魔女の宅急便 1

Tougher than it had to be

This was my first Japanese novel. I enjoyed this book but excessive hiragana without spaces made it harder to parse sentences and identify vocabulary to look up in the dictionary. Would have preferred more kanji with furigana instead. Was a struggle bus. I was reading Sailor Moon in parallel as my first manga. Probably would have been better to read more manga first and acquire more vocab before trying this book.

Good book

Overall, this is a really good book. It's different enough from the movie that you can read it without it feeling repetitive. Each chapter is a little story in it's own so it's perfect if you want to pair it with other books and read a chapter at a time.

Language Learning⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I've been asking my Japanese tutor to help me understand some difficult sentences and to her understanding the grammar in this book is a bit outdated. There are also many spoken grammar structures that can make it a bit scary at first.

The use of onomatopeia is algo something outstanding here. There A LOT and it can be frustrating at times if you are not familiar with many of them. The vocabulary changes from chapter to chapter because Kiki and Jiji face different delivery challenges everytime, so you get the chance to learn words about different topics.

As some other people have mentioned the lack of kanji on this one is something to take into consideration. This book is meant for teenagers that might not know some of the more "advanced" kanji so many words are written in kana. I would say this is good and bad at the same time: It felt confusing but it also tested my understanding of some of those words.

As with many books the further you read, the easier it gets. The good thing is that there are 6 of them in the series and you can really get familiar with the way to author writes.

Enternaining ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I loved the structure of the chapters. A little story at a time makes the book have a really good pathing. However, this might make it a bad book to read in one sit because it doesn't have a plot that sucks you in and that makes you want to keep reading.

Each chapter tells us how Kiki and Jiji need to deliver or pick up a different item/s for different customers. Sometimes it's a letter, sometimes it's knitted wear for a ship chimney??. They are fun stories that made me laugh at times.

As I said at the beginning it differs from the movie in a way that doesn't make you feel like you are reading something you already know (Ghibli might have picked up some stories from the other books to make the movie, tho) but still feels familiar.

Seing Kiki and Jiji make new lasting friends along the way and finding their place in a little town by the sea is just the cozy read I needed. I will deffinitely ready the rest of the books in the series.

Reasonably fun and useful, but not the best beginner book

魔女の宅急便 is a classic children's book, with an excellent Studio Ghibli film adaptation. It is relatively entertaining, although the episodic nature (each chapter is essentially a standalone incident Kiki is involved with) means there isn't really a strong story to carry you through. If you're an adult then unless you really love the film it might get boring for you, especially if you read slowly. I never got bored but didn't find each story that engrossing.

This book is often recommended to beginners, however it probably shouldn't be. There is a lot of kana usage where there would usually be kanji, and a LOT of onomatopoeia and other small words that appear disproportionately frequently but are very hard to learn. It does teach a lot of useful vocabulary, and each chapter being a new side-story means you have the same vocab repeated often within a chapter, forcing you to learn it. However, many sentences are unreasonably long and more grammatically difficult than one would expect at this level.

I would say you should read this if you love the film, are a child, or are already comfortable with books above this level. But if you haven't watched the film and are using this as a primary learning resource, other books at the same level will be more efficient and entertaining to learn from.

Not the best novel to start out with

This might be the one book that is most often recommended as the first native japanese book to read. Personally, i have to disagree. This being a children´s book, it suffers from the same problems like other children´s books do, which is of course the lack of kanji. It´s hard to parse and annoying if you already know quite a few of those. And don´t be fooled - this might be classified as a "children´s book" but it reads more like being aimed at young teenagers. There is some scary grammar in there every now and again, lots of abbreviated casual speech and a surprising variety of vocabularity as there are lots of pretty much self contained mini-stories in there as well as the wider narrative. This book also suffers from losing steam about midway through because of said structure.

Still, it has a few things going for it. First, just about anyone must have seen the ghibli movie by now, so it´s likely you can force yourself through otherwise too difficult and confusing parts. Mostly anyway, since the book differs from the movie adaptation - especially in later parts. Then there is the overarching theme about having to grow up eventually and becoming independent which i find quite important. Lastly, this is actually a series, so once you move on to the next volumes, they will probably be easier to read by then.

I read this when i was about N3 level and it was quite challenging, albeit doable. I wouldn´t really recommend it for this level, though. I feel like this book is read best when you are already pretty fluent and you want to take a step back a little and want to read something relaxing after all those super advanced novels with thousands of pages.

Slightly Boring but Useful

I genuinely don't have much to comment on. This book is frequently recommended due to its simplicity. Also, you've probably already seen the movie, so you should be vaguely familiar with the plot. Even if you aren't, there's not much to get confused about as the story is pretty simple. Kiki, with her cat companion Jiji, flies to a new town to help the citizens. Eventually, she opens a delivery service and goes on a bunch of small adventures helping customers.

