Japanese Reading Report: 12 October 2025

ファタモルガーナの館

ファタモルガーナの館

Immediately after finishing the Third Door I lost sight of the maid and started wandering the house alone. I met an oil-stained painting who warned me not to trust the contents of every story the maid tells me. He gave me the key to the master bedroom and I went on my way. I had the option to explore the house or call out to the maid, and naturally I decided to explore as much as I could before retrieving her.

Different locations in the house evoked faded memories of characters from the three doors who disappeared into the haze of the house as suddenly as they had appeared. In the master bedroom (inaccessible without trusting the painting, I checked) I experienced a very confusing spectre that I couldn't place to any particular door and I just moved on. I left the chapel for last since it was a location I had only visited in an optional scene (the mirror between doors two and three) but it didn't really offer anything extraordinary. Upon calling the maid, she took my hand and led me up to the highest place in the house and into the Fourth Door.

1099. Hundreds of years before the events of the other doors. This story, the maid promised, would be my final hope of restoring my memories. It was a very nice story. The White Haired Girl (WHG) is not only central once again, she is now the point of view character of the story (a first in doors so far) (sadly this also means we don't see her until right near the end of the story (see report image)). This time we learn the girl's name: Giselle. Her fated lover, Michel, is cursed by the witch of the house to kill anything he touches, so he keeps his distance to protect Giselle and himself.

This door employs a number of interesting storytelling techniques. First, there are a handful of glitchy effects that flicker between scene transitions. The text history, normally a convenient tool for checking dialogue, becomes corrupted, replacing words with meaningless white boxes. Finally, during scenes in the tower rumoured to house the witch, the text history features a third, unidentified speaker who writes in blood-red text and seems to know Giselle.

The door's finale is set up well, just like all the other doors, and ends in one more, slightly unexpected, tragedy.

And so the maid reveals our identity... we are Giselle, the white haired girl, fated to be reincarnated until we meet our Michel again.

But no! It can't be that simple. We reject the maid's truth, drawing on the scene from the master bedroom (still don't really get it aha...), the advice from the painting, and a few inconsistencies in the door. We insist that the white haired girl cannot be Giselle, and that the maid, herself, is the Giselle from the story. Together with the true, dark-haired Giselle we enter the Fifth Door, 1099.

The Fifth Door, the heart of Giselle, distinguishes itself first by being largely absent of fairytale or romance (so far). The broad strokes follow the Fourth Door: a young girl arrives at the house and meets a reclusive man named Michel. Some plot beats also rhyme with their couplet, though the storytelling and characterisation are different enough that I don't feel like I'm reading the same thing twice.

On a last note, this story features a dual narrative whereby the perspective swaps between Giselle and Michel during most scenes. It's particularly interesting because we get to see the inner thoughts of each character, and therefore we see what they withhold from each other in addition to what they say.

I honestly don't know if I'm nearing the end or just now closing out the prologue. Things are feeling final, but I know there are at least a inaccessible options in the menu to look forward to when I finally see an ending.

俺物語！！

I finished this series. Ultimately I found it really good. While it never really deviates from the initial premise, Takeo and Yamato's strong writing is flexible enough to fit several short arcs.

I assumed that Ai, Sunakawa's older sister, would be shuffled out of the story after her romantic interest in Takeo was resolved, but I was gladly incorrect. I enjoyed the continuation of her character development with the addition of Hayato, a man her age who crushes on her, and the drama that brewed when her infatuation with Takeo was taken advantage of in the theme park episode.

Another character I enjoyed was Yukika. Just one of Sunakawa's many crushes, Yukika is lucky enough to get a few dates with him thanks to Takeo's help. Yukika is cute and shy, making her quite similar to Yamato in many ways, so I actually appreciated that her fate with Sunakawa wasn't sewn in red thread.

