霧のむこうのふしぎな町

I think many of us read this because we heard that parts of it inspired “Spirited Away,” but really it’s only the broad concept of “little girl works in different parts of a magical place” that’s similar. It’s a completely different story.

IMO this book is less than ideal for intermediate language students because it’s written with few kanji and yet has some fairly advanced vocabulary. The particular thing that makes it tricky is that a lot of the atmosphere and characterization comes from Kashiwaba’s use of specific, descriptive verbs, rather than lots of adjectives or metaphors like another author might use. I imagine this is probably lovely and evocative for the native speaker, but for the language student this means a lot of words that you need to look up (instead of skipping) in order to understand the sentence, words which you might not see again for a while. I think this is more suited to a reader who’s further along in Japanese, perhaps someone who feels they’ve been relying on kanji too much and wants to challenge themselves by reading a high-hiragana book.