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Summary This is a graded reader with five stories: Urashima Taro, Yuki Onna, The Spider's Thread, The Siblings Who Almost Drowned, and Gauche the Cellist. As the author explains in the book's preface, stories 1-2 are simplified versions of the original folk tales while stories 3-5 are unabridged and unedited other than the addition of furigana. Each story is first presented in English, then in Japanese, followed by with translation notes, grammar points, and vocab. At the end, there are some grammar exercise questions (in Japanese) and discussion questions (in English).
Main issues: content I think the best bilingual graded readers explain grammar thoroughly and offer notes that help us understand the translator's word choice and phrasing. Having a vocab list with definitions is the lowest priority feature for me because it's easy enough to just use a dictionary, but unfortunately the lessons that accompany each story in this book are mainly vocab lists with only a sprinkling of grammar/translation notes.
On top of that, there were times when I found even the vocab lists lacking. For example, The Spider's Thread and Gauche both use 云う instead of 言う, which I hadn't encountered before this book. But the only time 云う is listed in any of the vocab lists is as part of a set phrase like "何とも云えない nan to mo ienai indescribable". Sure, from that you could assume that 云う and 言う are the same (or you could look it up somewhere else). But with basic verbs like 歌う and 合う in the book's lists I expected to see 云う as well.
The grammar exercises are two-choice multiple choice questions with an answer key at the end of the book and no explanations about why a particular choice is correct or not.
If the stories were all at an easier reading level (for example Short Stories for Japanese Learners by Japanese Language Park), lessons that mainly consist of vocabulary wouldn't bother me as much. But with the relatively more complex sentence structure and grammar in this book I would have really appreciated more depth in the notes and explanations.
Minor issues: structure I like that longer stories are split into multiple parts, but in my opinion the book doesn't make the best use of this. Ideally the parts would be laid out like so:
Instead, the third and fourth stories have all the English parts together, followed by all the Japanese parts, and then all the lessons. The fifth story, which is the longest, does alternate the English and Japanese parts. But it still keeps all the lessons at the very end. I think this would be less of an issue for physical book readers, but as an ebook reader it was pretty tricky to navigate back and forth with a list of manual bookmarks to check my understanding rather than just flipping a few pages.
Odd omissions? My final complaint might just be with my version of the book, which I got from Kobo. Most of the translation for the third story is missing, and there's no furigana in any of the stories even though the book preface states that there is.
What I did like I did enjoy the stories themselves, and I appreciated the fact that the stories went up in difficulty from simplified folk tales to unabridged short stories. The included audio is also very good.
Conclusion My least favorite bilingual graded reader out of the ones I have read. Okay if you just want to read a few stories in Japanese with English translations, but for detailed language learning there are better ones out there!