Wow, that was quick Cat!
I’ll listen to Ch 5 then and put in my comments. I can see why that one was confusing Cat, I definitely needed more lookups than usual for Ch 5 and if I remember right I read it twice as well. It’s worth it, there are some nice surprises in there 
Book 2 is my overall favourite so far of the first 4 and I’ve been having a good time exploring it again for discussion with you both
Finished the reread of Book 2 chapter 1 (phantom thief roll)
So literally all she says is to enjoy in moderation, because there are people in the world with greater luck than him. I thought this is kind of interesting because of the way she always says something about their 幸運 when they enter the Zenitendou. Very mysterious indeed.
It also got me wondering about the different sweets, now we’ve learned that the power of one can surpass another (the hero police can catch the phantom thief), so what is the most powerful sweet in the Zenitendou? Could they all be cancelled out if someone wanted the opposite thing? Come to think of it, there are two stories in the first book (the animal crackers and the hairdresser) where the powers of the sweet are cancelled out by a different one. This time is just the most direct.
Oh, also, on the reread I noticed that in the ending he sprints out of the police car and is on the run again just like the beginning! Fun bit of circular storytelling.
I haven’t re-read it yet, I had to take a few days off from reading as much due to personal stuff but hoping to finish book 2 today and then re-read chapter 5. 
I was getting through one chapter in around 2 days but one of the days I managed to read a lot between calls at work and ended up finishing 2 chapters in the one day.
I like thinking about this, too. The stories that explore interactions between characters with different sweets are really fun.
The other thing this story did for me was to make me wonder a lot more about Beniko’s motivations and concept for her store. In Book 1 it seemed like a bumbling attempt to help people solve their problems. From this point, I started seeing it more as Beniko using sweets to grant any wish, but with opaque conditions. I love how mysterious that is and how each story challenges the assumptions I make about Beniko.
Oh nice one, that’s a detail I must have missed, I don’t remember that!
I think I need to re-read chapter 5 AND 6 from book 2 as I think I’ve lost part of the story 
for chapter 6 I remember nothing except she got the tea set then next I remember is her talking to Santa Clause. Either that or I’ve misunderstood something and have no clue what I’ve read
I’ve also not managed to read much yesterday (4 pages then 2 just after midnight). Think I burnt myself out on listening yesterday so hope to finish book 2 later today(? 
) I think I’ve got 10 pages left including the Epilogue.
Ch 6 is one of my very favourite stories! If there’s one where it’s worth rereading and doing some lookups, that’s definitely one. There’s a lot of detail - it’s one of the harder ones, and once I knew what was going on I didn’t look up every last little detail. But it’s worth understanding the key points like the scene setting, what’s going on with the sweet, and definitely the ending. I don’t always do lookups, especially for the plots I’m less interested in, but that one is gold.
Finally managed to finish book 2 today. I’ll be waiting til Saturday to start re-reading chapter 5 & 6 so I can focus breaking them down and trying to fully understand them.
I think I managed to understand the second half of chapter 6 but chapter 5 I only really understood one small part of it so do need to re-read them.
Book 3 I’ll start tomorrow before work along with my listening for the September challenge.
Edit: I am noticing a trend with the Epilogues that I hope continues.
Read chapter 1 of book 3. There was no warning? Was this because he made the choice to get something for someone else to use or was it because his intentions were for the better instead of going for the more cruel option of revenge?
Was a little confused with that but wondering if this is maybe something that will be explained later. I did like the ending though.
Also, the inside back cover of the book 3 obi shows what the sweets are for this book on the cover for each chapter which I thought was a nice touch.
This story had some interesting twists and subtle changes from previous stories that I liked - carrying the story on from the world building in the prologue, and it shows Beniko taking an active role in getting her customers to directly counter her rival doing the same. Oh yeah, and we see someone having to choose just one sweet - that doesn’t happen often. Normally they go through just definitely wanting precisely one that they see or Beniko shows them.