At first, the lack use of kanji and frequent use of onomatopoeia made it unpleasant, but my frustration faded as I continued. I agree with the idea that it is a good first read.

Other people have commented that they found the book interesting. But I didn't feel the same way. The middle of this book was genuinely a pain to get through. I picked it up months ago and read it on and off because I just couldn't dedicate myself to it. Not much here, just a simple story written in easily approachable language.

I wish I had read this when I was a kid. There are many life lessons in this book I wish I'd been taught when I was little. However I still enjoyed this story very much even as an adult, thanks to endearing characters, beautiful world and the heartwarming tone.

Difficulty: Nothing crazy about vocabulary and grammar, but constant use of casual/children speech made me regret picking up this book as one of the first books to read in Japanese.

Great for learning but felt a bit boring due to being a children's book (personal opinion)

I can definitely recommend this as a good starting point for language learners getting into novels. Most difficult Kanji are replaced with hiragana readings, no use of sonkeigo/kenjougo, and no over-the-top wordplay/literary devices. Something I struggled with in this book was memorizing a large amount of onomatopoeia.

Personally, I prefer a slightly more mature story. So at times, reading this felt like a chore, but it was an excellent step to gaining confidence to tackle more engaging novels. So for readers who have already read novels above this level: I can only recommend it if you also enjoy typical children's stories with episodic little adventures of Kiki(it definitely has its charm).

Language Learning

I have read this book a couple of times now. I think it's so so useful when you're just getting into reading books in Japanese. Pretty much all the vocabulary used is commonly known (as it's targeted at kids) so you don't have to waste effort looking up and studying obscure words. A couple complaints I often see about 魔女の宅急便 is that:

• There's not enough kanji
• There's too much onomatopoeia

But, I think both of these things actually improve the book's utility as a language learning resource. It's really good practice to start associating words with their sounds rather than over-relying on kanji as you don't have the aid of kanji when listening to Japanese. Also, onomatopoeia is a really key part of Japanese, particularly spoken, so it's great to be exposed to more of it.

Entertainment

I'm personally quite fond of the story. Sure, it's not the most exciting. But the episodic adventures of Kiki and Jiji are really charming. The narrative style feels equally sweet too.

I really liked this book

I really liked this book. I think it's worth a read even in English and even for adults. Unfortunately the English translation seems to be out of print.

And don't think it's the same as the gihibli movie. About halve of the movie was made up. The book is more episodic with a handful of adventures.

Language learning wise, this was the first book in Japanese that I attempted to read. But I gave up and came back to it after having read one or two junior bunko books (books with furigana). Though maybe what made the difference isn't so much that 魔女の宅急便 is more difficult than those books but that I used an ebook in my second attempt which made looking up words easier.

I also read this together with the audiobook. The audiobook is wonderful. The way the narrator does the voices for kiki and jiji is adorable. Back then the audio books for all volumes were available in audible internationally. That's unfortunately no longer the case. They are only on audible.jp which requires a Japanese credit card or address or something. The first three volumes are on audiobook.jp though which I believe to be more accessible.

EDITED REVIEW (June 2022, 1 year later)

This is the book which inspired the Ghibli movie “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” It’s episodic, so each chapter has a different adventure with some new vocabulary. Some of the stories were adapted for the movie and will be familiar, while others will be new.

This used to be the JP community’s default “everyone’s first book” recommendation, but the more I’ve read, the more I wonder about that. It’s a charming story but there were other books I read later which I found easier, and looking at how the gradings have changed over time as other readers have made comparisons, that seems to be a common experience. Many words are written in hiragana instead of kanji, which makes it harder for foreign learners to see the word breaks and guess meanings. (It’s worthwhile to practice and get better at this, though.) There’s a lot of onomatopoeia, an area where we tend to be weak. Also, the setting is an idealized and old-fashioned European-style country, so the stories here include vocabulary which I haven’t needed for other books. So I've come to think that beginners looking for a “first book” might find a recently-written children’s book set in modern Japan (like 銭天堂 https://learnnatively.com/book/5b9046476c/) to be more approachable as a first step before trying this.

That said, it was my first book (I've read it twice, actually), and I still remember how surprised I was to see how prettily the first chapter was written. I had not imagined it was possible to create such an atmosphere using only this basic grammar (probably N3 and under), and it was something of a revelation to discover what “simple” Japanese could look like in the hands of someone who really understood how to use it. It made me rethink what I thought I knew and needed to learn. That was a valuable experience.