思い出のマーニー〈上〉

If you like the movie you will like the book

When I re-watched the movie this January, I first thought about reading the book. Then when I finally had it in hand I wondered if it would be as easy as I hoped, as I saw it was not a full furigana book. But after starting, it turned out that only the easy kanji were without furigana and the text was in fact kanji-sparce, the way 魔女の宅急便 is.

This made the text far easier than I feared. But as I understand this might not be the case for more kanji-affine learners. There are, of course some more difficult passages, where I doubted that what I read was actually meant. But all in all it was the easiest novel I read so far, with an average of just 3.6 look-ups (grammar + words together) per page. I will probably buy some more books in the 岩波少年文庫 series.

In contrast to the movie, which is a Japanese localization, the book is a translation of the original English text. And the original book is placed at really existing places at the coast of Norfolk, England. After some re-transcribing of the katakana town names, I actually found the place in google maps ;-)

The first half of the movie contains about the first book's contents, which means the book is far more detailed than the movie, but the movie is a very good summary of it.

I would say, if you like the movie, you will probably also like the book. On the other hand as a book intended for >= 10-12 year olds, it may not be everyone's taste.