Ah thank you! That will definitely be it!
There’s no real context related to the plot, it’s just a picture of the staff room, and I think all the other bits are more obvious (e.g. みんな合格), but I was stumped by 鳥もつ.
It does feel like the author (and I suppose the illustrator here), has put a lot of effort into making it a realistic portayal of Yamanashi-ken. Which is definitely nice for me, having never been there!
Hi!
I’m in the middle of chapter 26.
For anyone interested, this is the journey 小熊 has decided on (日野春駅, 県道611号, 国道141号, 清里):
Was gladly surprised to find the を中心に grammar point in the wild (白い鉄筋コンクリートの駅舎を中心に欧風の建物が並んでいる)!
Let’s see what this picnic is all about.
良い週末を
I felt there was a slight jump in difficulty for next week’s reading (chapters 30-33). There is an increase in bike-specific language and the tone changes to be more serious.
Here are my notes for the section.
Chapter 30:
合（ごう）is a unit that means 1/10 of a mountain, from base to peak.
須走 (すばしり）Subashiri, a path on Mount Fuji.
丹沢（たんざわ）Tanzawa
Chapter 31:
浅間 (せんげん） Sengen [Shrine]
Chapter 33:
勺（しゃく） is another unit. It appears only once in the chapter and the word seems to represent 1/10 the length of a 合, but I can not fully confirm whether that is true.
There is a reference to the ダカールラリー (Dakar Rally), an off-road racing event.
At several points, the line “山に体を立てるな、体を沿わせろ” appears. At first, I had difficulty understanding the meaning, but after seeing it used in context I would translate it as “Do not try to stand on the mountain, conform your body to it”.
Ohh, I’ve missed that definition completely, thanks! I thought that’s just how they call the stations without any further meaning behind it, but this makes a lot more sense.
Do you know how common the mistakes are? I usually use jpdb but I can switch to the bunpro one if it’s full of mistakes
I would continue to use the jpdb vocabulary list. The Bunpro list hasn’t been updated past chapter 11.
Please remember that all automatically generated lists contain errors and can’t represent the true meaning of the words when taken out of context. I prefer to learn words as I read, rather than looking at that information in advance.
If you want to learn words before reading, I recommend jpdb as you can sort words by frequency. This means you can look at the most important unknown words in the text to learn vocabulary that gives you the most benefit with the least effort.
I’ve been keeping lists of words missing from jpdb deck and words in it that I though are mis-parsed, and so far got approximately 60 out of 4.5k words. As long as you don’t trust the deck blindly, it’s fine. Most of the issues are reading not matching the context, like 五分. And some hiragana words are not picked up, like おかっぱ.
Hi!
小熊のバイト ended and I just started chapter 28. She is now confident in her driving, flush with money and wondering what to do with it all.
お手並み拝見、小熊！
I’m in chapter 38 and just fyi I feel like once you hit Reiko’s arc that the reading becomes more difficult. There’s so much vocabulary about equipment, parts, proper nouns, roads, etc. It’s definitely a little tiring. Right now it’s at level 27 on LN and it feels like more of a 28-29, personally.
So far for Super Cub I’d order it’s media like this.
Manga>Anime>Novel
This type of content goes so much better with some kind of visuals.
I noticed the change in difficulty as well. Do you know when Reiko’s arc ends, or is the difficulty consistently higher until the end of the book?
Reiko’s arc I think has 4-5 chapters in it. It’s been several chapters for me since her arc and so far it’s staying harder. I’m not sure if that will continue until the end of the book.
I know what happens in the anime/manga so I would think that it’ll get easier again and turn more into slice of life material, and less directly about the bikes. At least I certainly hope that’s the case because these chapters are killing me. 
I mean seriously. Just look at this nonsense.
エンジン内部のシリンダーと呼ばれる円筒型燃焼室の
I almost gave up during her arc, but I just kept going and stopped paying too much attention to all that nonsense. Fortunately it all goes back to “normal” once its done.
Definitely agree that Reiko’s arc is more difficult. I think that’s half her personality, and half a chunk of new terminology.
