It might help to watch some of the anime, because 人の痛みが分かる国 is the first episode of the anime. You’ll never get confused about Hermes again XD
I think he was talking about flying because the road ahead of them split from a sudden earthquake so there was suddenly a huge gap in front of them. Hermes was probably telling Kino not to attempt the jump because motorrads can’t fly.
You also need a solid grasp on grammar, because otherwise you might have problems figuring out who did what to what. But getting to a high WK level will at least make the reading faster, that’s for sure.
I know. I’ve been working on that too, but I’m still only at a low level stage with grammar.
Amazon’s Kindle ebooks aren’t region locked like the 3DSs are (thank god); you can use the mobile apps or the desktop application but VPN. The Kindle app is still the smoothest experience, personally, and the best one for reading Japanese novels out there in particular. Having to jump through hoops isn’t that worth it though.
What I would recommend is checking out the many other ebook sites out there that don’t need VPN use like: ebookJapan or Honto . They both offer essentially the same library, discounts, points, selectively free things, etc. The difference is Honto’s reader is a smoother/higher quality but its mobile apps are region locked (so on iOS you just need a JP account, on android easy to google and find the apk).
So ebookJapan is basically the most trouble free route to go if you want to read on mobile too. And they are still slowly improving the app! I’m telling you ebookJapan’s reader used to be one hell of a mess particularly for novels.
One of the things I love about the ebookJapan reader is that when you highlight things,
It lets you search words on goo!!! Which is my personal favorite Japanese dictionary. You might not be able to tell though, it isn’t the highest of qualities reading wise. And its features are pretty limited to these search features and highlighting.
Honto’s looks like this:
Has the same features plus quite a bit more. Doesn’t let you search on goo though ; ~ ; Just Yahoo dictionary (or google, wiki, etc.) which is fine. And as you can see highlighting can pop up wiki entries and it doesn’t just let you highlight it lets you take notes. Honto also gives you more control over feel/appearance. As a learner, these features really helped me when I started out reading novels 
(both read manga perfectly fine though, so if manga is your endgame. No problems with ebookJapan! Crisp as hell 
)
My goodness, thank you so much for the resources and the links. I had never heard of any of these so I’ll be sure to start utilizing them. Reading manga definitely is one goal for me but my overall goal is more the sort of book that OP showcased.
Once again, thank you so much!!
I was going to ask about this, since postage for books is killing me…
Do you use a physical reader, since I loved using a kindle for English novels and such, and wanted to get a paperwhite but I was kinda wondering if
It’s a shame that the Japanese paperwhites appear to be region restricted as well, in that they’re for sale for residents only. Possibly I just need to buy via VPN though…
I was just thinking, can you export items in houhou? And If you can can you share the grammar set that you put into it?
You can! And of course I’ll share. You should be able to use this link to get the .csv from my Dropbox.
The preview will likely look pretty weird, but it should work if you import it into Houhou. All the items have the tag JLPT, and are also tagged with N5 and N4 respectively.
Every item has an example sentence, mostly copied from charts at http://japanesetest4you.com/
There is also a page number in the notes where applicable. This corresponds to the items entry in A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar
My method has been to do two new items per day, where I read through the section in A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. During reviews, if I can’t remember the grammar point I read through the passage again.
DISCLAIMER
This is VERY unpolished, as I only intended it for myself. I do not intend to make any corrections. If anyone want something changed, they may change it themselves. I am also not interested in information about typos or mistakes. Odds are, I’m already aware and have chosen to ignore them.
The collection is also not complete by any means. I intend to keep add grammar points until I have the entire A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. It currently only has 100 or so items.
With that said, please enjoy 
Thank you so much! :3
forgot to reply oops
@OldTaco Glad to help in some way, good luck with someday diving into novels too then
@mechturk Nope, I don’t use a physical ebook reader like a kindle. Personally, I used to have one of the mini sized tablets but gradually shifted to almost exclusively reading novels on my phone. I have an S7 Edge so the screen is on just the right side of big to make reading in Japanese stunning haha. I think there have been a couple threads about it but from what I’m aware if you do go the non-app-kindle route it doesn’t matter what country your kindle is from it can still be used to log in to the amazon account of another country. I also don’t think people have had problems with font and such; kindle will download the required fonts and you can add load the fonts. If you have a Fire though you can’t switch accounts (from what I’m aware), so fair-warning.
For zooming in, it’ll probably be more of a personal thing? You can increase the font size to your hearts delight both with the setting and with pinch zoom. Like I personally tend to read in the kind of font size I screenshotted, but you can really go all out,
If you wanted 
Manga looks pretty darn great zoomed in too. you’ve got a lot of control with kindle as you probably know! Coming from someone who is using their phone and still finds the size great, I think with the paperwhite’s size you should be fine
Reading is really great when you find a book on a level that’s not impenetrable for you. I have a lot of Japanese children’s books that I loved reading years ago, and now I’m very fond of Kenji Miyazawa stories (and fully recommend them to anyone and everyone) since the language isn’t usually very complex but is still sometimes a bit of a challenge for me. They’re really nice stories too. I’ve also got some more difficult books waiting for me when I get closer to their level!
