We are following the below schedule (page counts may vary based on your medium):
Week 1 - Up until star break. Sentence ending in 殺されたからです。- 9% / p.29 Week 2 - Through end of chapter 1 - 19% / p.61 Week 3 - Up until star break. Sentence ending in 救われた気分でした。- 28% / p. 87 Week 4 - Through end of chapter 2 - 38% / p. 119 Week 5 - Chapter 3 - 54% / p. 169 Week 6 - up until bolded section starting with 四歳児 - 64% / p. 196 Week 7 - through end of chapter 4 - 74% / p. 229 Week 8 - through end of book - 100% / p. 301
I will generally copy this information over thread to thread each week for ease of finding - you can always expect the schedule at the top of any weekly thread
Law and Order
Any reveals, for the current chapters must be behind spoilers or detail curtains. When we get further in you don’t need to hide details that were revealed in previous chapters.
Questions on vocab, grammar, nuance, and the like are both welcome and encouraged. If you’re not sure if it’s a spoiler, assume it is and use one of the above options to hide the text.
You are encouraged to speculate and guess wildly
Be kind about other peoples’ wild guesses
Even if you don’t read the chapter(s) in time, you are still encouraged to post in the thread for that reading once you have finished it. I advise not reading ahead in the threads as you may see spoilers.
To gauge participation - a poll!
Are you reading week 3?
Yes, I’m planning to read along/am reading along this week
Wow, this ウェルテル guy seems kinda full of himself. I almost want to call him 良輝 instead but for the sake of comprehensibility I’ll stick to ウェルテル. Since it’s a direct reference to The Sorrows of Young Werther「若きウェルテルの悩み」 could this ウェルテル also be trying to pursue a selfish ideal that leads to self-destruction? He really doesn’t give a crap about the student’s opinion and just wants to be seen as some sort of savior to these poor kids.
But speaking of “these poor kids”, some are turning out to be outright gremlins! 美月being the voice of reason in this is kind of worrying because she doesn’t seem to interact with any of the other students so she might not have any influence on anyone else. It’s absolutely going to turn into a witch-hunt, especially considering when 美月 recognizes the existence of the court and law as a means to placate the bloodlust of the 凡人 (commoners? the masses?). I can kinda see how things are going to develop for 修哉 since still attending class and thus is an easy target but I can’t imagine how things are going to turn out for 直樹 with ウェルテル hounding him/直樹’s mother
As for my theory of how things are going to progress I think the bullying by milk is going to come to a head and turn into “good ol’ fashioned” schoolyard bullying except in this situation the bullies are bolstered by the fact that 修哉 is an accomplice to a murder. But based on how 美月 ominously mentions that the initial target of mob rule might be justified (in a very loose sense), once the mob gets going they’re going to be impossible to stop. Sooooo, class-wide murder-suicide?
I do feel somewhat sorry for ウェルテル, he has no idea of the situation and even if he asked he wouldn’t get an answer, so of course he keeps putting his foot in his mouth and making everything worse. In person he’d be so annoying though. And I agree that it does seem like he cares more about being the saviour than actually helping his students, although maybe he just comes across like that because he’s trying to make up for everyone’s lackluster attitude by being especially enthusiastic and gung-ho.
So 修哉 is A and 直樹 is B? I wonder who’s behind the messages. They seem malicious but I don’t know what they might be gaining from this.
Still, first they isolate the class, make sure the students can’t confide in anyone removed from the situation and now they’re slowly turning the students against each other? That’s a recipe for disaster.
Oh, thank you! I was going to ask how ウェルテル should be romanized. I’ll have to look up Sorrows; I’d never heard of it before.
The guy definitely seems like a representation for 熱血先生, which makes a lot of sense to me since that was a recurring theme in chapter 1. Immediately after her bombshell her replacement is this guy? Totally 熱血先生, with the intent of twisting it somehow, I’ll bet. I’m not sure what the twist is yet; maybe he does actually know about what happened at the end of the previous school year, but is pretending like he doesn’t for his own (selfish?) reasons. Right now he’s definitely just giving me vibes of that type of person who lives and dies on group participation and is incredibly pushy about it. Annoying, but so far ultimately harmless.
And just to check here, 美月 (was that how her name was written? I can’t remember atm)/ミズホ is a student, correct? She’s named as an 委員長, but it wasn’t especially clear to me what 委員 she’s 長 of.
I’m curious who the sender of that mail is. Our previous protagonist? (I really need to double-check her name/update the wiki; I can’t remember.) It doesn’t seem like her style, oddly, after all her talk about how, if students A and B owned up to their mistakes, everyone could live in harmony afterwards. I’m wondering if it’s ウェルテル somehow. Could he be her husband? We don’t have any info on his background, right?
These hints of bullying at the end of the section worry me a bit; this looks like it’s on trajectory to become incredibly vicious. Again, I wonder whether that was ch. 1 protag’s intention or not. Surely she had to know that kids, especially middle school kids, would take her speech and run with it.
I’m not sure myself; I was trying to piece together who could be who, but I’m sure I missed clues. Been recovering from minor surgery, so my reading’s been a bit all over the place.
It’s a German classic by Goethe. It was required reading in school. I have read worse.
isn’t that the class representative?
This book isn’t giving me major mystery vibes… but it is giving me low-key horror vibes. I can see how maybe one of the bullied kids runs amok, killing everyone and then drinking poisened milk or something. I wonder who the texter turns out to be. Must be someone in the class… or maybe it’s multiple people? Can we trust the various narrators? Maybe they are unreliable - or some of them are.
I believe so! I’m mostly basing it off her description of Student A and B, specifically that Student B having a decent family life with older sisters and Student A’s family was barely mentioned besides the A’s mother.