After that, it’s back to normal for the rest of the book. (There’s a chunk of place names but is otherwise back to normal Koguma)
I finished Reiko’s section. It seems to be back to the standard difficulty in chapter 36. (I never imagined that I would be reading the word 酸素 this much.)
In chapter 36 the proper noun 富士宮口（ふじのみや ぐち） Fujinomiya Route appears.
The Supercub will stop being made in 2025, apparently. As a tribute here is a nice nostalgic article (today’s 天声人語, which is a daily short opinion section in 朝日新聞).
幼い頃、「きょうは出前にしよう」と母が宣言すると、家の中は沸きたった。黒電話のダイヤルを回して近所のそば屋に注文を告げたら、耳をすませて待つ。近づいてくるエンジンの音に胸を高鳴らせたものだ▼あれは、きっとカブだったに違いない。ホンダの「スーパーカブ」。少々手荒く扱っても大丈夫。小さな体に馬力を秘めた原付きバイクは、そば屋に限らず、新聞配達、郵便局、酒屋と、街に欠かせぬ風景の一つだった▼初代は１９５８年に誕生した。片手で盆を担ぐ出前のそば屋でも運転できる。そんなバイクを、というのが開発のコンセプトだったそうだ。左グリップからクラッチレバーなどが取り除かれた。人まねを嫌う創業者・本田宗一郎らしい注文だろう▼使い勝手の良さから、人気は世界の隅々にまで広がった。ベトナム南部ではいまも、メーカーにかかわらず二輪車のことを「ホンダ」と呼ぶ人が多いという▼そのホンダが、総排気量５０ｃｃ以下のカブなどの生産を終了する。排気量の大きなタイプはいままで通りとはいえ、寂しさは否めない。排ガスの最新基準に応じられず、おしゃれな電動キックボードなどに販売も押される。世の流れに取り残される姿が、昭和生まれの目には、どこか人ごとに思えないからだろうか▼きのう街で見かけたカブは、かなり乗りこなされたのだろう。マフラーがさび、塗装ははげ、老兵のおもむきだった。汗を流して働く人たちにとって、あんなに頼もしい相棒はいなかった。
Wow, that struck a sad chord in me. Reading this strangely made me feel like some kind of time traveler going back in time, like a guy who knows the “contemporary” fiction he’s reading is about to unintentionally become historical fiction. Cubs are everywhere in my parts, but I didn’t start paying closer attention to them until reading this book.
Honda also makes the Super Cub 110 and C125, but I wasn’t able to determine whether those lines (with larger engines) will also be discontinued despite not being impacted by upcoming emissions laws changes.
Teary-eyed hand salute to the generation of machines that literally helped carry part of the nation.
That would be a very different book, with no room for installing storage boxes, earning a living with deliveries to the next town over, or climbing mountains.
I powered through the rest of the book during my vacation. It wasn’t bad, but a little difficult for me to get through sometimes. There were definitely some chapters that were way harder than others. Personally, Reiko’s arc and chapter 38 can go straight to hell. 
I was really struggle bussing on those. And I can’t believe that this first novel doesn’t even cover the entire 12 episode anime. Talk about slow pacing. In contrast, the manga has incredibly fast pacing. I’ve only read 4/10 volumes and with volume 5 it’ll probably go past where the anime ends.
I still stand by the manga and anime both being more entertaining. Maybe if my reading ability was a bit better I would have enjoyed this a little more though. I’d give it a 6/10.
Very glad for the experience though. It’s the hardest novel I’ve read so far and it was still mostly doable, which feels like an accomplishment. My worry of falling behind worked to my advantage I actually got way too far ahead.
Congrats on finishing the book!
As we are in the final weeks, I think now would be a good time to discuss the club’s next book. That way a schedule could be made in advance and people would be prepared to join the next one, without having a significant delay between books.
Also, for the next discussion thread, would it be possible to implement a checkpoint system, where people would be able to quickly update where they are in the book with a poll? I think a feature like that would make the thread less sparse, and encourage people who might be lurking to participate in a small way without having to write comments. It would also demonstrate whether a large part of the group is behind and the pace should be decreased.
