How is everyone going with their individual advents? Feel free to post here about what you’re up to!
Several people voted for the Mystery Story Advent but haven’t made an appearance, so I wanted to make sure everyone knew that the Aozora, Yokai and Mystery advents have their own threads, linked in the second post. Late joiners also welcome! 
It has been interesting to have so many people joining the Aozora Advent, last year it was me and one other person who was a native Japanese speaker 
It’s fun to be able to talk about the stories with others, but also oddly stressful as Aozora is a complete grab-bag and I worry about people being annoyed when they get something like an essay on pens or how they just don’t make tofu like they used to 
Both of those actually sound fascinating to me (if I could read at a high enough level to follow them)! I love those kinds of snapshots of a certain place and time.
I had to drop out of every advent challenge because work got surprisingly hectic and 月の裏側 is taking up all my remaining energy since it sped up 
I will probably read both the mystery and yokai advents a bit later on when things settled down a bit. 
❅１２月４日❅
I read 3 of the 54字の物語.
Today’s informal book club is a middle school choir manga, 少年ノート ーDays of Evanescenceー
❅１２月５日❅
I read 4 of the 54字の物語.
Today’s informal book club is actually not a manga today: it’s a children’s volleyball novel, 金色の羽でとべ
I read 4 of the 54字の物語, and though it’s a couple days late now, I also read 走れメロス from the Aozora calendar.
Today’s informal book club is for the 4-koma manga はんだくん (also ばらかもん technically, though I don’t own that one).
I read 4 more of the 54字の物語.
数分間の格闘の末、彼が釣り上げたのは小さなゴム片だった。世界中の海面が少しずつ下がり始めたのはこの日からだ。
I thought he’d decided to single-handedly fish up all the trash in the ocean (I pictured Animal Crossing tbh), so the water level goes down a tiny bit each time because of the water that the trash had displaced. Especially if he also extracts the big stuff like sunken ships and all those rubber tires that had been dumped in the ocean.
But that small piece of trash wasn’t meant to be just any ordinary piece of trash but a stopper—the man fishes it up, not knowing how important it is, and all the water starts draining beneath the Earth’s crust like a giant bathtub! Good thing this is fiction; that would be pretty terrifying…
I guess the clue is that it’s a several-second struggle to fish up a small piece of trash. Though I could see something being stuck in sand or silt or tangled up in seaweed or something and be difficult to fish up because of that.
The fourth one I needed the 解説 because I don’t know geography lol (also I didn’t notice the kanji mix-up…)
Today’s informal book club is for the LN and manga series 宝石商リチャード氏の謎鑑定
I read 4 of the 54字の物語. The last one involved some wordplay that tbh I’m not sure I would have gotten even if I hadn’t gotten caught up on “Wait, but that isn’t a word, what.” It involved a missing radical, of all things. The characters were trying to talk about a theft, but the thief had stolen plates—including the plate radical! So every instance of 盗 turned into 次. I do know the kanji, but I still doubt I’d have made the connection.
Today’s informal book club is for the sci-fi manga 彼方のアストラ
I read 3 of the 54字の物語.
Today’s informal book club is for the cooking/child-raising not-actually-BL manga, パパと親父のウチご飯
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. (It’s on 24th here 
)
I fell behind on the youkai calendar, but managed to keep up with both aozora options and X’mas Stories: 一年でいちばん奇跡が起きる日 | L35??
This was fun thx to everyone who ended up hosting a club. 
