夜カフェ 1

A decent first book in Japanese, if you like cooking and sewing

夜カフェ is a children's book series about a junior high girl named Hanabi who wants a brand new life. Her school life sucks because of a relentless bully who has harassed her for years, and her home life sucks because her parents are fighting constantly over her mom's new job — so, desperate to escape, Hanabi runs away to live with her aunt Aiko, and there finally starts building a new life for herself, one small step at a time.

Overall, this was not a difficult book. It has complete furigana, the chapters and the book itself aren't too long, and there's little slang and no dialect. For the most part the vocabulary is normal high school stuff, but there's quite a few cooking and arts & crafts scenes which use a lot of words specific to those topics; if those topics are interesting to you, this is a great opportunity to build up that vocabulary. When the aunt is doling out advice, her lines can be a bit tricky — even if you know every word in the sentence you might not understand the point she's trying to make if you don't thoroughly understand the grammar involved. Other than that, though, there are no hard parts.

I thought this book was pleasantly wholesome and down to earth, though admittedly not terribly thrilling. I liked Hanabi's cool aunt, and I like that Hanabi's life changes for the better through small, realistic changes, like reaching out to make new friends and undertaking new projects — changes that she makes on her own initiative and not because anyone forces her. I also appreciate that romance plays almost no role in this whatsoever, so if you want to read a book for girls that doesn't hyperfocus on romance, this one will fit the bill.