阪急電車

Very fun connected short stories

This is one of my most enjoyable Japanese reads so far. The format of short stories that are slightly connected gives a good mix of fresh and familiar characters and situations. And most importantly, each of the stories was cute, engaging, and positive. Often centered around nascent or past romances, but also family life or friends. Every story's main character was sympathetic and drew you into their life and perspective.

From a language-learning perspective, it was a bit tricky, but not as bad as some other books I've read around the same level. The main things to watch out for are:

• Many names without furigana. Several of these are place names which you can look up, but several are human names. They are often repeated, which is good, but you need to look them up quickly so you can properly practice reading them on subsequent exposure.

• The book takes place in Kansai, so there's a good amount of Kansai-ben. This seems to vary wildly per chapter/character; sometimes just some ～へん negations or Kansai-specific adjectives, but sometimes tons of unusual grammar structures made harder via lots of missing syllables due to the colloquial speech or narration.

The book also tends to use a lot of more advanced spellings/rare kanji, including for words which JMDict claims are "usually written in kana alone" (sampling: 反駁, 眦, 郷愁, 粥, 鄙びた). But I suspect that is just a feature of Japanese novels as we get to a higher reading level and not specific to this one.

A bit boring for me

I'm not sure why but I didn't love this novel. It's not hard at all for an N1 learner (except for some of the Kansai dialect) but it's just one of those slightly cheesy cozy Japanese genre novels. It's amazing to me that the same author wrote Library Wars, although perhaps the dialogue is similar. The nice thing about it was the short chapters, great for a book club. Surface-level connections to the characters didn't cause me to feel much in this book, but many others have liked it, so I suppose it's a good book for learners.

Mixed feelings

I didn't really know how to rate this book. I hesitated to give it only a few stars, because I didn't really like any of the characters (!). But I did enjoy reading the book, so that wouldn't have been fair. I liked to travel along the Hankyu Railway. The descriptions were so detailed that I could look up a lot of the places online and spent some time looking at satellite images and maps and pictures and the like. I almost feel like I know this area between Osaka and Kobe well now! I learned a lot about the culture and love / family / work relationships. Also as other mentioned, there is a lot of Kansai-dialect used, so if you want to practice that, great practice.