ロジカとラッカセイ ・ Rojica and Rakkasei 🥜 Week 3

Week 3 May 20 2023
Pages 41-56
Chapter 3
Previous week Week 2
Next week Week 4
Home Thread ロジカとラッカセイ ・ Rojica and Rakkasei

We’re reading volume 1 of this manga as part of the Beginner Book Club.

6eea3ec6-75cc-410a-bce2-75c143d0124d

Vocabulary Sheet

Grammar Sheet

Discussion Guidelines

  • Please blur / hide any major events in the current week’s pages (however early they occur), like so: text here (that’s: [spoiler]text here[/spoiler]).
  • When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked
  • Join the conversation — it’s fun!

The page numbers for ebook readers might be off by one or two. Some pages have physical page numbers on them, and you can use that to find out much off it is for you!

Participation Poll

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m planning to catch up later
  • I’m skipping this book
  • I’m reading this book after the club has finished

0 voters

For our participants who have never read anything harder: How are you doing so far?

  • It’s going really well
  • It’s going well
  • I’m struggling, but I manage
  • I’m struggling so much I’m thinking of dropping the book
  • I’m no longer reading the book
  • I have read harder manga/books than this one but I still need to click a poll option

0 voters

(This poll is anonymous.)

8 Likes
spoilers

Welp, that turned horrifying relatively quickly. It definitely has that adventure time feel of everyone looking happy, but something is just very wrong.I sure thought the husband was saying “Help”, but I guess he managed to outdo my expectations. Well played.

12 Likes
spoilers

yabe

I am really impressed by how this manga is asking very hard questions in such ambiguous and indirect ways. I also like how it doesn’t attempt to answer them either.

Even the reactions of Rakka and Rojika are very interesting… like it seems it’s shocking to them, but not really in the way a human would be. Feels like common sense is very different in their world.

12 Likes
Spoilers

When I posted my nomination I was really anxious as to how people would feel about this chapter. Like… the manga looks super cute and fun, and that’s also the feeling of the first two chapters, and then this drops. (If anybody feels like their expectations of the manga were betrayed and doesn’t want to continue reading: I’m really sorry!)

It’s such a trip too. Every new fact makes the whole thing worse. I was like…

  • Nobody has seen him? Haha, very suspicious. I wonder what will be wrong with him!
  • Oh, seeing those machines from the back and Rojica/Rakkasei’s expression can’t mean anything good. Guess he is ill?
  • Guess he is… very, very ill? Close to dying?
  • Oh no, that’s how you feed him?
  • So… he can only communicate via morse code, and you can’t even read it?
  • When did you last see him, Shi-san? Did I read this correctly? FIFTY years ago?
  • Oh my god, and on top of all of this he is from a short-lived race and supposed to be dead for a long time now?!

(And then much later I learnt what the morse code means.)


On a lighter note, this pair of panels was great. They have very different ideas of “beautiful”:

Kindle_2023-05-20 03.16.54.174


Which questions do you feel like have been asked so far? And in the earlier chapters too? I’m absolutely terrible at interpreting stories, so I’m kinda curious as to how you see this.

(Also, I can hear your GIF :laughing:)

15 Likes
Slightly off-topic

Look, WK forum software, I know you want this to add up to a 100%, but… just no :frowning_face:

Edit: Thank you to whoever just voted, the bars have the same length again!

3 Likes
spoilers

I was confused at first, because "no sane morse system has mixed 4 and 5 long letters. Then I realized that this is in fact a manga, and being a sane morse code system isn’t a requirement.

5 Likes
Spoilers

I’m not sure what you mean by “no sane morse system has mixed 4 and 5 long letters”? And I don’t think the manga invented Wabun code?

3 Likes
spoilers

Mostly that the average length of a character in regular morse code is 3, and the codes that have more than 4 symbols are reserved for numbers and special characters, while wabun code has an average length of 4+ symbols per letter, and 5 symbol long codes are pretty common.
Strange system is all I’m saying. And that I originally was confused about how I should translate that to letters (hence the thought of it saying “HELP”).

4 Likes
Spoilers

In case it’s not obvious, this is all my subjective interpretation - I am not sure what the intentions of the author were exactly.

Let’s start with the most “obvious” one, from chapter 3, which Rakka basically speaks out loud. Is マシュ一さん’s husband happy?

You mention that eventually the meaning of the morse code in the monitor is explained / deciphered, so this might not be a mystery eventually. But the idea is the basic question of at which point is it still ok to artificially extend a loved one’s life, which I personally feel is a extremely hard question to answer.

From humans’ perspective, I feel most of them would agree that this is too much and that he should be put out of their misery - but I feel this is just a rationalization of what a human would feel in that situation.

Is he suffering or in agony? Did he willingly accept to be connected to the machine? He clearly is conscious and can communicate. Perhaps he feels his extended lifetime is something incredible for his race, and being with his loved one is something he enjoys. After all, he’s from a different race. How does that race feel about death? What views do they have on the after life?

