This is the thread for chapter 2, 第一部：六月, a part of the かがみの孤城 book club.
As this is a read at your own pace club, please be sure to have your discussions in the correct thread, and don’t discuss anything that has not occurred by the of the chapter in this thread. As always, please also be considerate about spoilers and put anything that feels like a spoiler behind spoiler tags or in a drop down.
I was actually surprised which of the characters that we ended up meeting first. I like that こころ seems to have bonded especially to マサムネ and スバル. It feels like she’s been missing any sort of peer approval for a long time, and it was nice to see her get that and open up to the group a little bit.
The whole castle seems kinda crazy. Especially the part with a bathtub and no bathrooms! Entirely speculation on my part that I have no idea if it’s true, but spoilering just in case I guess right: Anyone else have the thought that this could be a dollhouse? I know some of the more elaborate ones have electricity, so maybe that’s how they’re powering the game console and the TV, but it wouldn’t have running water or maybe even toilets 
I guess I misread the part from the beginning since I thought that they couldn’t bring food into the castle, but it was more like the meaning was that the castle didn’t have any food of its own.
I’m definitely enjoying the book a lot so far… it feels like something I would have picked to read on my own, and not just because it’s at a comfortable language level for me.
Back to reading this book regularly so I finished this chapter!
It was nice to meet more of the kids and start to learn about them! I also was glad Kokoro got to start a friendship with スバル and マサムネ because she was bullied in the past so I was a bit worried the whole book would be like ‘oh I don’t know how to talk to the other kids because I’m such a loner’ or something.
Although, I will say, in the first part of the chapter I got confused as to which boy was which and I had to go look at the character list for the anime movie and try and fix them in my mind. No brain, スバル is the nice one, and マサムネ is the nerdy one! Not the other way around! 
Admittedly, I’m listening to the audiobook which helps a lot to keep people straight since they all have different voices. But I definitely remembered マサムネ as the nerdy one bc that’s the kind of name I’d expect a samurai otaku to have and even though he’s not that kinda nerd it helped me keep them straight.
Ohhh, that would probably help a lot! One of my main points of confusion in this book is figuring out who’s talking, but I think that’s just a feature of Japanese novels, not a bug 
If the audiobook is good I’ll make a mental note to listen to it in a while after I finish the book.
Yeah it’s supposed to be obvious because everyone’s speech register is totally different… except if you’re just understanding the text it’s hed to keep that straight too 
It’s also a really well done production. My only real complaint is that sometimes the files break at weird points in the chapters… which is weird bc they have so many chapter breaks. But yeah it’s a super nit picky complaint, and irrelevant if you’re just listening.
