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lol I learned 汽 today on WK (although I still wouldn’ta been able to read 汽笛 since I won’t learn 笛 for another level).
I read Seeds 8-9 of GREEN, finishing vol 2! I had planned on reading the あとがき comic too, but it’s completely handwritten and I didn’t feel like trying to puzzle that out. Ninomiya-sensei’s handwriting can be hard to read sometimes.
Seed 8
We meet old man Sakurai, who lives 4 houses down from the Onos and owns mountain land on which grow trees whose fallen leaves are used in fertilizer. Fitting for someone named after a tree lol. Obaa-chan and Wako both don’t like him and refer to him as things like ヒヒジジイ and クソジジイ. Wako’s convinced he hates her, but according to Makoto, he’s just shy/socially anxious (人見知り).
Sakurai’s son ran away with a woman from Tōkyō years ago, so now he hates all Tōkyō women. So it may be that he’s not good with strangers, but he does actually dislike Wako. Makoto takes Wako with him to rake and collect leaves one day when Sakurai won’t be accompanying him, and when they’re bringing the big cylindrical baskets back, Wako gets ahead of herself and accidentally goes careering down the mountainside, crashing into and breaking a stone grave marker (she thinks it’s Sakurai’s wife’s, but it’s actually his pet goat’s). Sakurai finds her there and she runs off (which Makoto doesn’t learn about until later), so when he confiscates Makoto’s baskets of leaves, he calls him クソジジイ in a fit of heatedness. That evening, Wako goes back to apologize to Sakurai, and it seems at first that he might have come to like her. When Makoto called him クソジジイ, he remembered his son shouting that at him as he left—a Tōkyō woman didn’t steal his son away, he decided to leave all on his own. …But he considers Makoto like a son, so he tells him not to marry any women of questionable background (馬の骨) lol. Wako-chan can’t win 'em all, it seems.
Seed 9
Wako’s staying with the Seiwas because she and Makoto are fighting—though the word she uses is 交戦中 lol—because she doesn’t want to go job-hunting despite graduating in a month (and she lies about it too) since she wants to stay with the Onos as Makoto’s wife, but Makoto isn’t planning on getting married just yet.
lol and we still haven’t met Nozomi’s mother and grandmother, as the two of them had won a trip to Hawai’i and are there currently. Last time, it was Saipei. I wonder where it’ll be next time.
For half the year, the Seiwas grow grapes, and for the other half, they grow strawberries, so Nozomi takes Wako strawberry-picking. いちご食べ放題! For 30 minutes, at least, since she’s technically a customer. But after lunch, he shows her their “secret weapon,” 幻のイチゴ、「彩のイチゴ」!! Yeah, I dunno what 彩 is supposed to mean as a standalone kanji since it doesn’t seem to be a word with that reading, but I did find out that 光彩 means “brilliance; splendor; luster,” so maybe the name has something to do with that? Anyway, they just look like regular ol’ strawberries, but they’re the best strawberries Wako has tasted in her life, although the way she tries to express it, it comes off as the exact opposite lol (firm like a hard banana, melts in her mouth like a fully-ripe peach, sweet like a slightly bitter old mikan). A single one of them costs ¥200! They’re Nozomi’s pet project, and he’s planning to sell them to rich people and get rich himself and buy a strawberry-red Porshe.
lmao her day began with Seiwa-san flipping the table at breakfast, and it ends with her flipping the table at dinner. Both father and son were drunk, and their extolment of Nozomi’s good points (for why Wako should marry him instead) turned into them dissing Makoto. She got fed up with it, flipped the table, and ran out into the night, where she ran into Makoto who was on his way to come to pick her up. She tearfully proclaims that she’ll look for a job, and she overhears later Makoto telling obaa-chan that he does plan on proposing to her eventually, but he’s fine with waiting since she seems so excited about finding a job lmao she’s like, “So I didn’t have to find one after all???” but she can’t exactly take it back now.
I read 2 pages of 2.43, putting me at page 51.
mostly off-topic today
We learn Hata-kantoku is 40. And I am reminded that one day not long after the anime ended, a short smut fic between Yori and Hata showed up on AO3, and I was just desperate enough for 2.43 fic to try reading it. In my defense, I’d thought Yori was already in college when Yuni was in middle school and he was mid-20s now and whatever age difference between them didn’t really matter that much. Luckily, the person’s writing is absolute shit and I noped my way outta there. Yori’s actually only 3 years older than Yuni, 1 year older than Subaru and them. He’s the same age as some of the kids Hata coaches (and maybe teaches; idk what class he teaches). Oh, I can only hope that person hadn’t read the novels; I’m pretty sure the person translating them on tumblr was already past when Yori’s age is mentioned at that point. I wish I could scrub the memory that that fic exists from my brain tbh
So Ochi apparently has really nice handwriting, though he just thinks it’s normal. When Hata goes off praising him on it, he just kinda thinks, “You’re not dying, are you?” lol. He doesn’t understand why he’s being praised just for writing some things in magic marker. That makes two characters now who canonically have pretty handwriting: Ochi and Aoki (and Oda apparently sometimes gets lost admiring it; Aoki’s teased him about it before).
I’d wanted to read more, but I was tired.
Some vocab of note:
椚* (くぬぎ) [noun] sawtooth oak
枹* (なら) [noun] oak, especially Quercus serrata
欅* (けやき) [noun] Japanese zelkova
ごま塩頭 (ごましおいあたま) [noun] salt-and-pepper hair. Though, literally it’s sesame-and-salt, which I find interesting.
*all of these can be written with other kanji (though of course, being plants, they’re usually written in katakana), I just chose the one I liked best. 枹 though, while I could type it with my phone’s IME, I couldn’t type it with my laptop’s using literally any of its 6 readings. Which makes me sad, because it’s prettier than its more common counterpart, 楢.