Reading Report: 08 January 2023
Apologies for forgetting to post this on the appropriate day. The reason for forgetting will be clear in tomorrow's report. In any case, during the first full week of 2023 I read a few, varied manga volumes and started reading my first book of the year, あ゛.
あ゛教科書が教えない日本語: 110 pages
New year, back on the book grind. I ordered this book about a month ago as it came up on twitter with some click-bait text like "read this to get the end-game Japanese education". Needless to say it's not endgame or anything. The book basically talks about the limitations of Japanese expression using 五十音図 and the history of symbol use to represent unorthodox sounds in general. There's some commentary on Japanese onomatopoeia, in particular talking about how Japanese has comparatively more than the average language. In addition to that, most Japanese readers will experience technically identical sounds differently depending on the characters chosen to express them. しとしと and シトシト feel different despite representing the same sound. In a similar way, ジトジト can be used to represent basically the same sound effect with a very minor shift in the reader's experience. In this case the sound of rain feels heavier, slightly more oppressive with the addition of dakuten. There has also been a lot of history of sound changes in a way to show the flexibility of characters throughout history. According to the author, characters like つ would be pronounced ティュ around 700 years ago. The entire た行 line was similar as well. Words like 蝶 would be represented with kana てふ but be pronounced more like ディェップ. On that note, there was a time when kana was forming where dakuten and handakuten didn't exist. Back in the day when Japanese used kanji to represent sounds, a different kanji would be used to represent voiced vs unvoiced sounds, 加 for か and 賀 for が for example. Frankly I'm grateful some smart guy thought to do a dakuten thing instead of creating unique characters for each voiced sound.
マイ・ブロークン・マリコ
I've been sitting on this one for a long time. Decided to read it when I had a free evening. It was alright. The story basically follows a young-adult woman who finds out her best friend committed suicide. She steals her friend's remains and goes on a sort of messy, self-indulgent, cathartic pilgrimage to a place that she and her friend talked about visiting once in the past. There are a bunch of flashbacks to their lives together and it's very clear that Mariko was romantically interested in Shiino (the main character), but that love was never reciprocated openly.
あせとせっけん vol 4
Something was in the air and I decided I wanted to continue this series. The last time I read a volume was around April/May of 2022. I think the highlight of this series for me is the realism of the main relationship. In this volume there's a sort of drama about the possibility of the two moving in together. The anxieties that both of them feel about it are very relatable. I especially liked this idea of "he'll start to notice all my bad points" that Asako worries about. But the way they maturely talk through it and come to the conclusion that it's a risk worth taking, and then very slowly start arrangements is very cosy to read.