Week 7: ユージニア 🌹

Join the Advanced Book Club here!

ユージニア :rose: Home Thread

Week 7

image

Start Date: Dec 17
Previous Part: Week 6
Next Part: Week 8

Reading:

Week Start Date Chapter Start Page Page Count
Week 7 Dec 17 Chapter 7 199 29

Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • When asking for help, please mention the chapter and page number. Also mention what version of the book you are reading.
  • Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun! :durtle:

Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll.
(Please feel free to update your status whenever you like!)

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I am no longer reading the book

0 voters

Proper Noun Readings

Previous Proper Nouns
Name Reading Notes Proof
青澤 緋紗子 あおさわ ひさこ the blind girl (ca. 12 yo at the time of the event) (Week 1)
雑賀 満喜子 さいが まきこ ch. 1 narrator (Week 2)
順二 じゅんじ ch. 3 narrator’s older brother (Week 3)
誠一 せいいち ch. 3 narrator’s older brother
ヒサ / 久代 ひさよ the blind girl from week 1
マキ ch. 3 narrator (young girl)
相澤 あいざわ doctor whose birthday is being celebrated
相澤 祐 あいざわ たすく blind girl’s younger brother, youngest son of the family
キミ ca. 15 year-old maid of the Aizawa family
青澤 望 あおさわ のぞむ eldest son of the Aosawa family (Week 4)
2 Likes

Hmm, a chapter that doesn’t end with “Hisako is clearly the murderer”? That makes a change :slight_smile:

Interesting that the author chooses to give us only a rather distant view of the delivery guy, mediated through somebody who never even spoke to him.

I think this (i.e. the delivery guy) is the first character we’ve seen who’s been parted from a woman close to them (his sister), which sort of lines up with the sentiments in the poem in the prologue. But I suspect it’s more complicated than that…

PS @NicoleIsEnough the week 6 and home-thread posts don’t yet link forward to this week-7 thread.

9 Likes

Yes I know. I was travelling when adding this post, so I decided to stick with the bare minimum. Will update tonight, thanks for the ping!

EDIT: Should be fixed now, thanks all for your patience!

4 Likes

Not my favorite chapter. I found it confusing and not very engaging.

6 Likes

Interesting, I actually liked this chapter quite a bit. There’s something compellingly ominous about seeing the same stranger over and over.

7 Likes

That’s a very interesting observation. I need to reread that poem at some point, it was so long ago I forget the details. He didn’t strike me as the poetic type, but who knows. The ending did seem to imply that he may have known what he was delivering after all. Or maybe something unrelated was his “answer”? To what question? This is all so vague and ominous and mysterious. I do hope there’s nothing supernatural, but the book’s world certainly seems to be full of premonitions and strange coincidences.
On a more practical level, in this chapter he was never seen on a bike, only on foot. Where did he get that bike from, and when?

7 Likes

ギリギリ読めましたー、けどちょっとこの章は難しくて分かりづらかった😅です😅

8 Likes

It was because the narrator who interested in the young man unilaterally seemed to be unrelated to the murder case, so that reading this chapter was somehow exhausting. :sweat_smile:

When I read the last phrase of the young man in this chapter (“I have my answer at last. This is my answer”), I also remembered the poem in prologue… :blush:

It is difficult for me to image how can be related the story with a third eye to a contrivance of the murder case (really ominous :thinking:), nevertheless I’m looking forward to reading next chapter :laughing:

7 Likes

I was late to finish week 7 (just now!) and so I’m just barely in time to start the next 2 chapters. I’m going to go ahead and prolong the Hisako-is-the-killer theory and say that somehow her ability to ‘see’ without sight is related to the delivery man’s 3rd eye obsession.

But overall this first half of this chapter was a slow and confusing read, only the second half really felt like it connected. If I weren’t behind already I’d probably re-read the first half to make more sense of it.

10 Likes

Finally I also made it across the line :sweat_smile:

Very cool observation, this didn’t cross my mind at all!

Or maybe he even is the culprit? He’d be the first one to have a proper motive after all :thinking:

Amazing speculation :exploding_head: Keep’em coming please!

Somewhere in between I had this epiphany that for me many of the chapters somehow feel like JLPT listening exercises :exploding_head: When is something relevant being mentioned, how does it connect to what we already know, how does it all fit together? :crazy_face: send halp plz

7 Likes

Does he have a proper motive though? We haven’t seen any kind of relationship between him and the family yet, have we?

I had the same thought but believed it too obvious to be worth posting :rofl: If I remember correctly, Hisako had her hair in おかっぱ style since she started middle school, which would mean bangs covering her forehead where a third eye might be. It all fits.

7 Likes

Hm okay maybe I should say he has a proper reason - to somehow revenge his sister who was killed. Whether or not that murder is related to the family, or whether he maybe just wanted to kill somebody (or a larger amount of people) and decided to aim for the birthday party is of course unknown so far.

But I agree that it would be too obvious if the murder stepped up after 50% of the book, saying “oh btw it was me” :thinking: (I mean I know there are criminal novels that make it known up-front who the killer was, and the whole book revolves around how it was done, but this book doesn’t feel like it fits that type.)

7 Likes