夢から醒めた夢 冒険配達ノート

A little girl visiting an amusement park goes to the haunted house and meets an actual ghost. The ghost is a girl her own age, who wishes to trade places for a day so that she can say her farewells.

It was the inspiration for a musical by 劇団四季 and you can find video previews and clips (and more) online.

It’s a picture book but it looks like it might be aimed at kids in the 7 to 9 year old range. It’s not a book for kindergarten. Because there are so many pictures, the actual story length is more like a short story or novella than a chapter book. But the text itself looks similar to books for that 3rd to 4th grade range.

There are two versions. The original Kadokawa version (which I read as an ebook) has no furigana for lower elementary kanji, and the illustrations are in a surrealist style similar to the covers on 赤川次郎’s other books. The Tsubasa Bunko version has full furigana and modern manga-style illustrations.

I felt like the story is a little hard to follow sometimes. Sometimes the setting changes (different place or next day) and at least in my digital edition, it wasn’t immediately obvious and I had to figure it out from what was happening. I wondered if perhaps the paper edition was laid out in such a way that the transitions would be more clear, or if the author just wasn’t paying attention.

Because of that, although this is “easy to read,” it might not be so easy for a beginner reader. There are some N2+ grammar expressions here and there too. But the vocabulary is almost entirely common words, and there isn’t that much of it.