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Day 11 Progress:
お隣の天使様 二冊 - 73.44% → 80.64%
スローループ - Chapter 3
I’m not really enjoying 天使様. Actually, it’s driving me insane. Excuse me while I rant a little bit.
My primary reason for choosing it as a first read was that it’s a SOL/romance title and I enjoy those, plus I had heard great things about it being a fairly straightforward and pleasant series. On top of that, I figured it probably won’t have too many difficult or made-up fantasy words and insane kanji for me to deal with. In the early days I could only read a few lines or maybe 1% and was much more focused on the mechanics of reading than the story itself. Now, I can read a bit more comfortably than I used to so now I can properly get into the story… which would be great if I could actually get into it.
天使様 is just boring. Boring, and also pretty frustrating to read. The heroine, 真昼, is a paragon of beauty and the apple every boy’s eye besides 周, our apathetic protagonist who has no interest in her… or so the author claims, before inserting lengthy sentences about 真昼’s beauty and virtuosity in every chapter. In fact, I’m pretty sure 愛らしい and 可愛らしい are some of the most common words in the series, considering they’re pretty much used to describe every single action 真昼 does. It feels like the author is spending way more time idolizing her than actually creating an actual relationship between them, and 周 himself is constantly smitten by her beauty, resulting in unpleasant obsessions like this particularly egregious example I came across in today’s reading:
The passage (with my own half-assed translation)
手入れして撫でて、まではよかったのだ。
To hear that Mahiru holds the stuffed bear (he gave her) and pets it, that much makes him happy.
ただそこから続いたのは、耳を疑うような可愛らしい行為だった。
However, she continued to speak and described doing something so cute he doubted his own ears.
抱き締めて一緒に寝る。
She held the bear when sleeping.
あの真昼が、くまのぬいぐるみを抱えて寝る。
That Mahiru, held the bear in her arms and went to sleep.
真昼の寝顔を見た事があるが、まさに天使のような寝顔だった。
Amane has seen Mahiru’s sleeping face and it was truly an angelic expression.
あの寝顔で、ぬいぐるみを愛おしそうに抱き締めて寝ている。美少女が、くまのぬいぐるみと一緒に寝る。
With that expression, she held the bear tenderly and slept. She was a beautiful woman but she slept together with the bear.
想像すると、ものすごく可愛らしく眺めていたくなるような光景が脳裏に広がって、顔が赤くなる。
When he imagined it, an adorable scene that he desperately wanted to see unfolded in his mind and his face turned red.
Imagine that sentiment being cycled over and over again, ad nauseam, over the last two volumes.
If I were fluent in Japanese, this probably wouldn’t annoy me as much as it does, but unfortunately it takes me probably four times longer than with English to get through a Japanese sentence even when I’m reading smoothly. And my irritation definitely builds up the longer it takes me to read.
Will I take my own advice, read only what I enjoy reading, and give up? Probably not, I’m a stubborn (and dumb) motherfucker who wants to see the first series they ever started in Japanese through to the end. Plus, the novels have actually been a great help for my learning, including (rather bizarrely, I feel) quite a few literary grammar points as well as showing more conversational Japanese writing when 周 and his friends talk like the high schoolers they are. So there’s been plenty of learning at the very least, even if I do take some considerable mental damage every time I see him talk about 真昼’s 可憐さ and her 美貌…
Word of the Day: 猫を被る - to feign friendliness; to play the hypocrite. Kind of a contrarian phrase to me considering how standoffish and honest to their own desires cats really are…