Recently having moved away from her rural hometown, Mikoto Yamada struggles to make friends at Uchouten High School. Noticing Mikoto sitting alone, the student council secretary, Ren Nekozaki, decides to utilize her position to create a club specifically to allow the two to spend time together, using a shrine near the school as their club room.
Soon enough, their club space is encroached upon by four strangers: Takuya Kumakura, Yozora Usagida, Airi Shishimaru, and Ritsu Pengin. These girls share the plight of having interests that are too niche to justify the creation of a club. As Uchouten requires all its students to participate in club activities, the four form their own club to let each member do whatever they want. This leaves but one remaining issue-a club room is required for a club to be official. As a result, the four decide to do all they can to convince Mikoto to let them share the shrine.
While Mikoto agrees, Ren is wary, as she believes the four stragglers will impede the time she shares with Mikoto. But despite her reservations, Ren eventually concedes. Although these girls all have different interests, they will nonetheless come to form an intimate, unbreakable bond.
Content warnings
Some characters deal with depression, self-loathing, chronic illness, or other challenges. There’s a student-teacher relationship (acknowledged as problematic from the start)
Reading Schedule
Page numbers are based on the printed page number at the bottom of the page, not the digital number.
Spoilers should always be hidden using spoiler blur.
When discussing a specific section, please mention where you are in the book, ideally by chapter so people reading different versions have a clear point of reference.
Feel free to read ahead if it’s exciting, but please refrain from spoiling ahead of the appropriate week.
If you have a question about grammar, vocab, cultural things, etc - ask! That’s a welcome part of the discussion too, and other readers will be happy to help.
Polls
Will you be reading along when the club starts on July 7th?
I’ve already read this one. Although I guess @暁のルナ also has read it before? Are you going to reread it?
I don’t remember much about it. I think I liked the main plot/couple quite a lot, but disliked some other aspects. I think it made me look at the author other works in hope there was something with all the stuff I liked and none of the stuff I disliked.
I didn’t think I’m actually going to reread this. But I think I’ll follow the discussion and skim the manga as a refresher.
My entire volume (digital) is 186 pages so that math doesn’t work.
I own all three volumes since they were on sale, but I will still decide after reading the first volume. I won’t force myself to read all three if I don’t like the first one.
Oh, and this is my first book club on Natively. I’ve joined a bunch on WaniKani, but never here before. よろしくね
Same. It looks like the chapters are around 35 pages on average. Unfortunately there’s no table of contents, so I can’t tell how long each individual chapter is.
This is my first book club period. Never really been a part of a community of readers before.
こちらこそよろしく！
Thx for catching the chapter length. I’ve added the actual printed page numbers to the table.
My thinking was this: it’s nice to go straight into the next volume, and anyone who doesn’t want to read further can just drop it at that point. Anyway, It seems like most people want to vote afterwards.
A question I’d have, I guess for @shablul is: if we do read the next 2 volumes, does the main club wait until those are done? Or do we just read them as a side group? That would make a difference for setting up the next nomination/voting cycle. (I’m fine either way personally)
Honored to have you こちらこそ、よろしく！
I have read it before, and feel similarly. It’s still one of my favorite works though!
I haven’t checked out the author’s other works… but for anyone interested: あらた伊里 - Wikipedia (I’ll try to look for/add them to Natively sometime)
I think you would still continue right into volume 2 if there was enough interest, perhaps with a one week break. But if only two people like the first volume enough to keep reading you may not bother continuing via a club.
Generally these are done as side groups. It’s important for new readers to have plenty of opportunity to join book clubs, and having sequel volumes block new books would be counter to that. Of course, this being a special topic book club could change that, but at least that’s how it normally works.
As long as it’s blurred or under details tags, it’s fine.
my thoughts
My main issue was the teacher-student relationship, those make me all kinds of uncomfortable. The series makes it clear it’s really problematic, but I still don’t like it.
I kinda agree re: the shenanigans. Sometimes it was fine, sometimes it dragged on a bit too much.
I like neat coupling like that personally (I just ship everyone lol)… but I get why ppl don’t. I did enjoy the other couples tho, but I’m curious to see how I feel this time around.
If we decide as a club to read the rest then we do it as a club (hence why I requested the poll thing for the next volumes - that way it’ll be a club decision if we want to continue together )
Else we can always create an informal group to read the entire series or something and whoever wants to join in can add comments in delay whenever and all that
Hi everyone!
Since we’re close to finishing volume 1 I’ve opened up the poll regarding whether or not we’re going onwards with more volumes of this manga or voting on something new.
こちらこそ、よろしく！
)
