妊娠カレンダー

A collection of three short stories, each of them about an unnamed young woman whose life is going through an unwelcome change, set in an eery, dreamlike atmosphere. Each of the narrators is, in their own way, out of touch with her own emotions, in one case so much she might count as an unreliable narrator.

While the style itself is straightforward enough, and a good source of exposure to slice-of-life-y vocab, this provides a challenge to the reader. You have to pay constant attention to nuances and things the narrators aren't directly thinking about to figure out who they really are. For this reason, I think this book is ranked well in the low L30s. I wouldn't recommend this as a first novel, the risk of missing important clues is very high if you're not familiar enough with the language.