A textbook 
just kidding. The first was probably a One Punch Man volume. Hoping to finish first novel by the end of this month, which is 放課後 by Higashino Keigo.
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Pretty sure the very first full “book” I read in Japanese was a volume of Dragon Ball, but for prose…
嵐のピクニック (Picnic in the Storm), by Yukiko Motoya. A fabulous, strange short story collection that’s been only partially translated (missing a few of my favorite entries) as The Lonesome Bodybuilder, so named for one of the stories in it.
For some reason I skipped the learner/light novel phase and just waited until I could read the same kind of post-modern fiction I’d normally read in English. I don’t know if I’d necessarily recommend that, but whatever works.
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not to derail your discussion, but how do you get them on your kindle? do you have a seperate one for the japanese store?
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My first book was also 銭天堂 with the beginners book club, along with a couple others in this thread! It was a really satisfying read, and once you get the flow of the dialogue/writing style the later chapters become even easier to read than the earlier ones. Since each chapter is self contained, that doesn’t cause any weird issues where you understand the back end of the story more than the beginning, which is nice. (That’s how I felt, anyway )
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Im interested to know how you would label the difficulty of the book, I enjoyed the anime so I might order it next shipment…
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Some random book I found in my town library called ハンバーガーバス。
It was a kids’ book about a hamburger bus…
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Yes, I have a separate Amazon Japan account and use a separate device for it. You can’t have US Amazon and Japanese Amazon on the same device. I used to have my Japanese Kindle stuff on an old iPad, but now I have a Kindle Fire dedicated to Japanese books too.
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Joined one of the bookclubs here and read コンビニ人間。Next was 鍵。
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The first book I read was 100万回生きたねこ which is a children’s book.
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Hmmm, for me it was pretty difficult, and I had passed the N1 when I read it. The problem wasn’t the grammar though, you can probably get by with N2 (or maybe even N3) level of grammar. The problem for me was vocabulary. I had to look up unknown words every other sentence.
The author also seems to enjoy using older unsimplified kanji forms, like 摑 instead of 掴. There are also a lot of kanji that are not in WaniKani, but that’ll be true for most light novels I think. There is also a lot of furigana so it’s easy to look up words.
As long as you don’t mind using a dictionary (jisho.org is nice and easy to use, or something like weblio.jp for JA-JA definitions, I prefer the latter when the English definition seems vague), and have the patience to look up words, you can do it.
If it helps, here’s a couple of sample pages and you can decide for yourself if you can handle it. It definitely did help me a lot and now I can read all sorts of books with more ease because I stuck to it.
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Wow thanks! I am very much used to looking up every other sentence with Danmachi atm, and based off of the two pages (thanks for that 
) it seems just as you said that it has lots of furigana, it seems doable. Now I just need to finish a few books of my current stash to justify buying more lol
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The very first three books I’ve finished in Japanese is a shounen-ai manga 30歳まで童貞だと魔法使いになれるらしい. Most chapters were free at the time I started reading it on pixiv, and it helps that there’s no translations available. I was so engrossed by the story and I didn’t mind looking at the dictionary every now and then to finish it. Most vocabs involve office-related and romance-related words, which are easy to remember if you watch office romance anime/drama.
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It was キノの旅1. I believe it’s the easiest a light novel can get. Thankfully the sentences structures were pretty simple, but I struggled a lot with the vocab and it took me almost a month to finish it. It was totally worth it!
Every now and then I pick up another キノの旅 volume between other books, and it has been a motivating way to track down my progress. I’m currently on volume 7 and I didn’t look up any words yet so it’s nice to remember how it all started.
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I’ve read half of that too. I agree that it has a simple sentence structure, but I felt that this also added to its charm!
The three stories I read were also all super creative, like the one with the tree guys working at the railway!
I think a book in a month isn’t bad at all! It’s totally not still taking me more than a month to finish each book…
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Ohh, I have the same manga! I haven’t read it yet but I’m planning to read it next after I finish the Manga I’m currently reading.
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This was one of my favorite books in my childhood.
I just realized that I still know the whole story by heart 
Since the story has several word plays in my language I was a bit disappointed when I read it in english and there were none.
Now I feel like reading it in japanese to be able to compare it.
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I think I never even opened this thread back in March, but now I have an answer, so I decided to comment. If manga count, then I first read 君の名は。in manga form, obviously. If translations count, then I finished reading Harry Pottter and the Philosopher’s Stone in Japanese this summer. I also read a couple picture books, but for the life of me I wouldn’t be able to remember which ones, so they don’t count for me.
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My first manga was ハイキュー！！ 
My first book was 氷菓 (ひょうか), which I read with the book club. Not only was it hard because of the first book syndrome, but also because it’s in the genre of mystery Not so strangely, some of the foreshadowing went over my head.
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I’m so proud. I had to translate every word but I did it.
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