Title: 世界にひとつだけの本
Author: 北阪 昌人
Reading Difficulty: Varies. This is a collection of very short short stories and each one has a different difficulty level. In general, though, the book is quite easy to read. The narrator speaks in a simple style and remains the same throughout the book. Massive bonus with this book is that many of the stories are read aloud here.
Description: A woman working at a travel agent relates small incidents from her life in a diary style. Some of these directly involve herself, others she is merely present while someone else tells their story. I guess vignette might be a more accurate word for most of these rather than short story. Usually not a lot happens but the narrator is made to think about life by what happens.
Review / Recommendation: I enjoyed this more because I could read it with a high degree of comprehension more than because I liked the stories. Some of them are interesting, but some are a bit too twee and heavy-handedly fauxtivational for my taste. I certainly wouldn’t read it in English, but the ease of the language coupled with the audio resource made it more than worthwhile in Japanese. Plus, if you don’t like one story, there’s always going to be another one starting in just a couple of pages.