魔女の宅急便 1

EDITED REVIEW (June 2022, 1 year later)

This is the book which inspired the Ghibli movie “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” It’s episodic, so each chapter has a different adventure with some new vocabulary. Some of the stories were adapted for the movie and will be familiar, while others will be new.

This used to be the JP community’s default “everyone’s first book” recommendation, but the more I’ve read, the more I wonder about that. It’s a charming story but there were other books I read later which I found easier, and looking at how the gradings have changed over time as other readers have made comparisons, that seems to be a common experience. Many words are written in hiragana instead of kanji, which makes it harder for foreign learners to see the word breaks and guess meanings. (It’s worthwhile to practice and get better at this, though.) There’s a lot of onomatopoeia, an area where we tend to be weak. Also, the setting is an idealized and old-fashioned European-style country, so the stories here include vocabulary which I haven’t needed for other books. So I've come to think that beginners looking for a “first book” might find a recently-written children’s book set in modern Japan (like 銭天堂 https://learnnatively.com/book/5b9046476c/) to be more approachable as a first step before trying this.

That said, it was my first book (I've read it twice, actually), and I still remember how surprised I was to see how prettily the first chapter was written. I had not imagined it was possible to create such an atmosphere using only this basic grammar (probably N3 and under), and it was something of a revelation to discover what “simple” Japanese could look like in the hands of someone who really understood how to use it. It made me rethink what I thought I knew and needed to learn. That was a valuable experience.