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Discussion questions
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!
What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?
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?
I’m slowly starting to see what the author enjoys writing about: societal norms, questioning the way things are, and flipping that around in ways that can be portrayed as disturbing.
I won’t go so far as to say I was disturbed but I definitely I felt a little uncomfortable/nervous reading the part where the protagonist mets Kenta and Makoto but funny enough it was quite innocent and sweet.
Curious to see the direction in which this story goes.
Yesss, I guess it counts, but for me main appeal of polyamory is no strict rules about the number of people and their mutual relations. Whatever suits people’s personal situation and gets everybody’s agreement is fine.
And here we swap one strict rule (couple) for another (triple).
It’s just one flavour of polyamory, the way I see it having triples being socially acceptable could be a stepping stone towards normalising other poly constellations as well. I don’t feel like that’s going to be a focus of the story, I’m just being optimistic about what would happen if triples became more commonplace in real life
I ended up reading all of this short story yesterday. I will refrain from commenting for now since I don’t think I can comment only on week 1… It’ll be super interesting to see everyone’s discussion at these stopping points, so I’m looking forward to that.
And I did so well keeping pace during the main story.
Interesting set up overall, though I feel like it took me forever to read through the section with orange shirt/blue shirt, as it felt a bit tedious. Also there were several random pop culture things I had to look up which sent me on google tangents. Like Wideshows - for anyone else who might be interesting, here is an article complaining about them which I found interesting/amusing.
Very brief thoughts on plot
The set up is interesting - I like the polyamory angle, though it isn’t quite as compelling right off the bat. I’m interested in what kind of commentary she will make - there are some obvious parallels to resistance to same-sex marriage which are somewhat mentioned (always a bit of a shock to remember that Japan still has yet to legalized same-sex marriage… but that is another conversation for another day). Asides from, looking forward to reading me, but not quite the page turner that 殺人出産 was.
Before I clued in that that was the premise, I was really confused as to why the mother was asking her daughter whether she was about to have threesome out of the blue, ha.
I wish my Japanese were good enough to accidentally breeze through a story like this For me it’s a whole production to read ~15 pages of a novel.
I didn’t realise Makoto was a name at first. I had just learned the kanji so I was very excited that I didn’t have to look up this ‘vocab’
Also, for old times’ sake I’d like to point out that I came across another mystery られる and this time I did realise that 叱 was missing
Kind of hard to comment much about the plot, cause not that much has happened so far. I wonder where this is going; we’re already a third of the way through
What do you reckon the mother means to say in that sentence before she cuts herself off? Something like ‘right, you especially [would obviously be going on a twosome date], but you know, it’s all the rage these days’?
Finished the first section of this last night. So far, things are eerily wholesome. It’s interesting that we’re following a younger protagonist this time around; I’m curious how Murata-sensei writes teen characters.
I agree that the constant use of 藍色の男の子 and オレンジ色の男の子 bothered me a little. I know it’s to keep us in-line with Mayumi at the time, when she still didn’t know their names. Still, I probably would’ve just shortened them to their colors.
Since no one else did, I figured I’d take a crack at this. I assumed that she was placing us into her explanation of how becoming a トリプル is different from what her mom said (just walking over to someone and hitting on them). We, the reader, would either be part of a couple already, or we’d be a single. It falls in line with what happened to them; Mayumi doesn’t immediately flirt with the boys, but instead chats with them a little before proposing a date. That was my interpretation, anyway.