校閲ガール

This is the story of Etsuko Kouno, a 24 year-old woman obsessed with fashion and especially the fashion magazine "Lassy." Chasing her dream of being an editor for Lassy, she applies to Lassy's publisher, but instead of the fashion magazine branch, she is accepted by the publishing company's proofreading department, in part due to her incredible memory and attention to detail. There are lots of funny parts, and it is entertaining all the way through, even for someone with next to no interest in fashion like me. It was also turned into a TV series starring Satomi Ishihara and Masaki Suda, though the novel and TV series differ pretty significantly in parts.

A lot of the book is dialogue, but there are also sections of text (fictional novels inside a novel!) that Etsuko is ostensibly proofreading, and these are much more difficult to read than the main narrative. Since she is proofreading them, they also have intentional mistakes, which further ups the difficulty. I think a solid understanding of JLPT N2 level grammar should be sufficient to comfortably follow the story, with only a few N1 level points that can mostly be understood from context. The vocabulary is extensive, with a lot of obscure words in the proofreading sections. There is also unexpectedly a very large amount of Buddhist terminology (used for imagery and other figurative language) that I was not familiar with and had to look up.