Ikoku Nikki - Vol. 6 Ch. 27 - page.27

I've said it before, but if this ever gets an official English release I'll buy every damn volume. The storytelling is just SO GOOD, and the art is warm and beautiful. I need it on my shelf!
 
It's not chaotic but it's heavy, my bet is that a couple of weeks or a month has passed in this chapter with people coming and going in the house and how Asa and Making felt, it was heavy because with everything going on, Major still needed to write and do something good too.

I think that the fact she finished at the end was really nice.

What left me a bit surprised was that Making was working on Asa's room at the end, maybe for a change of pace?
 
@serenta Other way around, Asa likes sleeping in Makino’s office. You can see it in the first chapter which takes place after a significant time skip.
https://mangadex.org/chapter/557980
 
I'm on the fence about this. On one hand, all the individual bits of dialogue are, as usual, pretty damn cool. And it's an interesting thing to try. Whether it's ever been done before or not, it's still fairly experimental, and there's definitely a feeling of stretching oneself, not settling into a humdrum routine. Mangaka tried to pull off a big move in front of the audience, went for the quadruple axel instead of playing it safe with the usual triple. I respect that.
But I do think the result was, if not a fall, at least bobbling the landing a bit. It did come off incoherent sometimes, and there were only a couple times where I felt the different parts being side by side added anything. So I dunno. Mangaka's strength as a writer powered it through, but would it have been just as good, or better, with the same writing strength but organized more linear? Not sure. It'd be interesting to just snip it up and reorganize the panels to read it through that way, see how it looks.
 
Weird flex but ok

But my real comment is this. Writing a narrative is a struggle to make a legible form out of disparate fragments. This is obviously a chapter of metacommentary on life as a narrative arc (beginning middle end) that everyone is normalized into thinking life is supposed to be lived. From different conversations there is plenty of reflecting on the past, past decisions and their consequences, past desires for the future and the horizons that open and close along the way. We are constantly attempting to self narrate our life in order fit into a legible form, an arc that stretches toward some recognizable future (arts or sciences, a homemaker or a office worker), and this narrative gives meaning to all the fragmentary and episodic instanced that we have experienced. Or at least we hope it will give us a sense of meaning. But sometimes life remains incoherent and noisy, like radio interference, as Makio says “the world is too loud.” By the end of the chapter, after struggling on, and especially after talking it out with others, the writer finishes the narrative, makes sense of the world and their place in it, albeit briefly. Life is a struggle oftentimes to find meaning in living, writers write despite going into slumps, to see where the story goes. I guess we got to keep living just like writers, to see where the story goes.
 
It's not so much that Asa likes sleeping in Makio's office--that room is the second bedroom in the apartment, it's sorta-kinda Asa's bedroom. Makio for some reason hasn't seen fit to move her desk into her bedroom. At one point, when Makio was planning an all-nighter, she told Asa she could sleep in her bed.
 
I get what the author was trying to do here but this chapter is a mess
 
wooooooh well I was confused at first (not very bright I am) but I got it soon enough and man this is chaotic but coherent enough.
thanks for chapter!
 
solid chapter!, and i'm surprised by all the people that don't like the continuity breaks, they're an effective tool used well
 
I think there's a error/mistranslation on the first page. I did the math and the day of the week of Itsuki Juno's visit should be a Wednesday, not a Tuesday. I also looked it up and all of the dates mentioned in this chapter correlate with the chapter (and subsequently, implicitly, chapters 2-26) taking place in 2018. I want to see what the original RAW of the page of this chapter looked like to actually determine if this was a mistranslation or an error on Tomoko Yamashita's part.

@ehoba If you wanted to bring up the mistranslations to Hi Wa Mata Noboru and it's leader Kewl0210, you should've @ at them in your post (like this: @Kewl0210) or sent them a DM.
 
Loved this chapter. The tiger gag on one of the earlier pages had me grinning.

I did have to read this chapter twice, with a restart once I realized I wasn't paying enough attention -- but I reread most chapters immediately anyway, because I love these characters and want more time with them. So, no complaints here.

Thanks as always to the scanlators.
 
I guess I can see why some would feel that this chapter was hard to follow, although I didn't feel that way myself as I feel it presented all three "scenes" well enough for me to keep track of the transitions.
I quite like how it melds three separate but similar occasions together to show that the whole topic of life choices and lifestyles in general is in itself confusing and without definite answers.
 
Count me among the people who liked the disjointed narrative.

Asa is very fortunate to have good adults in her life who take time to impart wisdom instead of shutting down her teenage angst.
 
@Beregorn The fourth one was the one that was clearly kept separate from the rest though and never sharing a page so I wasn't really counting that one.
 
I like how this reflects the blur of the moment. Makio's mind is a mess, and the bits and pieces of this chapter definitely feel like that.
 
"Am is smart because am can follow bad writing."

Not really if you can't identify it for what it is and instead choose to exploit the event to pat yourself on the back though. Again, not the first time that the author takes road less traveled (narratively speaking) in this series, but really the first one to garner so many "well I did got it" comments. That says something.

(also all of the pseudo- meta- "big picture high concept" post-modern readings here, yikes. rick and morty much guys?)
 
This is super good and an example of a narrative structure that you couldn’t do as well in any other medium. Comics rule
 

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