Reviews
(3.18/5)For me this book was on the easier side, not at its current L26, but overall more at L22 of 思い出のマーニー. I had an average of 3.1 look-ups/page, even 18 pages with no look-ups at all. Kanji sparse books are no problem for me, on the contrary this makes them an easy read for me, as I come from the watching TV and speaking front, I guess.
Don‘t get me wrong, this book has its more difficult parts, like the heavy use of dialect in the first 15 pages, or the one or other grammar point beyond N3 in chapter 5. But here I talk about the general ease of reading the book.
Dialect: it‘s probably save to say that it‘s from somewhere to the north of Tokyo, as there is the one or other だべ at the end of some sentences, which I am kind of trained to just ignore after reading a book where it was used in almost every sentence. But the major change you may trip on are consonant shifts from unvoiced to voiced, like か to が e.g だがら for だから, or こ to ご e.g. ごと for こと etc. though if you know the grammar points you can get used to ignore that as well. And as I said it‘s over very soon. As the author originally came from 岩手県 I tend to guess that the dialect is from there, too.
I think many of us read this because we heard that parts of it inspired “Spirited Away,” but really it’s only the broad concept of “little girl works in different parts of a magical place” that’s similar. It’s a completely different story.
IMO this book is less than ideal for intermediate language students because it’s written with few kanji and yet has some fairly advanced vocabulary. The particular thing that makes it tricky is that a lot of the atmosphere and characterization comes from Kashiwaba’s use of specific, descriptive verbs, rather than lots of adjectives or metaphors like another author might use. I imagine this is probably lovely and evocative for the native speaker, but for the language student this means a lot of words that you need to look up (instead of skipping) in order to understand the sentence, words which you might not see again for a while. I think this is more suited to a reader who’s further along in Japanese, perhaps someone who feels they’ve been relying on kanji too much and wants to challenge themselves by reading a high-hiragana book.