“現代風俗”に就いて | L32?? 
this kind of discussion has been ongoing for… a long, long time. 
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Right?! I was fascinated by this piece. I admit walking in I was like 風俗 eh 
and then realized we were talking about the actual meaning of the word, not the euphemistic one 
The ending was quite spicy though, just like let’s ban Japanese clothes and bowing 
No one needs to ban anything, friend, cultures just naturally blend without your direction and you must live with that whether or not it annoys you
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I looked that up but didn’t even see that connotation until I rechecked it just now because of your emoji. 
why am I not surprised you know this, though? 
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That (which I read as tongue in cheek) is quite spicy for 1937, though – it wouldn’t be too many years later when Japanese baseball changed all its technical vocabulary from katakana-go like ピッチャー to kanji terms like 投手, for instance, because seeming too Western-linked was frowned upon.
(But obviously not too spicy – a year later the government invited him to join the ペン部隊, a group of authors given free travel and access to the Sino-Japanese war front so they could write propagandistic stories about it. Wikipedia says he was seen by the authorities as a safe pair of hands without inflammatory political opinions.)
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Read through 赤い蝋燭 | L19 today, and since that was so short, decided to also do a test read of the first short from 花物語 上 | L38 - 鈴蘭 (I couldn’t actually find any 吉屋信子 on aozora, but I did find things where people talk about her and this book, so counting it in the aozora-adjactent-reading-category 
)
赤い蝋燭 was cute but like very very kid story
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She died in the 70s so it will be a while. It’s currently 70 years after death for copyright release. Their FAQ isn’t nice for linking but:
文学作品などの著作物は、著作権法でさまざまに保護されています。つまり、他人が創りだした作品を第三者が勝手にコピーして配布することなどは許されません。しかし著作権法では、その保護期間に制限を設けています。日本では、著者が亡くなってから70年（かつては50年）です
(source)
We’re looking at 2043 as the earliest her work will be available on Aozora…and even then it requires a volunteer to type it up
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In my mind since she was a contemporary of a lot of the authors we’ve been reading so far, I just kinda assumed her works would be out there with them, but I suppose a lot of the authors on the calendar so far did have rather, uh, early deaths 
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She was very close to being in there already 
The law changed in 2018
(source)
Very frustrating as an public domain works lover
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トイレット | L32?? This year has a lot of non-fiction. (not a complaint!) Very christmasy title. Pretty easy.
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1952 is quite late to still be writing in the historical kana spellings; the new orthography had been set out over five years previously. I suppose if you’re over 70 you’re not terribly inclined to change your writing habits.
The author’s father, who built this toilet, seems to have been one of those busy people with internationalist leanings who ended up in the Meiji bureaucracy post revolution. I found a short summary of his life that says he studied in a naval school, was in Nagasaki and had a trip to France before the Restoration, and afterwards was a high ranking bureaucrat in the finance, foreign and commerce ministries, with postings to New York and London.
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This is the result of me grabbing things based on title, author (basically: avoid known bad apples), and a quick glance at length It’s a mystery even to me what we’ll get each year
That makes sense given what she said of him. But gosh he died young didn’t he 
Only 50
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I read ごんぎつね。Felt like it read pretty much like a typical folk tale/morality tale. I was kind of surprised by the last line, which took a turn into descriptive writing. 兵十は火縄銃をばたりと、とり落しました。青い煙が、まだ
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How was it typical The first time I read it I felt like I had been gut punched
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Maybe I got spoiled by the description calling it tragic, but I started to see where it was going as I was reading it. I used to read a lot of Brothers Grimm fairy tales as a kid so I was almost expecting the ending to be like Hyoujuu going ‘oh, god has brought me this fox to feed me!’ and then killing him and eating him in a soup or something.
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Read through ごんきつね, even though it was still clearly kids story I liked it more than the other 新美 from yesterday, felt like it just had more going on and more to say
thingies
Also was kinda feeling like this as I was reading it. As Gon making his apology known got more and more delayed I could feel the ball rolling towards some kind of misunderstanding where the fox was probably not gonna make it
Not totally sure what the moral is supposed to be here: try to understand other people’s circumstances? If you wrong someone apologize quickly and directly?
赤い蝋燭 was kind of a “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” type thing, so I’m thinking it’s probably something pretty simple like that
These are definitely more straightforward to think about than the 宮沢 ones lol
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ゴン狐
I walked into the story knowing absolutely nothing about it, and probably coming off some of the more bland children’s stories (seriously, some of them are all sunshine and daisies and they bore me to bits) so expecting another one of those and then getting the knife twist at the end was very impactful to me.
Which speaking of 宮沢, めくらぶどうと虹 | L23 is actually one that comes to mind as ‘god this was boring’
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Knife twist
Agree with you there. That’s not what children’s stories are usually like. I know stories like this only aimed at adults. But I guess if someone is expecting something like the original Grimm fairytales, a story like this doesn’t come as a surprise.
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理想の女 | L32?? I was prepared to be angry… because… well… men talking about their “perfect woman” is iffy at best. But it’s actually a thoughtful piece about… uhm… the gap between reality and literature?
ああ東京は食い倒れ | L33 The author really didn’t have anything good to say about American food.
食い倒れ is an interesting term…
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This essay is the kind of text with a lot of abstract nouns in it which I find I can read through without really grasping properly. I read sentences and paragraphs stuffed with 理想 and 思想 and 意慾 and 希願, and the words I do know don’t give me a solid enough grasp of the author’s intent to pin down the words I only sort of know, and I get to the end and the sentence slithers away out of my head… I ought I suppose to go back through it carefully looking up all the words I’m unsure of and making sure I understand it all – but I don’t think I care about it enough to put the time in compared to the other things in my to-read pile for the week.
Also it always pulls me up a bit short when a text uses the kana repeat mark across a word boundary, like 島崎藤村や夏目漱石がロマンだなどゝは大間違ひです…
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Knife twist
I was probably more on the side of @soggyboy, perhaps for a similar reason of being in the Brothers Grimm style fairytale mindset.
But I did also get to thinking, there was definitely a shift in children’s stories, I feel like any older ones seem much more likely to involved some sort of violent end.
(e.g. カチカチ山 is another one which stuck in my head)
Whereas I couldn’t see anything written today having such a violent end.
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