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Reading through my first short story by 秋田滋訳 and have gone ahead with the story and had relatively few problems with it, but I'm a bit confused by the first line:

[新聞]{しんぶん}をひろげてみて[次]{つぎ}のような[三面記事]{さんめんきじ}が[出]{で}ていない[日]{ひ}はほとんどあるまい。

I get we're talking about 'try to spread the newspaper' amd 'the following human interest story' but I'm really not sure what 出ていない日はほとんどあるまい。means. 出ていない日 seems like it would be 'the day it's not coming out' or something along those lines, but otherwise I'm stuck. I understand enough that the rest of the story makes sense, but I can't hazard a guess of the precise meaning.

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  • Just in case, 秋田滋訳 is not a personal name, it's "tr. by 秋田滋" (and originally written by de Maupassant).
    – broccoli facemask
    Jan 24, 2016 at 15:05

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「新聞をひろげ(る)」 simply means "open the newspaper" (to look at it); then 「記事が出(る)」 means for an article to "appear". This use of 出る is extremely common colloquially, so for example "to be on tv" is 「テレビに出る」.

So the sentence simply means that "Hardly a day went by that I would open the newspaper and not find this sort of gossip story".

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  • So みて here is not 'try,' but 'look at,' despite being written in hiragana?
    – user242007
    Jan 21, 2016 at 19:48
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    みて doesn't really mean "try", in the sense of attempting to do something, though it might mean "try" in the sense of doing something to see the result, and the result of opening the newspaper is to see what's written in it. In this particular case the literal and metaphorical meanings of "see" are pretty much the same.
    – Brian Chandler
    Jan 21, 2016 at 20:14

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