Viewing Japanese
Reviews
(6)
October 8, 2024
Repetitive start with a nice twist at the end
I found the first few chapters a bit boring because they were very repetitive, but later this toned down a little, or maybe I got used to it? Towards the end I even started to enjoy the detailed descriptions of the journeys and everything. If you have a hang for meticulous details regarding train schedules, this is the book for you!
Language-wise the first few chapters started a bit rough for me, with quite a few unknown / old-fashioned vocab items, but then it turned into dialogue-heavy territ
July 25, 2024
November 30, 2023
Gruesome book with a silver lining
This book contains the titular story 土の中の子供 as well as a short story.
土の中の子供
What a powerful story! But! Please be aware that this one is not for the faint of heart; the trigger warnings apply with all their strength, and please make sure you've noticed them if you are sensitive wrt certain triggers. (Further triggers: Alcoholism, sex, stillbirth.)
In this story, we encounter a young man who tries to go to the extremes regarding various kinds of bodily and ment
August 26, 2023
Beautiful, beautiful book
As others have said, the story starts off as a slightly surprising high school romance (but luckily, the usual school gossiping etc was kept at an extremely low level). Then some events start kicking in... The end result is a beautiful story about pure love. In hindsight, I might have liked the book even better without the very last chapter. In my opinion, it did not add much to the main message and started veering a bit towards the kitschy end, which the author had pretty much avoided up until
April 15, 2022
Not a Graded Reader
This book promises that it is easy to read and understand, which makes it sound like it's a graded reader. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The stories contain all sorts of difficult grammar, up to JLPT N1, and also difficult vocabulary. They seem to be easy to understand because there are lots of vocabulary hints in English and also full translations of the stories. But if you really want to use these stories to study Japanese grammar, and if you want to fully understand what's going on in
So much pain...
A woman looking back on her life, reliving and re-feeling some of the most relevant passages, with so much unhealed pain on so many levels, paired with an interesting psyche and a certain matter-of-factness. The end was more hopeful than I had imagined - a very Japanese ending in fact. The story touched on interesting aspects, but I found it way too repetitive and long-winding.
The type of narrative was really interesting, for the most part it felt like the author was with the protagonist at al