君に届け 1

A good first light novel if you know kanji

The basic premise is that the main character doesn't fit in at school since she looks a lot like the vengeful ghost "Sadako" from the Ring horror movies, so most of her classmates are afraid of her. The story is about her making friends, falling in love and generally experiencing a normal high school life for the first time.

Storywise it's okay, but I wouldn't recommend it for the story unless you really enjoy high school romance novels. What's good about this light novel is it's accessibility for language learners.

If you've learned with a textbook or consumed Japanese media before you are probably already familiar with quite a bit of the vocabulary and the more unusual words tend to get repeated enough to stick. Since it's set in the real world the words used are also more likely to be relevant, than e.g. with a fantasy setting.

There's some furigana, but only for the first occurrence of a name/difficult word in the chapter, so you have to know kanji in order to read the book.

This is actually the first Japanese book aside from graded readers that I read, back when I was still working my way through the first Genki textbook. While it was very challenging, I understood enough* to decide to get the second volume, so if you're good with kanji it's certainly possible to read this only knowing N5 grammar.

*When I say "I understood enough" you should keep in mind that:

1. I knew the story beforehand, since I had read the first chapters of the manga this is based on
2. I'm also the type that can keep on reading a story without getting frustrated even if I don't understand what's happening for a couple of pages.

So unless that is true for you as well, you really shouldn't try it at that level. But if you're at N4/N3 level, kanji don't scare you and want to make the jump to reading books written for native speakers? This might be a good pick for you.