Any spoilers, 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’ questions and 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.
Things really get into motion in this chapter. We experience live how the library gets attacked by a gigantic water film that even takes a rubber ball and a dog with it on its way back
Will Hakuu show them the way to the artificial corpse?
On the side, we have deep conversations of our protags Tamon and Aiko about all sorts of things, especially about love
Curious to see how this side story will unfold…
I’m liking their dynamic as friends, so I’m really hoping it’ll stay platonic. Even not taking into account that they’re both married and seem happy in their relationships, it would be refreshing to have two characters of the opposite sex that get along well without ending up together. That happens way too often.
On the first person pieces at the start of each chapter:
Chapter six and seven are clearly not 藍子’s pov; they must be the journalist 高安. So I think we have three groupings:
Chapters 1, 2, 3: unknown person running through the rain
Chapters 4, 5: 藍子
Chapters 6, 7: 高安
Not sure how significant it is, but I noticed that in all cases the first person narration uses 私, even though in the dialogues in the rest of the book 藍子 uses あたし and 高安 mostly uses 僕. I’m tempted to hang a very speculative theory on this extremely slender evidence and suggest that perhaps they’re all from the POV of some other … consciousness … that has slurped up everybody’s memories?
You know, I love that theory! I’d noticed that we switched away from 藍子’s POV to the journalist’s, but I didn’t follow that thought to any conclusions like you did.
That bit at the very end of chapter seven was pretty chilling, but also seemed like a bit of a divergence in that I don’t feel like the narration has previously given us “stuff out characters don’t see” like that; or did I miss some earlier?
We’ve seen the cat roaming the streets before, and no one was witnessing it, so it’s not the first time.
It’s been a while since I read the first two chapters, but why do you think this wasn’t 藍子? I tend to remember someone in the early chapters referring to the water as それ. I assumed it was 多聞 but maybe it was in one of those first person pieces? In which case it might have been the professor, or maybe these pieces are not in chronological order.
Following a cat must be next to impossible, only slightly easier than following a bird I’m surprised they didn’t mention the cats at all during the discussion. If the professor suspected his brother and his wife of being changelings all along, how come he kept the cat? For studying? And what happened to the rest of the kittens?
Very surprised by the ending in this chapter (and the library scene). The plot is developing faster than I expected, and clearly moves in a direction where it seems impossible to have a realistic explanation of all these strange events. Very curious to see what’s next.
I am late to the party as I took a short break from reading this, but I am now caught up with week 5.
Besides the obvious action this week with the water attack, the part that I enjoyed the most was the discussion between 多聞 and 藍子 about points of view and experience, where 藍子 detailed the date she went on with her husband and how he had a different set of “eyes” when it came to the restaurant. It added flavor to the events in the story, but was also a nice little philosophical chatty break in a way?
Besides that, I have to say that I am surprised by this book. There are so many elements that feel very “out there” and don’t seem like they “fit together” at first glance, such as: the body snatchers theory/random body parts, the cat things, 多聞 being a character who is loved but does not love back, the philosophical discussions, the fact they are playing a “game” investigating together, the water attacks, creepy canal city, etc. I haven’t read a book like this before (maybe it is because I am not a big sci-fi or fantasy reader in general so my imagination is just small ) but, as I keep saying every week, I have no idea where things are going.
Not a ton to add - I like that things are getting a bit spooky and we have a witnessed ‘phenomenon’. I also love the body snatcher element, and the worry that anyone around them could be these replacement people. Tamon making a loud noise at the restaurant - imagine if everyone did look at him the same! Spine chilling. I hadn’t really been digging this book much, but this last chapter was quite enjoyable so I’m looking forward to reading on
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I’m surprised they didn’t mention the cats at all during the discussion. If the professor suspected his brother and his wife of being changelings all along, how come he kept the cat? For studying? And what happened to the rest of the kittens?
I haven’t read a book like this before (maybe it is because I am not a big sci-fi or fantasy reader in general so my imagination is just small 
) but, as I keep saying every week, I have no idea where things are going. 