Specs
Reviews
(4.14/5)A nostalgic, philosophical children's novel
ゆっくりおやすみ、樹の下で is a children's book about a little girl named Mirei who goes to spend the summer at her estranged grandmother's house. This book was written by Genichiro Takahashi, an author and literary critic famous for his surrealist, postmodern debut novel さようなら、ギャングたち.
This book uses plenty of kanji but has full furigana, however the physical book is a tiny little bunko so the pages are crowded (there was evidently also a tankobon edition which is larger, but I haven't found it, so it may be out of print).
Sentences tend to be long (the narrator loves parenthetical asides (and so do I)) yet there were few obscure grammar points, so once you get used to the style it's actually pretty easy. Vocabulary-wise it's also not that difficult — by comparison, I found the vocabulary in ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 significantly more challenging. The book overall seems a bit long for a kid's book (about 300 pages) but the chapters are extremely short (always 3 pages), which is a blessing.
The plot doesn't start moving at all until page 40, and it's not until the halfway point that anything really momentous actually happens. So, admittedly, it has an exceptionally slow pace — however, the little hints of future secrets to be revealed were enough to keep me reading, and along the way I enjoyed the idyllic setting, the references to various works of literature, and the likable characters, particularly the narrator's gentle but humorously self-aware voice. It has a bittersweet ending that makes the slow pacing worthwhile. To be honest, I absolutely adored this book. Despite being a children's novel, it's written in a way that even adults can enjoy.
I would not necessarily recommend this as a first book to read in Japanese, due to the lengthy sentences, but if you like children's literature it would make a very good second or third book. I think the short, almost stand-alone chapters would be perfect material for assigned reading in a classroom or for going over with a tutor.
Content warning: the dog dies in the end.
Boring
This was my first DNF in Japanese. I decided to stop reading it because I wasn't really enjoying the story and I found the writing/grammar/vocabulary very easy in terms of the Japanese used.
Yes, it was nice to read something so easy (I maybe looked up a word every 10 pages), but that made me criticize the story more.
Personally, I prefer more exciting stories. While this contained some nice life lessons and I liked the narrator (and the cover), it was also very slice of life-oriented rather than fantasy-oriented.
I finally decided that even though I'd made it 159 pages in (and bought the book physically) I didn't want to force myself to read the rest. 2 stars.
TLDR: If you're at a lower level of Japanese, I might recommend this as a first book since it's not too challenging Japanese-wise, but I found it too slice of life for my tastes to be very entertaining.
This is a gentle and thoughtful book. A little girl named Mirei visits her grandmother in the old family mansion in Kamakura. The house is heaped with the belongings and memories of 100 years of family members. It almost seems like the past could be alive in this place. And then one night, the broken grandfather clock starts to tick again, and Mirei meets the people of the past.
This book builds momentum slowly. The first half sets the scene and establishes the main characters. The protagonist Mirei learns a little about her family history, meets her grandmother, and is shown around the house and neighborhood. She sees a portrait of her late great-grandmother, who came of age during WWII and looked exactly like Mirei. As the book drew near the middle, it was starting to seem like a slice of life story, and I wondered if perhaps I had misunderstood the blurb/synopses/book beginning suggesting that this was a story with fantastical elements. But at precisely the halfway point of the book, the narrator tells us not to worry (I laughed at this little self-aware chapter), for wondrous things are going to start happening now. And indeed they did. And in the second half of the book, the relevance of some of the seemingly minor details became clear. This book ties up the plot strings, and might leave you clutching a tissue as you near the end.
The difficulty level felt similar to ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂. Perhaps slightly more difficult. If something like a tree name or a 1930s celebrity is mentioned, it’s easy enough to figure out that it’s a name from this kind of broad category, even if you don’t know the details of the reference. My edition was from 朝日文庫 and came in a standard little Japanese A6 paperback of 292 pages, including afterward. It has full furigana, and some words are written in hiragana instead of kanji. The book is divided into many tiny chapters of 3 pages each, so a convenient stopping point is always nearby. (Apparently it was originally published as a serial story in 朝日小学生新聞.) I came across this book at my local Kinokuniya, where a small stack of these appeared one day on the “Why don’t you try reading Japanese?” shelf in the Japanese language study section, next to the usual suspects like graded readers, 君の名は, and Murakami.
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