くま クマ 熊 ベアー 1

A great book for beginner-intermediate readers

The story of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear is rather simple, Yuna the main protagonist is a recluse high school girl that has been skipping school for the past months and spends her days playing her favorite game the world first VRMMO, a fantasy RPG, she gets sent to the game world and as a thank you for playing since the beginning the god from this world offers her a gift, from this the setting would seem extremely similar to 90% of the isekai genre yet it manages to feel different. You will follow the adventures of Yuna in this new world as she is forced to walk around with her bear costume and that's it, no demon lord looming over, no imminent destruction of the world rearing up it's head (at least that is the feeling I'm getting from this first volume and my knowledge of having seen the anime adaptation two years ago now), all of this casts some sort of happy/naive mood around the story making it somewhat lighthearted, just sit back and enjoy a story without heavy stakes to relax in a calm moment during your day. Because of this I think this makes it a great book to start if you are interested in the fantasy but also not so heavy in fantasy aspect genre, or if you sit at the beginning of an intermediate level of reading, there are quite a few N1 words and grammar but nothing too hard to understand, I barely had to look up words throughout the book even though I should be around N3.5. Also I think it best to mention it here because it was a surprise but something I've been looking for and it was a major PRO for me, this manga doesn't have any furigana at all (except on some rare words throughout the book but there were maybe 5 or so instances in those 170+ pages), some people may prefer to have them but I don't, my eyes automatically gets drawn to them even if I know the word making my ability to remember those words go down in the long run, but I could understand people wanting their manga with furigana. Another great thing about this manga, is the use of kanji for words usually written kana only, that's a nice change since we rarely see them and it actually made me learn the "original form" of those words. Overall I would say this book (and series) is on the easy end but the lack of furigana would probably make it harder than books technically on the same level but with furigana, this book is really good at what it tries to do and is definitely worth a read and even without the high stakes mentioned earlier the story still makes you ask for more and without realizing it you already finished the book.