Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text - Revised Edition

I really like the format of this book makes Japanese reading more easier and keeps the memory fresh on Kanji. I highly recommend this book series for Japanese majors and graduates of the language. Trust me, I suffered 4 long years academically.

I wish more books could be published in parallel text. It's just so cool! You've got the English over here and the Japanese over there. Some helpful notes for understanding what's going on, maybe some furigana on the kanji to make things simple. This volume is published by Kodansha, who has produced a lot of great texts for Japanese language learners. If you're curious about Japanese literature and want to see some genuine writing samples, this is a lovely little resource.

I am a learning Japanese between a N4 - N3 level and found this book to be of good quality and helpful for my studies.The short stories sometimes include rarely used/outdated vocab and syntactic variations to add style or illustrate a certain feeling or character, as you'd expect in a piece of fictional writing. This can make some parts hard to read or understand, but also gives you the chance to learn new and interesting phrases or words, and gives you a new understanding of how the language can be used, even if you won't ever use some of it in conversation or the classroom.The audio clips that can be accessed on the website for free are great for listening practice and the vocab list on each page is helpful for fluid reading. All in all a decent book.

This is a great book for people looking to start getting into reading more traditional Japanese stories and texts. This was a great stepping stone between reading dialogues from textbooks and moving into light novel & novella type reading. The stories were authored decades ago so sometimes it can feel a bit dated, but they are great shorts and pretty interesting.This is not colloquial Japanese, so be prepared for stories that are better appreciated when read with a more critical approach.

Mein Sohn ist sehr zufrieden

This book is great. Bought as a gift for my sister who is learning Japanese and she loves it. As stated in other reviews, the story is in Japanese and english alongside each other, making it easy to learn words and sentences. In addition, there is a little dictionary and synopsis with each story, which is incredibly helpful. Couldn't be better.

I have had a couple of years of college Japanese and have gotten past the half-way point in Duolingo Japanese. I found the First and Second Japanese Readers extremely enjoyable to read and helpful. But this selection was far beyond my abilities. it includes works by two modern Japanese writers which are certainly interesting, but their rich descriptive and psychological narrative is linguistically challenging. I have attacked a half-dozen times, but still find myself on the first page and a half.