すばらしき父さん狐 (ロアルド・ダールコレクション 4)

Fantastic introduction to chapter books

This is the Japanese translation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, about the escapades of a fox outsmarting three horrible farmers who have gone to extremes to kill him. It was a ton of fun to read and I heartily recommend the Japanese version to any learners who have fond memories of Dahl's works or who want to jump in to something meatier than a picture book.

The language is shockingly approachable. Given the length of the book, there will be all sorts of examples of more advanced grammar that pop up, but overall the translation is very direct and true to Dahl's style, which uses lots of short, simple sentences that help you build momentum into the longer, more challenging ones. The most difficult part is the amount of vocabulary; I started this with a vocabulary of over 15k words, and still made more than 500 lookups over the course of the book. Most of the words are colourful descriptions of how nasty the farmers are and how clever the fox is and the silliness of how they act, however, which made it a joy to discover new words and kept me motivated to thoroughly understand everything I was reading.

The text uses some furigana, but for the level of reader it's aimed at, many simple kanji don't have it, and if the same kanji appears multiple times in a chapter, it usually only gets furigana the first time (unless it's not in the jouyou list). And considering it's an elementary-school-level book, there's a surprising amount of non-joyou kanji used! I added at least one kanji to my study that's so rare it doesn't appear in many fonts. I enjoy kanji so I appreciated these as little gems to find as I read, but encountering weird kanji spellings might be distracting or intimidating to readers who struggle with it (though with the furigana it doesn't make looking up words any more difficult).

There is also a bonus "scene" by the translator at the end, which is a dialogue between one of the Small Foxes and the translator's cat, talking a bit about Dahl and about the translator's choices.