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This book is based in mythology and kind of has a little of the fairy tale vibes, less realistic and more “letting your imagination go on a wander” sort of tale. It reminds me a lot of young children's books in English though not as gritty as our fairy tales. It’s a feel good story (from what I understood of it) but nothing inherently bad happens in it so if you’re looking for mortal peril, look elsewhere.
That being said, I did enjoy it but unsure how helpful it will be for language learning for natural Japanese as I’ve been told it is a translation of a Chinese children’s book. There’s a lot of Chinese words but it does have images at the beginning and end of the book (as well as a few pages explaining certain cultural aspects) of most of the Chinese words.
Without spoiling much, my understanding of the story is that it follows the adventures of a young girl and a stray cat with several side characters that pop up from time to time. The other books in the series follow a similar vein. There are nods towards certain aspects of Chinese mythology, with a little Chinese and Japanese culture thrown in. It was easy enough to follow, though I did falter at one chapter where I kind of lost the story due to not looking up some of the words.
Each chapter is a separate story of its own following one or both of the main characters. Though as you read each chapter you do get to understand the characters a bit more each time.
Most of the difficult words I came across were names or Chinese words. Otherwise I felt the grammar to be around N4/ lower N3 level and most of the rest of the vocab was every day stuff.