君の名は。

My first ever book read in japanese! I had actually never written my review of this book on my instagram account, so here you go :)

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Mentioned in:

How I Read My First Book In Japanese (to come)

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Before I tell you what I thought when reading this, let me tell you why I chose this book in particular and what was the context surrounding it.

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For my first book, I wanted something that was of course relatively easy to read, and that would interest me. I wanted it to be either a story I already knew from another media or a story translated to japanese which I had already read in the past.

Since I had really really enjoyed watching the anime "Your Name", the cover of this book really caught my eye at the bookstore when I was looking for my first book. I thought "if this is the same story as the anime, this could be my first book... let's take a look" and so I did.

Opening the book I realised it contained furigana on the kanji, which made it way easier to read than other books I had tried reading before. And from what I could understand, the story seemed to be the same as the anime movie's (the pictures inside the book were screenshots of the movie --  at the time I did not know anything about the concept of novelisation in the first place).

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I have told this story many times in the past, but reading this book was as much a joy as it was painful.

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At the time (end 2019) I was barely at N4 level, and was arguably NOT at reading level yet, especially paper books, but since being able to read in japanese was my goal from the start, I decided I would give it a go anyway and if I found it impossible, I was prepared to fail miserably until my level would allow me to actually go back to it.

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But I am a very tenacious person.

 

It took me weeks to get through it, but managing to read it until the very last page gave me a sense of satisfaction I had never felt before with japanese. This event alone triggered my japanese reading life and I will always be grateful to myself for having pushed through!

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Now that you guys have the background in mind, you should then understand that even if I managed to read all of this book, it doesn't mean I understood 100% of it. I used both the intensive and the extensive reading methods to get through this book, which means some passages were less understood than others, and only meant to serve as reading fluency practice. Similarly, I found some N3 and even N2 level grammar structures in that book, and so naturally did not understand them fully (since I hadn't yet studied those) despite looking their translations up on my dictionary.

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Therefore, this review can only be "partial" so to speak, since, in my opinion, a full book review requires a comprehensive understanding of the book.

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I can tell you the following:

- I enjoyed reading what I understood and enjoyed finding useful vocabulary words

- I enjoyed a bit less some passages that were harder to grasp since they were transcriptions of action scenes from the anime, and which my level did not allow me to grasp fully

- The storytelling was as good as in the anime, and for a good reason, since -- I learned it later -- this book is a novelisation of the anime, which means it was written AFTER the anime movie, which is the original work (both of them written by the same author, Makoto Shinkai)

- I later read a lot more books by Makoto Shinkai and ended up not liking his style very much - but at the time I read 君の名は。 my level did not allow me to notice the little things that bother me in his writing style, so it did not affect my reading!

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Do I recommend you this book? Absolutely! A great story, which you will like even more if you enjoy Makoto Shinkai's anime movies, including "Your Name"!