Yes, 美月・ミズホ is a student as well as the class representative (委員長 is a generic term for a group leader) which is probably why she was chosen to do house visits to 直樹 with ウェルテル. Probably. I really don’t know what that dude is thinking.
It’s so spooky! Like who would intentionally goad the students into banding against one another. Seems kinda psychopathic and the only resident “psychopath” is 修哉/Student A. I do think 修哉 is genuinely smart but orchestrating his own bullying might be too Machiavellian. He is getting punished by milk again, which is something.
I agree with Biblio though, whatever vibes of mystery I’m getting from the book is overcome by an encroaching sense of dread and horror. I love it.
That’s an interesting idea. I think that would be quite difficult to pull off though, since her husband appeared on TV so the students should know what he looks like. The name also doesn’t match, according to the Wiki the husbands name is 桜宮正義, while ウェルテル said his name was 良輝.
Character list wiki is updated (btw anyone can edit it, just be mindful of labeling and hiding spoilers).
Also I am here for the theory that ウェルテル is somehow a plant from 悠子 and basically destroying the class via his intentionally misplaced enthusiasm. Love it. That said he gives me おいしいごはんを食べられますように vibes of gross, forced positivity. Also love that. I think I just enjoy the discomfort he brings
I think the messenger has to 悠子 or her husband. Who else would know, and have access to the group’s contacts?
I also think 直樹 is B and 修哉 is A. 修哉 being cold and aloof feels very in character for A.
Also agree on people saying this feels less mystery and more horror. There is some mystery (who is sending the messages?) but it’s eclipsed by the sense of dread and vicious energy building up in the classroom.
Strangely, this reminds me that I need to finish watching サロモンの偽証 (movie trailer). It’s about a class that decides to hold a trail when a classmate is accused of murdering a fellow student whose death had been ruled by the police as suicide. Also based on a book but…it’s a 6 volume set and the first two alone total over a thousand pages
Read up to the break point. It seems very well placed again.
At first I was unsure if the two stories were related or not. I had a feeling it did, but couldn’t find it when I went looking for it. So I just continued reading and later I did see that it was 悠子 was homeroom teacher of group B. Was at the very start of the book (p. 11) when she starts her confession. That does mean that the students still address her on a first name basis among each other, outside the group they use her last name.
As for the new narration, it took a while to place her. New style and the new homeroom teacher kept butting in, but the consistency made it clear over time. He definitely gives off a very try hard appearance. It feels a bit forced and kinda fake. The kind of positivity that ends up ruining everything. He also just randomly decides that she needs a nickname to be his partner in crime. 美月 is definitely at this point in the story pretty down to earth and more an observer to the madness that is about to unfold. Does feel a bit weird that as class representative, she feels a bit isolated from the rest of the class. Whereas her counterpart is basically leading the lynching. Like I know they’re basically there for menial tasks and all, but you would also want them to keep the peace and be a voice of reason. Especially after what happened. Definitely feels like this is something 悠子 hoped would happen, let the kids serve their own kind of judgement where the adults have failed.
I’m interested in where it’s gonna go from here, so I’ll keep reading. Never a dull moment in this book so far.
It’s been a couple of years since I was an ALT in a HS and parts of this reading made me think back on my experiences then. No real spoilers but felt like writing up my random reflections on parts. I have some more thoughts on school life aspects but I’ll just bring them up if they end up playing a larger role in the plot.
呼び捨て: Teachers would get a lot of random papers from the school during the daily morning meeting that I sat in on, and one piece that sticks out to me mentioned 呼び捨て. I can’t remember the exact topic of the paper, I believe it was about respecting students by keeping boundaries with them? There was a list of things under the header “Do you do any of these?” and one of the bullet points was about using 呼び捨て for students. ウェルテル sure has no issues trying to be buddy-buddy with the students lol
Going to student’s houses: I remember hearing ALTs who worked in JHSs talk about how the homeroom teachers, in particular during COVID lockdown, needing to go to each of their students’ homes to deliver things/check in on them. I think I’ve heard of homeroom teachers needing to do home visits to everyone. Since I was in HS though the teachers at my school didn’t do that.
連絡網: I had 連絡網 with my teachers. The idea is that in an emergency one person on top contacts a number of people in a group, then each of those people contact one person, and they go down the line until everyone has the information. We had a big typhoon once and power/water was out which caused school to close and I got a phone call through it to let me know what was happening.
Turns out classes used to do this but stopped due to privacy concerns (this is why that mass text message could be sent out). Now students just join the unofficial class LINE group haha.
Maybe I’m misremembering, did they say specially that the number wasn’t in the 連絡網, or just they didn’t know who it was? Here’s a picture if anyone’s curious: https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedJapan/status/958928907373342720
Oh fun! Always neat to compare real experiences with the book drama
I don’t remember 100% but I do think it was basically an unofficial mass group type deal here. Also these giant LINE groups come up a lot in HS murder shows
Re: 呼び捨て - I definitely think ウェルテル is written as being uncomfortably comfortable with the students. Someone who has blurred the line of ‘friend’ vs ‘teacher’ - or is trying to! He wants to, the students don’t. I had a teacher like that in HS and while they probably thought they were ‘cool’ but overall the students (including myself) just felt it was lame. ‘We know you have authority over us, don’t pretend to be our equal’ - that kind of feeling.
This book was published in 2008 so it wouldn’t shock me if some cultural things re: high school have changed, although I’m not sure by how much.
That’s a good point, I did hear the way teachers call boy/girls has changed over the years but I’m sure there are a lot of other cultural changes since the book has come out that I’m not familiar with.
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Law and Order 
We don’t have any info on his background, right?
I wonder who the texter turns out to be. Must be someone in the class… or maybe it’s multiple people? Can we trust the various narrators? Maybe they are unreliable - or some of them are. 
