I’ve read a piece by the author of 蠅を憎む貴 before so I had an idea that I would be walking into something difficult
Things I looked up:
管簾 is another word for 管暖簾 which is this: Noren - Wikipedia
独楽 - a spinning top
種痘 - inoculation (surprised I haven’t seen this one before? Old fashioned, perhaps?)
真桑瓜 is a melon
烏帽子 are these old hats and I know for a fact this is not the first time I’ve looked that word up
素袍 is “the ceremonial dress of lowerclass samurai”
柳眉 - beautiful eyebrows. Cute word.
馥郁 - fragrant; sweet smelling
Anyways, I read it and was like "…I only understood like 75% of what was happening " so I tried to look up a 解説 and all I could really find was this on someone’s blog:
Oh you know what, looks like it. I kinda glanced at the Japanese definition which included 天然痘 thinking it was talking about the development of vaccines in general rather than that this one referred to just that first vaccine. Specifically mine says:
Yes, it is. I‘ve just read about it in らせん. Edit: As such it is indeed old-fashioned. These vaccinations ended 1977 after the virus was exterminated in the wild.
Read through today’s 毒もみのすきな署長さん and enjoyed it a lot, also read the article that cat linked about the ending. Thought the language use was pretty fun, even if the themes were a little more serious. Structure felt really lopsided to me though, so much writing for the introduction and background information and so little for the ‘plot’ of things happening at the end
laughed a lil bit at this
この国の語ではエップカップと云いました。これはずいぶんいい語です。
とにかく
Going on diversions about good words mid-story, man after my own heart
I was bored silly reading this. I picked the title thinking it’d be a cute story about someone flying a kite or something, not an essay on kites Well, I’m sure someone will enjoy it.
The only thing of note for me in it was the bit about Korean kites having holes in them. I looked it up and they look like this:
Edit, note for tomorrow, the title is a bit of a pain to find on Natively being a subset of many other titles, so here it is: 初恋
初恋 | L30?? Didn’t really vibe with this story. I think the title lead me down the wrong path in my expectations. Also, I was a bit confused at first, thinking this was an autobiographical story, which it isn’t.
I’ve already read the pre-vetted story in the past.
猫の事務所 is definitely the hardest one on the pre-vetted calendar I’ve done so far, and also the longest. A lot harder to kinda fake your way through the old kana on this one, too, but I did notice even just in the duration of reading this story that my ability to understand the さうか and 本たう type stuff improved.
Went and read 宮沢賢治『猫の事務所』あらすじと解説【いじめ絶対だめ！！】 afterwards trying to see if I was missing something, and I think I understood the “what” of what was going on, but I don’t quite understand the significance, I guess? Unless I’m just way overthinking it. May need to take a second pass at some point.
初恋 was much more interesting than I expected given the title. I read through this blog post on the story to make more sense of it. I can’t say I was quite as impacted by it as the author of the post, but I’m definitely open to reading more by this author in the future.
Read 指輪, found the rough speech a little bit of a challenge to follow, not as huge of a fan of this one as the other 江戸川乱歩 i’ve read
Then because that was so short, went back and read 蜜柑 from day one of the unvetted calendar, really really enjoyed that one. I think 芥川 has been my favorite to read so far of all these, and this one was nice not needing to battle with old writing as much.
Was the other story this happened in 指輪? or are we up to three counts
Also was thinking a bit more about 毒もみのすきな署長さん and 猫の事務所, and I think I kinda get what they’re trying to say now.
They both are kinda sympathetic to the idea that having some big heavy handed institution to come and fix things doesn’t do all that much fixing, and might even make more problems: in 毒もみ it’s the police chief who ends up doing the poisoning, he’s executed but that doesn’t fix any of the damage that’s been done to the river, and doesn’t fix people’s hearts for being sympathetic to his single minded desire to do what he wanted to do regardless of the laws/morals. There will be more people like him, simply executing him doesn’t solve that underlying issue.
Then in 猫の事務所 the big 獅子 comes along and dissolves the office, which stops the bullying but basically only on a technicality really. It solves one particular instance of discrimination but it doesn’t do anything to change the underlying social conditions, and also now all these cats are out of a job and are probably just gonna keep blaming the guy they were already bullying.
Was mr 宮沢賢治 perhaps in the closet as kind of a left wing guy or maybe even an anarchist? Hard to say from such a small sample, but will be looking out for this if I read him again
髷 | L32?? Nonfiction again. basically a guy having a hair fetish and being sad that his favourite hairdos are dying out. tbf, I think most ppl feel that at one point about something in their own country/culture. Traditions give way to modern ways of doing things as often those old ways took a lot of time, skill and effort that we often no longer have today. At least some things survive by being turned into a hobby.
There’s a piece of modern art in the Tate Modern in London that I personally associate with this, though I have no idea to what extent that’s what the artist had in mind. There was a rural Romanian tradition of making straw wreaths and objects which the artist was working with, but changing economic conditions meant people stopped doing it, the skills were lost, and so on. The artist ended up “preserving” these straw structures by canning them:
My interpretation of this is that however much you try to preserve traditions like that, whether as hobby or as tourist attraction or whatever, once the original cultural context and impetus for it has been lost your “preserved” version is never the same and in some ways is self defeating.
PS: The author was a woman: 上村 松園, real name 上村 津禰:
(I got a few paragraphs in and thought “hmm, doing their friends’ hair when they were a child doesn’t sound very like a dude thing”, and then there was 自分の髪はたなへあげて置いて too, so I stopped to look up the author.)
Haha, I read Biblio’s post and went to be like ‘no the author is a woman!’ and then saw pm215 had already done so
I enjoyed this more than some of the other nonfiction I’ve read on Aozora. I think so far I’ve read in depth essays on tofu, kites, types of frozen precipitation, and now 髷. This one was the best of the extremely niche crop. I’m kind of sad there aren’t pictures - would love to know what the 猫の耳髷 style looks like, but of course a google image search gives you much more modern cat earred hair styles
フランケンシュタイン 01 はしがき | L32?? This part rubs me the wrong way: しかし、著者自身「夫にはただ一つの出来事の暗示も負うておらず、ただ一聯の感情の暗示もほとんど受けなかった」と述べているが、夫シェリーの天才の影響なしにこの作品を書いたかどうかは疑わしい。もちろん、シェリー自身が筆を入れることはしなかったとしても、著者の幻想や情熱が夫の燃えるような影響のもとにあり、構想その他の点でいろいろの助言を受けたと考えられるふしもなくはない。Yes, potentially there was some sort of interaction with her husband that influenced her writing, but the author basically saying that she could not possibly write a book like this without her husband makes me want to slap him. Hard.
Oh yeah, I felt the same way. The author just seems to assume that a woman could never create something this good without the influence of a man. It came across as pure misogyny. Or is there some detail I’m missing here?
" so I tried to look up a 解説 and all I could really find was this on someone’s blog:
Well, I’m sure someone will enjoy it.
my brain thought “guy” and just found things to fit that image. 
