Oh, thanks a lot for the ping! Will check it out 
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December 11th Mystery pick:
Natively link: 葬られたる秘密
朗読: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIZwEOAl6B4
This one was surprisingly easy to read, but also no where near as spooky as I expected.
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If you want Hearn’s English version of it, which this is a translation of, you can read that here.
I think Hearn’s retellings of these ghost stories are intended not so much to be spooky or scary as to be evocative of what to his readers was an exotic and distant land with very different customs and traditional stories. I wonder what they feel like to the Japanese reader?
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December 12th Mystery calendar pick:
Natively link: あさましきもの | L35??
朗読: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5lhckHr_wQ
I didn’t quite get what that second to last sentence was saying. I got the gist, maybe, from the one before it and knowing a bit about Dazai, but oof at a 3 line sentence full of words like that!
Overall I liked it, though I had to sit and think on each little story a bit (classic Dazai)
1 Like
A bit late as usual, but I just read
青年諸君よ、この戦争は
馬鹿 げた茶番にすぎず、そして戦争は永遠に呪うべきものであるが、かつて諸氏の胸に宿った「愛国殉国の情熱」が決して間違ったものではないことに最大の自信を持って欲しい。
… I don’t know, man. I feel like, if they had ran away (or refused the order; what is going to happen? They’ll get executed?) en masse, things could have gone a different way. It seems to me that that patriotism you speak of make people do bad things in the end.
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December 13th Mystery Pick!
Natively link: 蠅 | L35??
朗読: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6L5KQadycU
I don’t know what I was expecting but that ending was not it! Apparently this is high school reading and it has that vibe…up til the end. Definitely makes the rest of the story retroactively more enjoyable, as odd as that sounds. Knowing what it was leading up to improves it 
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Mmm, definitely an unexpected ending 
Apparently the author was a leading member of the “New Sensation School”, which had “a particular interest in sensation and scientific objectivity”.
(I’ve reported the missing Aozora link in the Natively page, by the way.)
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Oh thank you, I didn’t even notice! I wonder how that even happened 
Edit: nevermind I realized 
Everything is submitted via Amazon links
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So officially the story for today is this one:
Natively link: 人生 | L35??
朗読: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV72ylSEobY
But I found it exhausting to read and not in a way that looked like it would provide payoff so, in the interest of me not developing an aversion to 漱石 I decided to pick one of his more famous short works to give him a fair shake. I may just dislike his essays and letters, after all.
The work I choose was 変な音 (Natively) and the 朗読 can be found here.
I keep the rules of this advent pretty loose (is it Aozora? It counts) so if 人生 also strikes you as unpleasant feel free to take that one or choose another.
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As usual, playing catch up randomly. I just read 葬られたる秘密 and あさましきもの.
About 葬られたる秘密, I wonder why the ghost was so insistent on looking at the [secret]. That’s like the best way to make sure someone will find it (and, indeed, did). She’s lucky it was someone unrelated and who can keep his mouth shut who found it. That being said, the fact that we know about it at the end means that he did check what it was.
あさましきもの
Just in case, it was 太宰治 shitting on himself (乃公自身) as usual. Despite writing about those people he himself has to fight against laziness to just write 6 pages of the garbage quality of [insert the stuff at the beginning of the sentence] just so that he can get enough money to buy 3合 (=540mL) of alcohol; he is clearly a sell-out and dishonorable and despicable and blablabla woe is me. I do like his style, but that kind of negativity kinda makes me uncomfortable, considering his death.
Other than that, the first story reminded me of parts of 人間失格. The second one made me laugh with “大学生は、頭がよかった。女の発情を察知していた。” Wow, that’s 名探偵 levels of deduction. She is literally rubbing herself against you.
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It definitely doesn’t look like it’s going to be an easy read, but I liked this fragment from the first sentence:
地震、雷、火事、
爺 の怖きを悟り
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Having waded through the first paragraph or two, I think this is not just old kana spelling but in fact in classical Japanese. For instance:
「エリオツト」の小説を読んで天性の悪人なき事を知りぬ
means …知った, because it’s 知りぬ the perfective auxiliary ぬ following a renyoukei verb form, not the more familiar survival into modern Japanese 知らぬ, which is a different negative auxiliary ぬ that follows the mizenkei.
Ending a sentence is べし is also definitely classical:
容易に計算し得べし
and my favourite, the wild るる:
「マクベス」の眼前に見はるゝ幽霊
I do have “learn some classical japanese” on my to-do list, so I might come back to this some day, but not for a while.
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Ah this makes sense! I’ve run into べし before but the rest is all new to me. No wonder I was having so much trouble parsing it. Thanks for the breakdown
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Wow, that’s a challenge! After half an hour, I’m finally reaching the part about Confucius (so, fourth line for me 
). It’s rough.
It won’t stay level 35 
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Mystery pick for December 15th!
Natively link: 頭ならびに腹 | L35??
朗読: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogw5doOk0hM
I had a lot of trouble visualizing this first sentence:
満載された人の頭が太つた腹を包んで発車した。 跡には、踏み蹂じられた果実の皮が。
I think broadly it’s saying the train was packed to the brim and that what remained at the station after was litter and debris (stepped on fruit skins)? But parsing what that first sentence is really saying is bothering me. Is this supposed to be a visual of people’s faces in the windows? Does the train have a big belly appearance?
Haha, I think that one definitely deserves a higher rating!
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By the way, I found a modern day Japanese “translation” of it here:
(It’s in many parts and navigation is hard, but very helpful)
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Just finished 特攻隊に捧ぐ
…自殺ですら多くは生きるためのあがきの変形であり…
(The author has some… interesting… opinions, though. 
)
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I liked this one, at least at short story length; not sure if I would want to read a book length quantity of the style. The author 横光 利一 is another of the New Sensation School of writers. I noticed that in the whole story we are never told what any of the characters are thinking; we only get the external description. I have a feeling I read somewhere that that was a characteristic of at least some of these modernist Japanese writers.
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Finished 葬られたる秘密 and enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s probably one of the easier stories we’ve had so far.
Anyone any theories on what was written in the letter?
(My ratings on those aozora entries are all over the place… apparently I rated this story to be similar with L29 to L32… but harder than a L33 book… )
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I found an essay on the story that said
that what the author is doing here is describing people as body parts, as if they were objects. So the 腹 is the fat guy who precipitates the crowd into changing trains, and the 頭 are everybody else. We see this already in the previous paragraph:
尽くの頭は太つた腹に巻き込まれて盛り上つた。
So the 発車した sentence is saying that the train leaves with the crowd of people (頭) on it and the fat guy (太つた腹) in the middle of them.
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