Hey everyone, I just finished キノの旅 I and II. Ive been learning Japanese for around a year, and about 2 months ago I read my first novels: キノの旅 I and 嫌われる勇気. Both took me around a month to read in total. Though I guess 嫌われる勇気 was a bit too ambitious for my first novel, which is probably why it took me so long lol.
Anyways, a week ago I took up キノの旅II and enjoyed it so much that I managed to read it in 4 days.
If anyone is unsure if they want to read the book, you can ask me for my opinion. Or if you already read the books and want to share your own opinions, you can of course also share them here, too.
I personally think that they (especially the II book) are perfect for beginners, since every story is quite short and digestable. (Each book is around 70k words, with each story at around 5-10k) and the range of topics is baffeling.
(Though that also means that the difficulty is pretty broad, ranging from N1 to N3.)
I remember that in II there was an entire chapter of only newspapers about an incident that occured. Each newspaper represented a different person and therefore had a completely different tone, philosophy and writing style, which really tests variety. Another chapter had the fun (=horror for beginners lol) gimmick of leaving out literally all of the narration and just presenting snippets of a discussion about japanese literary authors. I had no idea what was happening in that chapter but it was fun nonetheless.
But all other stories were genuinly amazing (and utterly heart crushing.) (I should add Its a rather sad book.)