That just one (sweet, visit to Zenitendo) rule is an interesting one that the customers don’t know about but causes some of them problems. Philosophically it feels a bit like either “you can’t rely on getting every wish granted” or in a more real world model “luck/misfortune isn’t something you can choose to make happen”. Maybe that is why there isn’t so much a moral to each sweet (I was surprised she gave a sweet to help the thief, for example), but rather, the idea seems to be that when presented with a lucky / good fortune situation, we aren’t always good judges ourselves of what good fortune is (maybe we didn’t want all the rest that come with what we though we wanted), and whether it continues as good fortune or sours to misfortune is to some extent in our own hands.
I’m not so sure why it bugs me so much. I think because in fantasy, revenge often escalates quickly to absurdly painful degrees and it’s presented as if we’re meant to empathise with one character in particular. But if people carry that out in real life, revenge just leads to more violence and more suffering for everyone, and I don’t think it’s correct to just empathise with one side, or feel any satisfaction at harm done.
Perhaps put more simply, I don’t like violence as entertainment. It’s a reality for a lot of people and isn’t a topic I want to blunt my emotional responses to. I’ll tolerate it in small less explicit amounts like this book, or if the author explores it in a much more subtle way than just “bad guy gets stuffed, ha!”
This story was a bit more complex and if I remember right, and flows from the Prologue where the father’s colleague had used a sweet from the evil eye shop to give the daughter nightmares. So I might have to look at my copy again to get this right. When you say he, I’m pretty sure do you mean the father getting the sweet for his daughter? (not the colleague) And by warning, warning for what? Like, in general for the sweet the father got from Beniko? I’ll check the guide book for that as it always lists one. Sometimes if the story goes in a positive way, the warning doesn’t get explicitly stated in the story, but it is written in the guidebook.
So if I understand your question correctly, based on the assumptions above, a warning isn’t discussed simply because it didn’t come up (nothing bad happened to the buyer), but there is almost certainly a warning about the side effects of the sweet that I’ll look up.
It’s not that there is no warning/consequences because it was bought for a noble purpose for someone else. The food tree from Book 1 had a warning, for example.
haha, I totally didn’t notice the obi diagram, thanks for pointing that out!! Normally I take them off for reading and don’t really look at them, and when I’m done I put them back on. I used to throw them away until my friend gave me a horrified “whaaaat?? we save those, lol”
I only noticed because the obi fell off and I wondered what the numbers were for
This makes more sense than what I was thinking. I will need to re-read the series once I’ve read through it so I can understand it better as I do think I’m missing stuff which is skewing my overall understanding.
[spoiler] [quote=“mitrac, post:49, topic:7970”]
where the father’s colleague had used a sweet from the evil eye shop to give the daughter nightmares.
[/quote]
[/spoiler]
This bit I missed. I kind of guessed he had something to do with it but didn’t realize it was from there.
Let me know what you were thinking on the one sweet rule, maybe I have the wrong end of the stick!
Also, I also enjoy doing rereads like you mentioned. Getting a good enough understanding to enjoy myself, and then later reading again and enjoying it fresh with better Japanese and catching more details from the story.
I remember the prologue being really tough for me. I had to do a few passes of the prologue and Ch 1 of this one to understand the connections. Let me know if you want any other explanations there or if you want to wait for the reread. Sorry about that detail you hadn’t seen, I’ll be more careful next time and put a spoiler tag so you can decide if you want to open it first!
My understanding on “one visit only” was that if they had what Beniko-san wants then they could potentially visit the shop a second time or more, but they would have to have a coin that she wanted in order to do so as I was linking the coins specifically to the people who had them so thought this was how she was choosing people.
For “one sweet only” I was just thinking that the only reason the others had only one option was because there was only one thing they wanted. This one, where he gets a choice, I thought maybe that was because he had 2 things that were fighting within him and he ultimately got the choice of what to do and decided his daughter being free of nightmares was the better option. I feel that maybe in the future there may be more people who get a choice depending on if they have more than one thing fighting within them.
