00003られると甘い気持ちが湧きあがる。


The book’s definitely interesting. Curious to see more explanation of how this weird system and the punishment works and why. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense so far.
A bit harder than Konbini Ningen to begin with, I think. Loads of specific vocab and some longer, more complex sentences but I guess it’ll get easier a few weeks in.

6 Likes

It’s an interesting theory, but it’s scaling nicely for a picture :thinking: I used the largest font in the PC app and it still was crisp. But I also cannot copy it!

It’s just a 128x128px .jpeg. I scaled it down in the post. You can open the image in a new tab and look at it in full size. :smiley:

It boggles my mind that it would somehow be ‘easier’ to insert an image into the ebook than to change the text :sweat_smile: But yeah, when I open the ‘source code’ in Calibre I see the image file as well. That does make it easier to find these dropped kanji.

EDIT: Could it be something to do with there existing an extremely similar kanji? :thinking:

My IME suggests 叱, but the book has 𠮟.

1 Like

Now this whole kanji-image-voodoo-issue got me curious, and I wouldn’t have guessed it, but it’s the same in the Bookwalker app :joy_cat: :woman_facepalming:

I cannot select the kanji on its own, and if I select the whole phrase and copy it, the kanji is left out.

Jisho also mentions the two similar kanji, btw:

But Kanjipedia thinks that this kanji is the main form: 𠮟 | 漢字一字 | 漢字ペディア

:woman_shrugging:

4 Likes

Totally unrelated, but are you using a userscript on jisho to show the pitch accent?

2 Likes

It’s actually a browser extension called jisho-pitcher.

4 Likes