Inhae's blog

I am reading the third book of my 2018 reading challenge! My challenge was to read a book per month, and I am well ahead of schedule.

The book I chose is 「彼女がその名を知らない鳥たち」by 沼田まほかる (ぬまたまほかる) There is a film adaption which trailer you can watch here:

To be honest, I may not have bought this book if I had watched the trailer before. I was expecting some kind of psychological thriller where we don’t know if the protagonist is persecuted or suffering from paranoïa… but this story seems to be mainly a love story.

This book is clearly above my level. The opening chapter was difficult, but opening chapters usually are, and I always need some time to get into a story. Therefore I persevered and reached the 1/4 of the book… and it is still challenging!🤯

There are passages that I understand well and others that leave me behind. To be more precise, I feel more or less comfortable with narrative passages, but some of the dialogues give me the impression I never learnt Japanese 😱 … I understood the reason for my confusion on page 56 when the sister of our protagonist Towako talks about using the 大阪弁, the dialect of Osaka.

So that’s why I don’t understand the dialogues… When the main protagonists, Towako and Jinji, talk to one another, they use the Kansai dialect… with which I am not at all familiar. I feel like I am facing two options: either I accept to miss things in the novel and just go through the dialogues without understanding everything or I work my way through this…

To be honest, I still don’t know how I will read this novel. I understand very well the other dialogues when Towako is speaking to other characters using standard Japanese, so I am tempting to just continue reading without bothering. On the other hand, missing the subtility of the “confrontations” between the two main characters would be a shame…

Anyway, to say a word about the setting, the main character is a young woman called Towako. She is living with a man, Jinji, she finds disgusting but depends on him for a living. Obsessed by the memories of her former lover, she leads an idle life, succumbing to depression.

To be honest, I am still not entirely convinced by this novel, but of course, this may be linked to the fact that I don’t understand everything and can’t read it comfortably. What I can say is that I feel no sympathy whatsoever for Towako but find the character of Jinji extremely interesting.

With these mixed feelings, I will go on reading this challenging book and post my review as soon as I/if I can finish it.

About

I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.

Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.

Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.