#Japanese Novel

[dokushoclub]

わたし、定時（ていじ）で帰ります

For the month of October I'm reading the novel わたし、定時で帰ります by Akeno Kaeruko. The main character is Higashiyama Yui and it's her golden rule that she goes home on time. No over time! However she works at a company with very questionable executions of the labor laws and her coworkers seem even excited about giving all their life to this company.

I'm a bit more than 50 pages into the book and love the dark humour. The coworker characters still seem a bit like caricatures at this point, but the main character's struggles to reconcile her own beliefs and her work reality make for a very entertaining read.

I'm familiar with most of the work related vocabulary and also appreciate the fact that Yui's story is mostly told through dialogue between the coworkers. I'm making good progress but in line with the spirit of the book, I'm only able to read it whenever I can make time for it during my lunch break and after I've gone home ^^

[ihayachii]

Review of one of my favorite books 🇯🇵

跡を消す means "Erase the Traces"

But what do they mean by traces? It basically means, erase the existence of what the deceased left behind.. especially if the landlord or the police found out about the dead body weeks or months later... Usually that happens when the dead person dies alone.. with no family or friends around.. they only get divorced when the smell becomes so hard to bear.. the smell of a dead body left to rot makes the whole building stinks and there will be so many worms and naturally.. the waste and the liquids of the dead body.. so that's what they do.. they cleans the houses of the deceaseds and erase their traces.. like these traces weren't here from the very beginning..

I never expected this book to hurt so much yet touch my heart in so many places.

You can see how cruel the world is..the families who don't give a shit about the dead person.. the angry landlords.. and many many more.

And because I don't want to spoil you, I will stop here so you could discover the rest of the book on your own.

This is my first time reading a book by this author and definitely won't be my last time. I absolutely love her writing style and it makes you feel like you are part of the story and feeling every emotion the protagonists feels..

She is also a nurse which isn't surprising because you could tell by reading this book that she has so much knowledge. A Lot of medical information was explained in a really easy way.

Trigger warnings: death (including infants), bodily waste, medical issues, blood, horrific scenes, corpses, suicide, insects

Level: N3-N2

[amaleu-antmat]

The case files of Jeweler Richard

Who might you be looking at Seigi?

Kehehehehe I can literally hear him calling Richard!

This took me less time than the Richard fanart, probably because it's just his side profile, anyway, I really hate drawing man's hair, I had the fatal misconception of thinking that it would be easier to draw and colour than women's hair. 😔

[aleapintoreverie]

days at the morisaki bookshop (2003) by satoshi yagisawa

july reads // summer vacay // rain sounds in the background

[minimalist-language-learning]

I switched from reading 悪い夏 to 十角館の殺人 .

To be fair, I didn’t finish the first chapter. The book is quite difficult at my level which means: looking up many unknown words if I want to understand what's going on. Looking up many words is much more bearable if the story really grabbed my interest. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for me (yet). 悪い夏 is probably interesting, the story just needs more time to unveil the intriguing parts, I guess.

Don't get me wrong, slow paced stories have absolutely their place! But since I have to patiently look up a lot of words in both of them anyway, I prefer the story that grabs my interest from the beginning. And at this point, that’s 十角館の殺人 .

I‘ll give 悪い夏 another chance in the future.

[sincericida]

I am still so moved by "All Of Us Strangers" Andrew Garfield did an incredible job in talking to Director Andrew Haigh, Claire Foy and with its lead Andrew Scott, who was so lovely when I shook his hand as I was in bits crying. Yes, this film triggers, but in a way that is healing. Andrew Haigh was so lovely and comforted me when I told him what had triggered me about his work. The film is pure genius. It's spiritual without being corny. It reflects its viewer, who bring their memories to the piece. The film has only four actors who carry the movie for 105 minutes. It's based on a Japanese novel by the late Taichi Yamada called Strangers, but other than its core, it bonds with anyone who grew up in the UK in the 80's. If this film does not move you, then you are already dead!

— Jon Thompson

from Twitter

[222hanna]

reading during golden hour is therapeutic

[calvincell]

As a fan of SMT & its star artist Kazuma Kaneko, I was bound to stumble upon his other works of art including those done in collaboration with Kouhei Kadono of Boogiepop Phantom fame for an LN series I’d never heard of until a handful of years ago called the Jiken Mystery Series. It’s a meld of gritty Weird Fantasy with the Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie & hit right on my personal sweet spot not just due to loving unique fantasy settings like those of FromSoftware, SMT & Berserk but the likes of Hercule Poirot & Sherlock Holmes slotted into the MC role. 

The Jiken Mystery Series sadly never even reached the niche cult status of its sister series Boogiepop Phantom so I’d abandoned hope of ever getting to read it beyond learning Japanese & scouring eBay for untranslated copies. However surprisingly, an LN fan happened across seemingly one of the few existing copies of the Del Rey Books English Translation of the 1st volume: The Case Of The Dragon Slayer: A Jiken Mystery from nearly 2 decades ago, an official publishing project that was soon after abandoned. That same fan also went through the effort of scanning the work & thanks to the magic of the Internet, an archivist went ahead & uploaded to the scans to the Internet Archive. 

