夜カフェ 1

A very pleasant experience

I picked this up because I felt like reading something easy and i was not disappointed! It fit my reading level perfectly - progress was fast, and yet I encountered a decent amount of new words. I enjoyed the story more than I had thought - it has a kind of feel-good vibe about it. Very cozy. Very home-y. The ending surprised me - I wonder if (....) will return in a later Volume!

If you are looking for your first LN, you found it

I picked this up as my first LN and I think this is a great choice for anyone else looking for their first forray into walls of text. :) I was around lvl 17 in WK when I started and now I'm lvl 25 and this was an excellent book for drilling in quite a lot of the vocabulary items that appear in WK around these levels (and below). Sure, there is some very specific handicrafts and cooking vocab, but I did not mind those, because I'm also into both of those activities, so it was nice to come across them here. In terms of entertainment value, to me, it was fine. I was not bored with it, but also was not super enthusiastic.

Great choice as your "first book"

After a few failed attempts at reading light novels in Japanese, I picked up 夜カフェ and was surprised at how comfortable I could read through it. For anyone looking for their first book, I really recommend this one.

pretty decent, good for language learning

The story wasn't the greatest - a little bland at some points, but I enjoyed that it was relatively easy to follow language wise.

Not the most boring story in the world but not that much in there to keep me hooked. I do recommend it if someone is looking for an easy book, but I did not enjoy it as much as some of the other relatively easy stuff I've read.

A great first non-manga book!

This was my first book I read that wasn't a manga, and I think it was a great choice!

Language Learning: 5/5

The language itself was very easy to read, so the most difficult part was getting used to the intimidating "wall of text" that you don't get with manga. I originally found myself losing my place often because I wasn't used to a book format yet (pro tip: use a piece of paper to block the next line). But I found 夜カフェ was a great book to get over that hurdle due to the simple vocabulary and grammar structures!

There's a lot of cooking and crafts vocabulary (you'll recognize ぬう instantly by the end of this book). I didn't come across a lot of grammar that I didn't already know. To compare difficulty to other things: I'd say it's similar to ふらいんぐうぃっち (albeit with more to read since it's not a manga) or the intermediate stories on Satori Reader.

Enjoyment: 3/5

This is the kind of thing I would have read as a kid. Unfortunately, as an adult I didn't find it terribly thrilling (it is a children's book after all), but it was a good story. Enough to continue to volume 2 at least!

The main thing I enjoyed about this book was that the characters and their problems all felt very real. Nobody was a one-dimensional character in my opinion. And for anyone who was, they did not show up often and I'm assuming we will learn more about them in later books. I guess if that's not the case, I'll edit this review when/if I finish the series.

I recommend this book if you like slice-of-life and if you're okay with getting hungry every time you read (because there really is a lot of cooking in this book)

A decent first book in Japanese, if you like cooking and sewing

夜カフェ is a children's book series about a junior high girl named Hanabi who wants a brand new life. Her school life sucks because of a relentless bully who has harassed her for years, and her home life sucks because her parents are fighting constantly over her mom's new job — so, desperate to escape, Hanabi runs away to live with her aunt Aiko, and there finally starts building a new life for herself, one small step at a time.

Overall, this was not a difficult book. It has complete furigana, the chapters and the book itself aren't too long, and there's little slang and no dialect. For the most part the vocabulary is normal high school stuff, but there's quite a few cooking and arts & crafts scenes which use a lot of words specific to those topics; if those topics are interesting to you, this is a great opportunity to build up that vocabulary. When the aunt is doling out advice, her lines can be a bit tricky — even if you know every word in the sentence you might not understand the point she's trying to make if you don't thoroughly understand the grammar involved. Other than that, though, there are no hard parts.

I thought this book was pleasantly wholesome and down to earth, though admittedly not terribly thrilling. I liked Hanabi's cool aunt, and I like that Hanabi's life changes for the better through small, realistic changes, like reaching out to make new friends and undertaking new projects — changes that she makes on her own initiative and not because anyone forces her. I also appreciate that romance plays almost no role in this whatsoever, so if you want to read a book for girls that doesn't hyperfocus on romance, this one will fit the bill.

Fantastic first novel.

The story follows Hanabi, a young girl who wants to create a new version of herself when she starts middle school, however, she fails her entrance exams and is put into a local school, which her former bullies also attend. It's a very simple plot which was expected as this book is aimed at kids of a similar age and younger.

As this was my first novel in Japanese (reading along with the WK bookclub), I struggled at first, but quickly found after a few chapters it was the perfect level for me (N3 studying N2). The chapters are short and is often quite dialogue heavy, with the descriptions written through the eyes of Hanabi.

The vocab is relatively simple, however there are some sewing & cooking terms that may throw people off. Grammar wise I found a couple of N1 points scattered about, however the book is definitely mostly N3 level grammar.

Overall, it's a wholesome cute story and has given me a lot of confidence in starting my next book. In the beginning a chapter would take a me a couple of sittings, and now 1 chapter can easily be read within an hour.

10/10 would recommend as a first novel.