The last major story moment involves a new love rival for Takeo. Yamato starts working part time at a pâtissier and her pure soul infects her boss, an older man named Ichinose, with lovesickness. After meeting Takeo, Ichinose believes that he's a more suitable partner for Yamato, and Takeo's lack of self confidence threatens to end everything, but Yamato reaffirms her love for Takeo in the end. It was an expected ending, but the delivery was very engaging.
I'll definitely be recommending this to people looking for pure love romance stories going forward.

暁のヨナ

This is a series I've had on my radar since developing a curiosity towards non-romance shoujo. Yona is an outgoing, red-haired princess about to celebrate her birthday in a sheltered, luxurious life. Other than her father, Yona has two main male actors in her life: her retainer, Haku, and a childhood friend from another family, Suon. Yona is just about ready to jump on Suon for all of the first episode despite her father's disapproval. And it turns out her father was right; Suon betrays the royal family, revealing that his entire life was part of his father's plan to take over Yona's kingdom. With some help from Haku and another attendant, Min-Soo, Yona is able to flee to safety.

I'm still very early into the story, but so far it looks like it'll be an energetic adventure.

Pale Fire

Since last week I've moved through all of Cantos 2 and 3 and just begun Canto 4. In terms of my enjoyment of Pale Fire (the poem), I think my rankings so far fit the order of reading. Canto 1 was so dense with emotive imagery, Canto 2 goes deeper into the supernatural and beautifully masks (or expresses) Shade's pain of losing his daughter, Hazel. Canto 3 was a bit of a let down. It focused more on Shade's spirituality and thoughts about death, but I just wasn't as engaged by the form as I was in 1 and 2.

Kinbote's stories have also progressed, and maybe have had a similar (inverted) arc. The tight personal stories of the Shades have slowed since Hazel was introduced and dropped by Kinbote. He hadn't entered the picture until Hazel had died, so apart from a story detailing her gentle resolve to capture evidence of a wisp and the account of Hazel's last night alive Kinbote has few notes about her life. Maybe it's my fascination with 20th Century Americana, or just how much I adore Nabokov's fascination with it, but I always find the New Wye (Shade's home town) stories far more engaging than the Zemblan (Kinbote's home country) ones.

In the course of reading the poem and commentary I've been compelled to re-read the Foreword at least once. I noticed the repetition of a man wearing a velvet green jacket between the Foreword and a section involving the assassin Gradus, though at this point it's hard to tell if Nabokov is playing with my paranoia or not.

Regarding faith that one's soul will be taken care of in the hereafter, Kinbote made a compelling argument for why not knowing shouldn't necessarily bring anxiety.

Little Christopher, a frail lad of nine or ten, relies completely (so completely, in fact, as to blot out the very awareness of this reliance) on his elders' arranging all the details of his departure, passage and arrival. He cannot imagine, nor does he try to imagine, the particular aspects of the new place awaiting him, but he is dimly and comfortably convinced that it will be even better than his home-stead[...].

I've also noticed two not-so-subtle references to Lolita within the poem. Line 413 has a draft that replaces nymph with nymphet. Temporally there isn't really much of a connection—Lolita is set mostly in the late 40s and early 50s—but nymphet is a term of Nabokov's invention and it makes me wonder if we, as readers, are supposed to understanding something about John Shade by his use of such a term (and his subsequent scrubbing of the term in his final draft). The second is in line 680: "Lolita swept from Florida to Maine."
Kinbote's note on this line only notes how it's an unusual name "sometimes given to parrots" and suggests a few hurricane names of his own. I think the dismissal of the name highlights its importance to readers (as so many lacklustre notes have done in prior lines). The hurricane travelling across America also evokes the storytelling of the latter half of Lolita, and Florida and New England are both critical regions in the book. Florida is Humbert Humbert's escape from harsh winters while road-tripping with Lolita, and New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) is the birthplace of Lolita.

Anyway, that's all to say that Pale Fire is so dense and referential that, like much of Nabokov's writing, it could take a lifetime to resolve every reference and understand the exact texture of the poem.