My other strong recommendation for "starter books" is the 君が見つける物語 series. They're anthologies of short stories specifically chosen for a teenage audience, and they have a 'scary' one, a 'friendship' one, a 'love' one, a 'mysterious' one, etc, so you can choose something to suit your interests. They tend to have furigana over most of the kanji that are above 6th-grade level.

The nice thing about reading short stories when you're at a lower reading level is that you don't get bored waiting for something to happen even if you read really slowly.

Otsuichi has a very easy way of writing, yet it's beautiful. I'd recommend his short stories to those being around N2. A good starter! I find Norwegian Wood requires a lot more vocabulary knowledge compared to Otsuichi for example. Kaneshiro's "GO" is also very easy to understand, I find, but lately I'm not having much time :s

Hyperborea Wrote:

mutley Wrote:Norwegian Wood was probably the first book I was able to read without needing to use a dictionary all the time; a pretty significant development because it then meant I could read even when I was in a situation where pulling out a dictionary all the time was inconvenient.

This book has been mentioned a few times as a good starter novel for adult Japanese. I'm going to have to keep this in mind for sometime around the N2 level (or after? - recommendations) .

Personally I'd class _Norwegian Wood_ as what the Japanese Book Recommendations lj community would label 'moderate difficulty': a book aimed at Japanese adult readers which isn't especially hard but isn't especially easy either. There are certainly easier books out there, not to mention shorter ones. I'd say both Yoshimoto Banana and Akagawa Jirou are easier to read authors.