At the start of 6th Spice and Wolf light novel, what's up with the discrepancy between "like" and "love"?

Question

Note: I'd like to request no spoilers beyond the start of the 6th novel.

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At the very end of the 4th S&W novel, Lawrence says "I like you".

And yet Lawrence embraced Holo. And then—
"I like you."
He kissed her right cheek ever so lightly.

Love is never once used by Lawrence toward Holo so far in the story. I even ran the search function to check the PDF, I'm certain.

Yet, in the next book, at the very start, on the same day that the previous novel left off, Holo teases Lawrence about saying "I love you".

"I was so happy, yes—happy that you said you loved me. So please—"

The best I can tell, the author meant to write "love" in the previous novel, or else my PDF copy is simply wrong.

What's the explanation behind this? I'm afraid to do a Google search on the topic since I'm only starting the 6th novel and searching "love" in regards to a romance that I'm 6 of 17 books through is just begging to run into all sorts of spoilers.

Answer 1

In Japanese to show affection to a loved one they usually use 好き pronounced suki which means to like something like ‘I like sushi’ or to show romantic affection like ‘I like you (romantic sense)’ or even to say ‘I like you (as a person)’.

In general suki is used rather than 愛してる pronounced aishiteru which means to love. It is a stronger form of affection and is not really used much even amongst couples. In general the two forms can be interchangeable I guess but the Japanese tend to use suki more than ai or aishiteru.

Now I’m not a Japanese and I can only speak conversational level Japanese but I read this somewhere (forgot where) but it was a credible source (a native speaking Japanese).