the title of the book implies, this is a good way to start reading modern Japanese literature, Here, "modern" means post Meiji Restoration,
It consists of seven short stories: four by Natsume Shoseki of "I am a Cat" and "Botchan" fame and three by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, The stories become progressively harder to read through the book,
I like the format of the book, Furigana is given above more challenging kanji, Word definitions are given on the lower half of the page and a full translation provided on the righthand page, It makes it much easier to read the text as you don't have to waste time looking up dictionaries and you can easily check your understanding of what you've read.
I found the stories quite difficult to read and would have struggled to read them without the help provided by this book, They often use slightly antiquated words and kanji, The stories themselves held my interest,
Highly recommended for those with a resemble Japanese reading ability and an interest in Japanese literature,
This is a fabulous way to get one's feet wet reading nontextbook Japanese, This book containsshort stories, in order of increasing length and complexity, in a bilingual format Japanese on the left, English on the right, It also has a dictionary for complex or archaic terms used on every page as well as for kanji every kanji is listed for the first time it appears on the page, along with reference numbers that correspond to the publisher's kanji dictionary.
All of these stories are wellknown in Japan by Natsume Soseki and Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and CD recordings of all the stories are also included,
This book was really well puttogether, and makes reading "actual Japanese" much more accessible to anyone who's just starting out with reading literature, Even for someone more used to reading in Japanese, it's a great introduction to Soseki and Akutagawa!
Topicwise the stories range from the dark like the selections from Soseki's 'Dreams' to the outright laughable Akutagawa's 'The Nose', and also include famous stories like 'In the Grove' and 'Rashomon,' the bases for Akira Kurosawa's film, Rashomon.
All in all a wonderful read, and great reading practice in Japanese, Good way to read classic Japanese literature for readers who couldn't cope with the original text alone, I really enjoyed it, but I have to say, even with the parallel English text, it was still difficult to read the stories, probably because they are not contemporary texts.
Only recommended to advanced learners/speakers, It was just okay. The beginning of the book wasn't bad but by the time I got to level two, it was super hard to understand, It's not like I'm native level or something but I majored in the language, lived in the country, and I'm taking the Nin December so I think I'm decent.
However, there was a lot of Japanese I've never used before because it's not modern Japanese, and there were a lot of cases where kanji was used with words that are almost always written in hiragana while there were words in hiragana that are almost always written in kanji.
Just all around confusing. The English translations were kind of loose as well so it wasn't super helpful when I struggled with the Japanese texts, I also just didn't really like the stories which is my fault I guess, I really don't like Sōseki and this book has a lot of his stories, I guess my favorite was probably Akutagawa's "The Nose", "In a Grove" and "Rashomon" were grueling to get through, It was only these two authors and they were all horror centered so there wasn't really any variety and it just really wasn't my cup of tea.
I have Murray's companion book "Exploring Japanese Literature" which I know has stories like "Snow Country" which I've read in English before, so maybe I'll like that one better.
.Stars. A great resource for those studying Japanese, however I really feel it's too advanced for anyone who would actually need a dictionary and direct translation on the page.
If you're advanced enough to read the majority of the kanji without the help of furigana, you're certainly not using readers such as this,
I wish there had been more furigana use within the original Japanese text so those with a strong vocabulary could still enjoy the book without the tediousness of consulting the dictionary with every new kanji.
Kind of took the joy out of reading, and hardly seems practical for even intermediate speakers of the language,
This is a great tool, The characters and translation are at the bottom and each page is translated next to the original text, You can highlight to your hearts desire, It's easy to translate and the repetetive characters make it a great early reader, Forse non proprio un "breaking into", ma scorrevole da leggere grazie ai glossari e qualche minima conoscenza delle forme verbali del giapponese classico, I started learning Japanese at the begging of this year,
I'm still a beginner but I wanted to experience reading the famous stories in the Japanese text, This book provides the hiragana of each Kanji which makes it easy to read, I was glad when I succeeded in reading and understanding some sentences in Japanese, the book is clear, it gives the meaning of each and every Kanji.
I will reread the stories after a while to track my progress in learning the language, Let me refer you to sitelinkChristian's spoton review,
This book was, . . not that great. But let me start off on a positive note: I enjoyed the stories, The book contains seven short stories in total, by Natsume Sōseki and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The selection of stories, content wise, is good, The stories are quite dark, which I love, and I especially like Akutagawa, so reading these stories wasn't boring,
Now for the negative, . .
The aim of this book is to read Japanese literature in the original language, The book is set up to accommodate this: each page contains the original Japanese story on the left page, an English translation on the right page, and vocabulary on the bottom half of
both pages.
Sounds convenient, but it doesn't quite get it right, There are no grammar explanations, and the English translations are notliteral translations either, The same vocab is repeated every page when necessary, which is convenient but also makes you lazy, On the plus side, there are free audio downloads available for each of the stories, if you like to listen to them while reading I haven't downloaded them, so I don't know if the quality is any good.
The stories themselves are, honestly, too difficult for a book like this, They are separated into three different levels: the first stories are the easiest and of a pretty good level, and then they gradually become more difficult, They are classic stories, and many use words and kanji that are no longer in use, The same goes for some of the grammar, And the grammar and vocabulary was simply too difficult on the whole, It doesn't help that there are no grammar explanations in sight and the translations don't always help with that either you will get the meaning of the sentence, but you still won't understand the actual grammar.
For me the stories were readable, but I'd judge them as high Ngoing up to Nlevel,
This book simply doesn't help anyone 'break into' Japanese literature, If you don't have any prior experience reading Japanese literature in Japanese, this is way too hard, And if you are advanced enough to read stories of this level, there are better choices out there, All of the stories in this book have already been published in English parts of Soseki's Ten Nights Dreaming, Akutagawa's Rashomon, In the Grove, The Nose.
. , so if you want to read something new and previously untranslated, this is not a great selection of stories,
All in all, a nice book for reading practice at Nlevel, But before buying this book I'd recommend sitelinkRead Real Japanese Fiction: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers, which is set up better, more accessible levelwise, and has a wider selection of stories and all of them previously untranslated.
If you are looking for more difficult reading material, you might want to check Aozora Bunko instead,
The next book in this series has sitelinkYukio Mishima hollow laughter,