Kodansha Comics Breaking Into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text - Revised Edition

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and found this book to be of good quality and helpful for my studies.The short stories sometimes include rarely used/outdated vocab and syntactic variations to add style or illustrate a certain feeling or character, as you'd expect in a piece of fictional writing.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.

An excellent book for people with an interest in Japanese literature and a means of expanding one's knowledge of the language.I find the parallel text format very helpful, especially the integral dictionary section, saves a lot of dictionary page turning.A great idea to have an MP3 download included, iron out those pronunciation wrinkles, I would love more books like this.

This book does exactly what it says it will do which is to help the student of the Japanese language read real Japanese literature.The content is from early 20th century writers, and is rather ero-guro (erotic-grotesque) a popular genre of Japanese writing, and this may put off some readers.However, the book comes with a splendid apparatus of vocabulary and notes and makes the study of literary Japanese a pleasure rather than a chore.Altogether excellent.

The best way to learn any language is to surround yourself in it. I found this book great for practising reading hiragana and kanji, as well as reading up on classic Japanese literature and culture. There's a website with downloadable Mp3 files that go with the book, but I haven't really looked at these. Overall a very good book.

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.