Breaking Into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text - Revised Edition

This book is great. Bought as a gift for my sister who is learning Japanese and she loves it. As stated in other reviews, the story is in Japanese and english alongside each other, making it easy to learn words and sentences. In addition, there is a little dictionary and synopsis with each story, which is incredibly helpful. Couldn't be better.

I am a learning Japanese between a N4 - N3 level and found this book to be of good quality and helpful for my studies. The short stories sometimes include rarely used/outdated vocab and syntactic variations to add style or illustrate a certain feeling or character, as you'd expect in a piece of fictional writing. This can make some parts hard to read or understand, but also gives you the chance to learn new and interesting phrases or words, and gives you a new understanding of how the language can be used, even if you won't ever use some of it in conversation or the classroom. The audio clips that can be accessed on the website for free are great for listening practice and the vocab list on each page is helpful for fluid reading. All in all a decent book.

Was impressed by how the contents were like, and how detailed the breakdowns of the meaning of each verbs and nouns.

Nice to read the original story without having a dictionary at hand! The text selection is really good and not too difficult: intermediate language skills should be enough

I have had a couple of years of college Japanese and have gotten past the half-way point in Duolingo Japanese. I found the First and Second Japanese Readers extremely enjoyable to read and helpful. But this selection was far beyond my abilities. it includes works by two modern Japanese writers which are certainly interesting, but their rich descriptive and psychological narrative is linguistically challenging. I have attacked a half-dozen times, but still find myself on the first page and a half.

This is a great book for people looking to start getting into reading more traditional Japanese stories and texts. This was a great stepping stone between reading dialogues from textbooks and moving into light novel & novella type reading. The stories were authored decades ago so sometimes it can feel a bit dated, but they are great shorts and pretty interesting. This is not colloquial Japanese, so be prepared for stories that are better appreciated when read with a more critical approach.

Didático.