Young adult fiction recommendations?

6 comments

1. **君の膵臓をたべたい (Kimi no Suizō wo Tabetai)** by 住野よる (Yoru Sumino): It’s about a terminally ill girl and a high school boy. Kind of bittersweet but would definitely recommend

   **一週間フレンズ。 (Isshuukan Friends)** by 葉月抹茶 (Matcha Hazuki): Preimise is a boy and a gril who can only remember for a week then amnesia hits. Kind of like a “Eternal Sunshine” vibes

2. * 西の善き魔女
   * RDG レッドデータガール
   * Any works by 上橋 菜穂子

   Edit: oops, none of them are slice of life. Sorry. But some of the volumes are on kindle unlimited

3. My personal experience is that, while you will get more furigana (or just kana instead of kanji) in books for younger readers, the language is not actually necessarily going to be easier than books for adults.  This, of course, varies widely by author and by book, but I found, for example that コンビニ人間 was easier to read than キノの旅 or to the Japanese translation of もも.  Somebody else might have a different experience.

   You can check Learn Natively:

   https://learnnatively.com/

   for gradings of books, and see if anything on the easier side catches your interest.

4. Shinkai Makoto’s fiction version of his movies are well worth reading!

5. I would recommend 魔女の宅急便. You might have already seen the Ghiblj film of the same name, but the texts are rather different in plot if memory serves. But both are charming. It was one of the first novels I read in Japanese, and was an enjoyable and suitably challenging/suitably achievable read.

6. If it’s available on Kindle you don’t really need the furigana, because you can easily just highlight the word to look it up.