魔女の宅急便 Book Club - December 2025

Hi Everyone!

A few others in the Book Collector Rehabtm community and I thought it would be fun to start a book club to help encourage people to read more. This is the welcome thread for anyone interested in reading through 魔女の宅急便 (Kiki’s Delivery Service).

If you’re interesting in joining, please have a read through this post!


Details

Book: 魔女の宅急便 by 角野栄子 (Kiki’s Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono)
Start Date: Dec 28, 2025
Pace: ~10 pages a week (see Pace section below for more detailed breakdown)
Vocab Decks: https://bunpro.jp/decks/vegl68/kikis-delivery-service


Focus of Club

The goal of this club to act as an inclusive community where we can help each other engage more with native material. This thread is a place to ask questions, help others, and just generally discuss the book. So let’s come together to support each other and share in the joy of Japanese studies!


General Rules

While this is not an official Bunpro staff-run book club, we will be using the same rules that were created for the official book club discussions. Please keep the following in mind when posting in this thread.

Keep discussion related to the target book.

You may of course make comparisons between grammar or vocabulary usages between this book and other series, but for the most part try to keep discussion related to the unique challenges that this book presents.

Search the threads for users that may have previously asked the same question as you.

It’s likely that a simple search will result in finding someone having asked the same question as you are about to ask. In addition to this, if you jump into a book late, it is expected that you would search the thread history before asking questions about content most participants have already read.

When asking questions, give as much detail as possible.

For example, if you include the page number, who is speaking, and explain what you want to know more about, that will be far easier for other users to answer rather than just asking ‘What does てっきり mean? Taking a screenshot and highlighting the portion you’re asking about would also be suitable.

Be polite! Not everyone is the same level.

Just because something is easy for you does not mean that it is easy for someone else. Let’s be thankful to those that answer our questions, and thankful also for the opportunity to help others that aren’t quite at the same level as us yet.

Keep questions in line with the pacing.

We know that some of you may want to surge ahead of the group if you are really enjoying a book. However, this can result in confusion if you are asking questions about things that people haven’t read yet. If this applies to you. Make a note of the question you want to ask, wait until the group has caught up, then ask the question

Be mindful of spoilers.

If you are asking a question about something that includes spoilers to the story, please be aware of this and let users know with a ‘SPOILER’ tag at the beginning of your question. Hiding the question by utilizing the Hide Details function of the forums would also be appreciated. Let’s allow everyone to enjoy the experience of reading spoiler free.

Let’s all have fun and create a positive learning environment together! :blush:


Pace

Week Start and End Dates Start Line End Line
Week 1 28/12/2025 - 03/01/2026 あるところに、深い森となだらかな草... Coming soon...


Okay, hope you’re all set to go! Looking forward to reading through this book with all of you! 🥳
22 Likes

I decided to start early just to see how it would be and… it’s already kiki-ing my butt (see what I did there)

Tbh I’ve only read the first two pages and it’s actually not so bad (as far as one can tell within two pages, anyway) but I feel like I have to read it more carefully if it’s for book club rather than just flying over stuff I don’t understand… have to remember I can always read it again in the future!!

9 Likes

Still waiting for my copy to arrive, it’s scheduled to get there on the 31st so I might get a late start :sweat_smile: Will just have to read a lot during my vacation week afterwards to make up for it ig

6 Likes

Just ordered my copy. よろしくおねがいします

6 Likes

I went ahead and read the first chapter, and there are definitely quite a few words I don’t know. I think what I’m gonna end up doing is read through it at whatever pace just skimming past what I don’t understand, then actually go through more thoroughly along with the book club pace

7 Likes

Looking forward to it, I haven’t started reading anything yet but I got the book in time.

This is my first Book Club of this kind, I’m curious to see how it works.

Good luck everyone!

6 Likes

I might suggest using the schedule proposed for the 2020 WaniKani reread of Kiki. It is roughly 10 pages per session (well, 9-13) and can be synced up with multiple versions of the book.

emphasized text

2 Likes

アマゾンで買ったところです。一緒に読むのを楽しみにしています!
来年の正月の希望は小説を全部日本語で読むことで、早くできたらいいと思います!

4 Likes

Thats a great idea!!

I got the exact ISBN of learnnatively since there’s so many options as epub and I’m reading it with ttsu reader so I can use yomitan on it. This is the first time I will attempt reading a novel in Japanese. Let’s see how bad this goes.

The ebook doesn’t seem to come with page indicators since they depend on the device settings (font size, etc)

Excited to participate

In case anyone feels like this is useful, my “search on bunpro” extension seems to work properly with ttsu reader (the second version)

image

1 Like