[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by Nyororin

I don`t think it`s that bad because the sentence follows a logical order. Instead of looking at it like "but" and "because" and being linked into a single sentence - you have to realize that this is a very fluid spoken-style passage. Because it is so informal in tone, it is more natural to just let the sentence stretch on and on instead of using things like しかし or the like to split it into multiple sentences.



You`re both right on this - the kanji is perfectly fine in there. He is basically saying that it sounds better than the reality in this case.



I would personally translate it as "farm" - because you hear 農家をやってる a lot more than it being used to actually refer to a specific building.

Also - a bit of curiosity. Why do you both use Wakase?　若狭 is Wakasa, in Fukui. Dialectal territory I am quite familiar with.

If I get around to it, I may post a bit of a dialect challenge as I have a really nice and short video with 3 people talking. One is from the Wakasa area, one from the Echizen area, and one from the Fukui city area. They all have different and pretty heavy regional accents. Might be kind of neat for a few more advanced learners to try to figure out.

I was saying Wakase because the second kanji I only know as セまい (can you use katakana like that, as a Japanese equivalent of italics when the "emphatic dot above" is technologically impossible?). I knew it was a town, but it's a region I have zero familiarity with. I've never been further west than Kanagawa.

As for the incredible length, I had a feeling it was supposed to mimic a conversational, flowing style rather than something specifically high literature. The story's structure really starts out with a lot of setup where the narrator is using very long sentences. But when he gets into the actual main events (Yamagishi's wife contracts typhus and the narrator and his father must take her, by bicycle cart/rearcar, a few towns over to be quarantined), the sentences shorten up.

Thanks to both of you. I'll no doubt be hitting up JF for some help with new structures I learn from this project. Thankfully, I have until around November to finish this and one other work.