I finished this book Friday night, after about a week and a half of slowly working my way through a chapter every night before bed. I read Japanese very slowly.
This is the first of an ongoing series that currently consists of 13 books. As I mentioned in a previous post, this book is meant primarily for elementary students in Japan. More specifically, it's meant for elementary girls. All the same, I enjoyed the stories. They may have been simple, but I could follow them easily.
The story revolves around Chiyoko Kurotori (AKA Choco), an initially reluctant witch in training. With her magic instructor Gyubido, her best friend Meg Shion, and a few of her classmates, she learns more and more about the workings of magical beings, spells, and curses.
The book itself is divided into a brief preface and three short stories. The three stories are titled 学校の怪談 VS. 黒魔女さん (School Ghost Story VS. Black Witch), 黒魔女さん原宿へいく! (Black Witch Goes To Harajuku!), and 黒魔女の初恋 (Black Witch's First Love). Each story is about 70 pages long.
Of the three I understood, and thus enjoyed, the second story most. I like how each story opens with some sort of training that Choco is undergoing that becomes important by the end. I'm sure after reading a number of these stories, this stylistic detail would lose its charm, but it's fun trying to work out how the story will tie together and it provides a bit of familiar structure to each tale.
A book like this is a good in-between point for those wanting to transition from manga to books. Known as light novels in Japan, these types of books are shorter in length, dialogue heavy, and utilize furigana for most kanji. The typesetting on this book in particular only allows for 14 lines maximum for each page. It also has several pictures, which helped to occasionally reassure me that I wasn't completely off base with what I thought was happening.
If your looking at picking up this book in particular, there are only a few groups of words you need to be familiar with in order to follow the story. The first is obviously words associated with magic and ghosts. The second is school words, as two of the three stories take place in part at Choco's elementary school. The last, and not one I was expecting, are words associated with clothing and fashion trends in Japan. Many of the descriptions in this book are Choco's observations of other peoples' clothing. Meg's clothes in particular are given a lot of attention, as she is introduced as a very fashionable and trendy fifth grader. However, most of these terms are katakana words derived from English, so as long as you can read them you should have no trouble following along.
I don't think this book is for everyone, but if you don't mind reading a few simple and somewhat silly stories about a young witch it's an easy and enjoyable read. Sadly, I haven't found a site to buy this in America, but here is the official site for the series where you can preview the first 20 pages or so of each book.
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