Specs
Reviews
(3.72/5)Not for children
I enjoyed my time with this. It's a calm, relaxed book with some very light philosophical sprinkling. It reminded me very much of https://learnnatively.com/book/1030c11685/ but much more light-hearted.
This book is not overly complicated both in story and language use, but I do think the target audience are adults or at least older teenagers.
Reasons:
The story is imo boring to a child. Not a lot really happens. I am not sure kids enjoy character-driven, slow-burn books. But I could be wrong.
The books referenced might be known to western children because they belong in the western "cannon", but I doubt that Japanese kids would have even heard of them. How many western kids have heard of Sôseki, Dazai, Mishima, etc., let alone of any of their books?
Marketing. None of the publishers (both Japanese and abroad) are marketing this book towards children/teens. 小学館 has a youth label they could have put this book into, if they wanted to.
The afterword. Again, this is written for adults, not for kids.
Rintarō was raised by his grandfather and is currently dealing with the death of that same grandfather. As he is still coming to terms with his loss and considering his options on what to do regarding his grandfather's beloved antique bookstore, a talking cat appears to take him to another world and save the books.
I was strongly reminded of the typical story structure of a Ghibli film to a point where I could almost see the scenes animated in that style while reading along. Each adventure Rintarō and the cat went on to save the books involved discussions on the value of literature and the power of reading stories. The way the author took some common attitudes towards books and reading to the absolute extremes, and then pushed Rintarō's idealism to clash with them, was something I found absolutely captivating.
Languagewise, this story included many literary expressions and grammar points. But at the same time, a lot of what is going on is told through dialogue and exchanged arguments that aren't difficult to follow. It is a novel for advanced learners of Japanese for sure, but I believe an N2 level reader could enjoy it just as well as an N1 level reader.
nice and cute with a good message
it's a relatively easy story to read with normal vocabulary. i really like that the story is dialogue focused rather than exposition of the world. would definitely recommend.
As a note, I listened to the audiobook, I do not own the text.
First off - this is a children's book. Probably aimed at around middle school age. I'm judging it from that perspective, and as a book for kids I think it's absolutely lovely, am sure it would have been a favorite of mine when I was younger, and I still appreciated reading it as an adult. That said, it's not deep and moving literature. It's still 5 stars for being charming and keeping my attention.
A book about what it means to love books, and what power books hold. This is light fantasy and something of a coming of age / self discovery story for the MC. Also there's a talking cat. 😸
Difficulty wise this has a pretty wide spread of vocabulary and the speaking styles varied quite a bit. If you got through the Harry Potter translation or any other fantasy type book aimed at a younger audience this shouldn't be an issue, but it is something to be aware of.
A charming but fairly uneventful story
Difficulty: I listened to the audiobook for this and didn’t read the text. As an audiobook listen it was mostly straightforward enough other than some dense descriptive sections when the characters enter new locations. I definitely was missing some vocab here and there which didn’t get in the way of me being able to follow what was happening and enjoy the story (especially it was mainly limited to those location descriptions) but someone that prefers to understand 100% might rate this higher than I felt it was. Depending on what you’ve read before, the dialogue of the cat character and some of the narration might take some getting used to as it’s written in a quite “old fashioned” style.
Story: I found this novel a bit of a weird one. It feels as though the author really wanted to write about how great books are and how they should be read/treated and the characters and plot were just kind of scaffolding around that.
Similarly to cats review, I think I would have really loved this book had I read it perhaps in my early teens but adult me wished for a bit more depth to the plot and characters. If you are looking for a novel that has ‘a point to make’ about how we live our life and the things that make it worthwhile I’d recommend 世界から猫が消えたなら or カラフル over this one as I think both feel more like complete stories. That said, the writing style of this novel is enjoyable and some of the characters (such as the talking cat) are pretty fun, so overall I still enjoyed it despite the above.