I see we’re low on nominations, so:
夜の名前を呼んで
Natively: Level 22
Full furigana: No
Summary
Mira, the main character, is a girl with a disease that causes darkness to seep from her body when she gets anxious. In order to cure her disease, she lives secluded deep in the forest with Rei, a kind-hearted doctor. By making jam from the stars that fall from the sky, trying to get up early to gain confidence, and cherishing each small daily detail, Mira gradually regains her former self.
However, one day, Rei’s friend, who is interested in Mira’s darkness disease, appears before the two of them, making Mira anxious…!
A healing story of an anxious patient and a kind-hearted doctor who face the wall of a disease that cannot be cured immediately.
Availability
Physical: Amazon JP, CD Japan.
Digital: Rakuten, BookWalker.
Personal Opinion
This has been the second prettiest art style I’ve seen so far, and it’s one of my favorite manga series. It’s a feel-good healing type story about the mc recovering from and learning to live with her chronic illness. I think her illness most closely resembles anxiety, but since it isn’t a real illness you can relate it to anything you want.
Even though it’s fantasy, it doesn’t have very much fantasy vocabulary. The story revolves around Mira’s recovery journey so the fantasy aspect isn’t very important. In volume one there’s a chapter about making jam from stardust, that’s the only fantasy vocab chapter iirc.
The cast isn’t very big: other than the two main characters, each volume features one or two more side characters, so it’s easy to keep all the characters straight. Mira and Rei also use easy to understand speech, there’s not a lot of slang or contractions. The only contractions are the common ones like てしまう → ちゃう, ておく → とく, and ている → てる. And there are only 8.5k characters in the first volume, as opposed to the usual 10-12k. This was almost the second manga series that I read in Japanese, and given how easy the language ended up being, it would have been a good choice.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Pretty art
- Only 8k characters, as opposed to the usual 10-12k
- The mmc wears a maid dress
- Not a very wide cast, so not a lot of speaking styles to get used to and names to remember
- Minimal slang and contractions, shouldn’t be hard for beginners
- You’ll learn the word 師匠
Cons
- Fantasy genre, which is apparently not very popular
- The lack of a wide cast could be a con depending on how you look at it
- Quite possibly too easy (I would have nominated it for the abbc if not for the lack of furigana)