If there was anything that specifically said there was only a one visit/ one sweet rule though, I missed that entirely 
I wasn’t complaining, stuff like this does help me to figure out if what I was thinking was correct. Some bits I miss in my own read through but even if I know what happens, I’m still happy to read it and see how much I can actually understand 
Re-reads for me will definitely be a must and I’ll still enjoy them. I was using a different set of books to gauge my understanding in Japanese but these will be my new set for re-reads. Though I think they may also be a set I would be happy to read again just for fun even when I can fully understand them 
Also found another chapter I will need to re-read : chapter 4 of book 3.
I’m only looking like I’m breezing through these but it’s just that I’m waiting atm and can’t do anything else.
Finished the Doctor Ramune story read!
When describing Beniko in this chapter, it says her face is smooth like a boiled egg. Hmm. Haven’t heard that one before.
Chisato says she wants to heal people. Beniko says she’s a kind customer, so she has an extra lucky item to give to her. I feel like this implies Beniko knows exactly what she’s doing in terms of the relative strength of the sweets that she gives people. This makes sense because the Doctor Ramune is pretty powerful!
Another fun expression:
I liked that story a lot. I see how it got a lot harder in the end, there were a lot more lookups. I’m also finding things with multiple names to keep track of difficult, that’s really something you have to be understanding on the first listen so you know who they’re talking about. I totally missed that there was a doctor involved in this story at all tbh, since they refer to him by name after he’s introduced.
I also struggle with this and completely missed that part as well. I will be re-reading though so hopefully pick that up on the next read through.
Edit: spoilers wasn’t working for me but now is
I really liked this story, too. And by far and away it was the hardest for the audiobook for me so far. The names were tough enough even reading, and the male voices were fast and felt less clearly articulated. Plus they used slang which I haven’t got in my ear yet
That’s s great one
Ah such a good point, she does give some people an extra leg up
I’m glad we all seem to have a similar view on rereading etc, this is fun!
I haven’t managed to read much the last few days so have been mostly listening to stuff but I’m hoping to get more reading in later today. I’m wondering if I should start intensive reading for each book once I finish this one and then read one new story a week while re-reading and listening to one of the stories intensively that week as well. It might help with my studying as well as my overall understanding as I do think I’m missing a lot at times (I also just pick up on a grammar point I had no idea of previously as well which is making me re-think my reading so far ).
I’ll be doing more intensive reading this week, too. My wishlist is Bk 2 Ch 6 because it’s one of my favourites, Bk 4 Ch 6 and Prologue because I read extensively and there were some interesting developments I want to get nuance on. And I wanted to look at the Prologues again since you mentioned you noticed a pattern - I haven’t been making notes, but I should since that’s where we get some good world building
Let me know if you figure it out or, if once you’ve read them, you haven’t found it and want to know. I don’t want to spoil it. I do want to finish book 3 (should finish chapter 5 tonight, hopefully chapter 6 and the epilogue tomorrow) then read the prologue of book 4 to see if it continues the pattern though.
I’m surprised that I even noticed the pattern considering how much I actually missed when reading
Listening only comprehension for book 2 chapter 5 
Ok, already this story is a little different with our main guy trying to find Beniko. It took me about half the story to realize that the guy who wanted him to find Beniko is none other than our hairdresser guy!
He follows Beniko into the supermarket and sees her refilling the gachapon machine. (I was glad that I had already read the prologue with lookups, so I knew what it was). Obviously he becomes overcome with the desire to buy something from the machine and does so. It’s the revenge menko.
He tells hairdresser that he saw Beniko but didn’t catch her, and hairdresser yells at him. He’s irritated by this and wants to retaliate so he goes home, writes hairdresser’s name on the card, and slaps it down. Then he turns on the tv and there’s breaking news about the hairdresser! This is where my comprehension petered out, I didn’t catch what exactly had happened to the hairdresser as a result of the card. Pretty much everything except this very end bit I felt like I was following pretty well.
I liked seeing the gachapon machine turn up again, and the ‘sweet’ not actually being a sweet. I also was surprised to see a character come back, which opens up a lot of possibilities for later stories potentially revisiting past sweets/customers.
I really liked this part too and liked how it tied into the prologue as well. I did miss a lot of this story (will be re-reading it soon though) but I hope more unusual things like this get introduced through the series.
