Age gap strikes again.
Well, at least he is seeing her as a child and waiting for her to grow up. It’s… something… I guess… 
Have the ages been mentioned? I looked them up, but
I didn’t notice while reading… but I often don’t notice such deta… oh! squirrel! 
14 and 28, I believe. She’s 15 under some system that starts you at 1 from birth, so 14 in the reckoning most of us use.
She is 15 getting onto 16. He is in his 20s, but I don’t know the details yet.
Well, either 14 and 27 or 15 and 28 (which is what wikipedia says). Not that it changes much of anything.
in the historical context, that age is not particularly unusual, though… Geisha would start “entertaining” at like 15/16…
Done with this week! The author sure likes the word ハイカラ 
Her family was weirdly apathetic about her leaving with a guy literally twice her age, but it sure helps moving the plot faster.
It definitely felt like she had an unusual family situation. I’m not sure I picked up all the author was putting down, but I think they were glad to be relieved of her?
Iirc they were poor and lived in a bad section of town, so they were happy that someone wanted to take her off their hands?
This is what I got, too. She has lots of siblings, but no dad and they live in the poor part of town, … one less mouth to feed. Also, he seems like a comparatively good catch and as I wrote earlier, her age is marriage age back then…
I suppose my vagueness was on whether she was a bit disreputable? I kinda got the vibe that he was picking up a girl that most would consider beneath where he should be looking, for lack of a better way to put it.
Nooo she is a hidden gem where only he can see her true potential 
but technically yes I guess, since he has a proper nice job and all that
Yes, he even mentiones this in the beginning, I think. Like, if he wanted to get married, he could just do a matchmaking and easily find someone, but he wants a less rigid way of finding a partner, and more time to get to know them.
I think the “meet once or twice and decide” made it less easy of course he’s over here looking for love which a transactional お見合い is not really about
Side note: I constantly mix up お見合い and お見舞い when talking. So much confusion
I’ve now finished week one as well. I thought this was relatively easy to read as Tanizaki goes, though I have been prestudying the vocab on jpdb which obviously helps. It doesn’t have the Kyoto dialect dialogue that 細雪 does, for instance.
Tanizaki has both speakers use the old Tokyo words for father and mother: おとつあん and おっかさん. IIRC these were replaced by modern おとうさん and おかあさん somewhere around the 1910s, so these characters would have been the last generation to use them, likely. I think Tanizaki may have talked about these words in his childhood years autobiography 幼少時代 | L43 but I could be misremembering.
Also on language use, Naomi is a わ and のよ onna-kotoba speaker. I wish I knew to what extent that was really what somebody of her age would have used and to what extent this is Tanizaki using the relatively recent at the time literary convention that this is how you mark “young girl” speech. (I did finally read Vicarious Language about women’s language, which talks about this sort of thing.)
I saw a couple of uses of 〜たらば as conditional in there.
Here’s the other footnote from this first week:
p17 : 花屋敷 : 嘉永三年（一八五〇）ごろ浅草五区に植木職森田六三郎が創設したもので、昔は草花や動物の飼育などをしていた。
I don’t know what to make of the difficulty. The kanji usage is a bit awkward, if you are not used to old kanji usage, but listening to the audiobook (audible) is not more difficult than a level 37 or somewhere around there. The difficulty really only comes from the kanji for me. Stuff like おとつあん is easy enough, imo. 
I agree, this doesn’t feel like what I’d expect a 43 to be. I’d place it around ~37 as well based on what we’ve read so far. I’m trying to not be too carefree in my rating though as I am very used to old kanji usage, and probably some old words I barely even clock as old anymore
I 
Aozora Bunko
Looking forward to the advent calendar… aozora has been pretty intimidating for me. 
Me toooo! Advent calendar hype
I wanted to read this too but I got waylaid by bronchitis and a really heavy workweek! Well, up to the middle of chapter 2 now, so I figure I still have time to catch up…
Oh no, I hope you feel better soon!
This club is pretty informal, so even if you fall behind a bit feel free to post as you get through it! But I think you’re in the perfect spot now 
