Speaking of which.

About six weeks ago, I tried to read Hana monogatari, by Yoshiya Nobuko, for as long as I could before completely getting lost--in, yes, the original Japanese. The first couple of sentences were easy enough: It's an evening in early summer, and seven girls are meeting at this Western-style mansion to trade stories. As you do. It's proto-shoujo. But then, a few characters into the third sentence, I completely lost all sense of what was going on. All I knew was that it had to do with one of something saying something about pupils.

This morning, I tried it again. I still wasn't able to read whole sentences past the second one, mainly because of unfamiliar kanji, but I had a much clearer handle on what was going on. One of the girls tells a story about her time at a mission school someplace. Her father does or did something in the florist or possibly gardening business and her mother does or did something with this school. So the girl and her mother came to know this lady who played piano at the mission. I'm not sure why the fact that it's a mission school is relevant, but if I had to guess I'd say that it's because that way it's easy to make the piano player a beautiful blonde European lady.

So we follow the exploits of this girl as she watches the piano player play piano for the balance of the first page. At the end of the page, there's something about returning to some town somewhere, and then I completely lose track of what Yoshiya is talking about.

But still! Two sentences to one page! Progress, am I right?