[DeepL Translation - needs review] Volume 1: Anne of Green Gables, an abridged translation for children by Hanako Muraoka, the protagonist of the 2014 morning drama series. It was Hanako Muraoka, the translator, who came up with the title "Anne of Green Gables," which is widely known in Japan. During World War II, she went through many hardships, including carrying the manuscript into an air-raid shelter, to translate "Anne of Green Gables," and after the war, in 1952, she was finally able t...
Simply and consistently charming
This is the original Hanako Muraoka translation of LM Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, abridged and fully furigana-ed for younger readers (the unabridged version is here). According to the afterward, no story content was cut and most of the edits were minor -- to modernize vocabulary or reword sentences to be clearer -- but I don't own the original to confirm the extent of the changes.
Difficulty- and learning-wise, I found it to be pretty challenging, but in a way that felt valuable. The book is replete with antiquated language, even after being abridged; なさる everywhere, lots of things like 悪うございます and 言いなすった, and more than a few words that aren't in J-E dictionaries. The average sentence length is also quite long, with lots of relative clauses that can sometimes get painful to keep straight. Because of its age and how specific a lot of the vocabulary is, I'm not sure how broadly applicable the knowledge is that I got from this book (which is why I deducted a star for learning), but I did learn a great amount and felt motivated to dig into the things I didn't understand throughout.
Story-wise, this is a classic work and well-loved for a reason. Somehow I never read it in English and had no knowledge of the story outside of "red-headed orphan gets adopted in rural Prince Edward Island", so I went in with relatively low expectations... but that red-headed orphan completely pulled me in, and I felt the charm of the characters and the island and Anne's imagination every page from cover to cover. There is very little "story" to speak of -- mostly it's a collection of vignettes across 5 years of Anne's childhood and adolescence, with not much connecting them and sometimes whole seasons in between. But very little of it is told from her point-of-view, and the narration is quite matter-of-fact when it comes to the characters' thoughts and feelings, which gives the story a bit of a fly-on-the-wall quality. It makes reading about Anne's escapades feel very much like you're there fondly watching her grow up, from a small distance, and so are just as amused and mystified by her idiosyncracies as the other adults in the story.