Despite the crude scans which don’t end up being flattering to Kaneko’s artwork, the story itself is still completely readable & enough so that a motivated fanbase could retype the entire thing & pair it with the existing higher quality versions of the novel’s artwork which have been floating around for a few years to create a digital restoration of at least this first book. It’s quite a wonder that this series, which was inching towards being complete lost media doomed to obscurity, has been able to persist at least a bit thanks to the random luck of a Kouhei Kadono reader & the efforts of online archivists.

[sundaysays]

“How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful and lonely,” I said aloud to myself.

— Norwegian Wood (Murakami, 1987)

[constellationss]

i wanted this to be my first read of april but i couldn’t wait!!! loving it so far🤭💕

[dokushoclub]

In 2023, I started working full time and thus had less time to read compared to 2022. In addition, I also started preparing for the JLPT N1 and tried to read novels in Japanese that would challenge my reading comprehension accordingly as well.

These are my top 5 Japanese novels of 2023:

5. 余命10年 by 小坂 流加 4. カラフル by 森 絵都 3. ちょっと今から仕事やめてくる by 北川 恵海 2. 少年探偵団 by 江戸川 乱歩 1. 告白 by 湊 かなえ

You can read the full post about my 2023 novels here:

I also joined Tumblr in 2023 and am really happy to have found the Japanese langblr community! Since a lot of what I’m reading comes through recommendations I’m super grateful to have a community again to share resources and reviews with. Thanks for all the great books I was able to read along with you guys!

[ihayachii]

I bought this series from Japan and I can’t wait to read it in 2024!

Look at that stunning cover and the cards that comes with it ✨✨


[astreamoflight]

I'm not sure how to rate The Rope Artist. A lot of times I was confused about what was going on, but I'm trying to remember that reading is supposed to be fun, and I'm not doing it for a grade, and that if I'm enjoying what I'm reading the rest doesn't matter. So I enjoyed what I read, and I'm looking into other novels Fuminori Nakamura has written.

[justtt-a-hooman]

I swear to god Dorothea, do not die.

When we get a pov of the character and they tell us their past, the ending is never a good one. Especially the if pov of this character is highly unlikely.

Sorry for my bad English🙏🙏🙏

[minimalist-language-learning]

I finished 『ひと』 !

Now that I've read the last chapter of 『ひと』 I want to share my thoughts:

Story

I have mixed feelings. Slice of life stories are nice and relaxing to read from time to time but, unfortunately, I struggled to motivate myself to continue reading. I can see the value of this kind of story, however, I missed interesting twists, unusual events, challenges that the main character needs to overcome, etc. (=anything that would make me curious) To be fair, it's not that the main character doesn't has any goals nor problems, far from it. But they are so … normal. I usually prefer interesting and exciting stories. Mystery, action, suspense, thriller… you name it. That's why slice of life is a bit boring for my taste.

However, this is just my personal taste and has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself! Although it was not a page turner for me, it's not that I dislike the story. I think it's a nice slice of life story.

The first chapter introduces the protagonist, his difficult life situation, his past and several other characters. The books reveals gradually more and more details about the protagonist and other characters in a natural way. I liked the pleasant writing style and storytelling.

To me, the story and characters felt very realistic. It was not like the dramatic, exciting and exaggerated stories I'm used to (and usually prefer). Reading this book rather feels like watching normal people like you and me living their normal life: You learn about their struggles, see how they are building relationships and how they are trying to find their way in life.

Most of the time I had the impression that the main character didn't know what to do with his life (I think many people can relate to that). He didn't have much confidence in himself and his abilities. In chapter 3, things changed a bit thanks to people around him. They encouraged him to believe in his abilities which opened new paths for him (I'm very vague here to avoid spoilers). I was curious which path the main character will choose.

During the last chapter, the protagonist made some surprising decisions. It seemed like he became a bit more confident and optimistic and finally realized what is important to him at this point in life. Especially the last page was a big surprise for me.

It's a bit sad, though. The end made me more curious what will happen next than the other chapters before.

Difficulty

The level of difficulty was okay. I had to look up many words and didn't understand every detail but most of the time I was able to follow the story. Only scenes with descriptions of different kinds of meals and other cooking and work related things were quite difficult because of my lack of vocabulary in these areas.

I think this novel is a bit difficult but not too hard to read. Compared to other novels, most sentences are surprisingly short. So even though there were words I didn't know the sentences were not very complicated.

I was able to follow the story but I felt that I missed lots of nuances that are important to really understand the appeal of the story. At this point, I've read two or three books where I had the same feeling. In other books, this doesn't matter too much. Understanding what is happening is usually enough to enjoy the book. But there are books where I have this vague feeling that following the story itself is not enough. That's why reading these books felt ... unsatisfying. I'm not sure how to describe it. Did you experience something similar?

Anyway, I still have a lot to learn. And since I'm not a big fan of slice of life stories, please take my thoughts with a grain of salt. I just described how I personally experienced reading the book at my current level. This genre may not be my cup of tea but I think it's a nice story that makes you think about life.

[ninked420]

I may have a problem. These are so good.