七夜物語 上

Heads up: this is not a trilogy of 3 books, it is a single long book in 3 volumes. The author is the same Hiromi Kawakami whose short story 神様 appears in “Read Real Japanese: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers.”

The heroine Sayo is a little girl in 4th grade who loves reading, especially classic Western children’s books like fairy tales and the Chronicles of Narnia. The story is set in 1977, in a world without internet or smartphones, when expectations for how boys and girls should behave were different. At the library, she finds a mysterious book called 七夜物語 that stings the hand when touched, and whose contents can’t be remembered after reading. One day, she and her classmate Honoda-kun, while exploring at twilight, find themselves in a mysterious kitchen, where a giant mouse orders them to wash the dishes. And Sayo realizes that she and Honoda are experiencing the events of that mysterious book, in the World of the Night.

This is clearly written for the kind of children who are like the protagonists. Precocious readers who’ve spent too much time reading classic books and imagining themselves in those fantastic worlds instead of playing with their classmates. The phrasing can be reminiscent of older books, and grammar includes occasional use of N1 points such as や否や、VともなくVて、そばから.

My edition is a paperback from 朝日文庫, and is printed in a typical A6 format with normal grown-up size font and minimal furigana, with consideration for the target age group. As expected for a children’s book, many words are written in hiragana instead of kanji. Words with kanji which a mid-elementary school student would be expected to know do not include furigana at all. Names and more difficult words include furigana the first time they appear in each 2-page spread, and have no furigana if they repeat on that same page.

Since volume 1 is only 1/3 of the book, after 300 pages I’m still actually in the beginning part of the story and have no idea where it will go. But I’m enjoying it so far, and have purchased the last 2 volumes.