消滅世界 ☠️ Book Club ・ Week 13

消滅世界 ・ Week 13

Week 13 2 Jul 2022
End page 238
End loc (Kindle) 2408
End phrase 近づいて来るようだった
Pages 18
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Participants

  • I’m reading along (I’ve read no further than the end of this week’s section)
  • I’ll catch up soon (I haven’t yet finished last week’s section)
  • I’m reading ahead (I’ve read beyond the end of this week’s section)
  • I’ve read this book already but I’m here for discussion
  • I have no intention of catching up or the club has already finished, but I’m using the forums as reference

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Vocab Sheet

Anybody should feel free to add to the vocab sheet. Read the guidelines on the first sheet- even if a word is not yet included you can use the spreadsheet as a tool to get help.

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
  3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading need to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as such.

Discussion Questions

Feel free to use these questions as a framework or a starting point for responses. I also encourage people to post their own discussion questions!

  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?

Oof, haha. I’m not sure what to think at this point. There’s this pervasive sense of wrongness I just can’t seem to shake under everything else.

(I think this happened in week 12 or so?) One scene I thought was striking was the one where she meets her old friend at the hospital, and they both think the other is a brainwashed, poor fool. It felt a bit blunt, but at least she’s going into this experience with both eyes wide open…? Kind of. For all that she was hoodwinking herself about her religion, ‘family’. In the end, her former husband and her aren’t really on the same page at all.

I’m just really confused about our MC’s motivations, and it’s not helping that they keep changing so much. :see_no_evil:

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Same, lol. That’s been my single biggest frustration with this book. That, and the fact that not a whole lot seems to be happening.

Does anyone know how to interpret the following sentence, mainly the bit about 子供ちゃん?

その整った笑顔が「子供ちゃん」と一瞬重なって、ゆらりと眩暈がした。

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For a second, the smile on his face seems to overlap/overlay with that of the children - that is, for a second, they seemed to look the same, or his features reminded her of the children’s.

She’s remarked before about how all the kids and their caretakers use the exact same facial expressions. I guess now other people, such as her husband, are adapting, so to speak, and start to look the same as the children (to her, or really? We do tend to assume similar habits as those around us… :thinking:).

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Ah yes, that makes complete sense! The ‘theme’ of week 12 and 13 seems to be that even her husband is slowly getting Stepford-Wifed.

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Yeah. I think it’s really creepy. Everyone seems to be slowly becoming a ‘perfect model human’ in the test city. :nauseated_face:

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I’m curious about the funeral and burial. How similar/different is it compared to normal Japan’s?