orange 1

Easy to read high school romance with time travel elements

orange is a shoujo romance kids novel about a high school student named Naho who receives a letter from herself ten years in the future. Her future self warns her that something terrible will happen that she'll regret for the rest of her life, and this letter is an attempt to change that future by giving past Naho instructions on what to do and not do. The letters revolve around a new transfer student named Kakeru, whom Naho befriends and begins to have feelings for. orange was originally a manga series, and later turned into an anime and live action movie. According to the afterword, this book covers the manga's first volume and the first 7 chapters of the second volume.

I found this book relatively easy to read, similar in difficulty to books like 夜カフェ. It's written in third person, features full furigana, and the vocabulary is mundane, centered around normal high school life and teenage feelings. Once in a while characters will use regional-specific slang, but this is always "translated" in parentheses immediately following, or is explained by another character within the dialogue itself. As the romantic situation became more complicated I found it did get a bit harder, since abstract conversations about feelings rapidly become inscrutable in Japanese if you're not paying close attention to who's talking and who they're talking about. But the author also uses a lot of commas to "chunk" the sentences which makes them a bit easier to parse, so overall it was not that bad.

The premise of the story is interesting, and I liked it well enough. It starts out as a light mystery (Is this letter legitimate, or a prank? What terrible future is Naho trying to change?), and then as more details are revealed it transitions to romantic drama. Like so many shoujo heroines the main character can be frustratingly meek, so if that sort of protagonist bothers you you should probably skip this one.

Content warning: references to suicide.