Even when they don’t reach such a dreadful state, humans grow old. They start becoming unable to do many things they could do, losing their ability to move by themselves, the ability to see, to hear… but they might still enjoy meeting their grand-grand kids and giving them sweets - while others feel they are a burden, or prisoners of an old body.

Can we really decide what’s best for マシュ一さん’s husband just from the information we have so far? Gorbit99 called it “horrifying”, and I called it “shocking”. Is it really? Does he agree? We don’t know. We just, biasedly, internalized the situation and thought it was terrible. Personally, I’d never want to live connected to machines - but this is just my bias. Maybe for him, it’s a blessing.

For chapter 2, Rojika mentions typhoons and says:

数の人類が死に至ったらしいよ

I thought the wording was strange. I am still unsure if 数の人類 a normal construction. Isn’t that “a lot of humanities” or “a lot of mankinds”, and not “a lot of humans”? Does this mean that humanity got wiped out several times, or something?

Actually I was confused at first and thought that when Rakka replies "人類ってばかなの” she was actually calling Rojika dumb for saying “a lot of humanities”, though eventually realized it was just “Is mankind stupid?”.

But that’s not the interesting question, the question is precisely what Rojika does next. He (she?) goes out, into the danger, and then explains he understand what’s basically the “thrill of danger”. Why do people enjoy doing this dangerous things, things that could easily kill them? It goes against natural survival instincts. Isn’t it very strange how such a thrill even exists? Rakka just takes the very rational point of view - it’s just dumb.

I feel these differences in point of view, implicitly make these kind of tacit questions. What is “beautiful”? Clearly Rakka and Rojika have different ideas about it, but their differences are so extreme. It’s somewhat different to the opinions of two humans would have - they would still have the common ground of being humans. Rojika and Rakka don’t seem to have that, even if they have other kind of things in common.

11 Likes
spoilers

It’s not a mystery, not sure if シュ一さん or the gang will ever understand it, but you have the power of google on your side. We even mentioned the exact kind of code in the spoilers above. I recommend going ahead and translating it for yourself.

6 Likes
Spoilers

Oh I see now … never mind anything I said then.

5 Likes
Spoilers

I have to say, it was the opposite for me, lol. When it got nominated, I wasn’t looking forward to it too much because it felt… too cute and fun for me? But I was somehow curious with the trigger warnings and things like that. The previous chapters already dropped some interesting hints, but this chapter really got me hooked on it further.

8 Likes
spoiler

No one is questioning why しーさん has seen them both 50 years ago, but still looks very… young? And why did he carry a cross on his shoulder in the timelapse? :thinking:
This is currently my main concern that I hope will be answered :smiley:

p46

美形揃いで

Apparently 揃 is not on WK. Even seems to not be a Joyo Kanji, though the words that I have seen on Jisho range from JLPT N2-N1. What kind of word is 揃いで?

6 Likes
Page 46

My understanding is that 揃い is a suffix that can be appended to nouns to say “matching”. 美形揃い would be “matching beauties”. で I believe is just the particle で - in this case used to mark the reason (they were famous).

5 Likes
Spoilers

This chapter actually met my expectations of the manga going in. Sure, the artwork is cute and might seem disarming, but even from the cover, I got the feeling that things might be more bleak than the art shows, wuth that overgrown 止まれ sign giving some hints. Odds are very good I am going to have no self control and I’m going to finish the manga this weekend. :sweat_smile:

I had never heard of wabun as a code system, but when I saw the 4 symbols, my assumption of what 4-kana combination was likely in that situation ended up bearing out. As soon as I looked up the chart and saw the first kana was what it was, I had a little bit of pride that I assumed correctly.

Definitely an intriguing manga, and I’m all on board with it!

8 Likes

You’re not very good at following schedules I see :joy: This is what, the third time this happens in a row?

3 Likes

し~ :shushing_face:

2 Likes

Oh no, quite the opposite. I thought your post was very thought-provoking. And I’m pretty sure the writer had in mind that quite a few readers wouldn’t know/figure out what the morse code says, so I do think he is trying to evoke the kinds of questions that you mentioned.

5 Likes

I didn’t even realize the stuff on the monitor was real, so thanks for sharing that. I’m not at all surprised by what it says. :sweat_smile:

6 Likes
Spoilers

Oh noo this chapter was so sad! :cry: I initially thought along the same lines as @2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz where I was like “well I find this really unsettling, but I shouldn’t judge too much when I don’t know all the details”, but then I deciphered the code…:fearful: (thank you everyone for mentioning it was wabun code so I could figure it out) It makes me feel so sad that on page 49 you can see the husband repeating it over and over on the panel.

And then the happy little illustration of the two of them when they were young at the very end of the chapter (page 55) :sob:

Sorry, got the formatting wrong in my previous post so the spoilers weren’t hidden, then panicked and deleted it instead of fixing it :sweat_smile:

6 Likes