This book was perfect. It was just what I needed.

There are almost no other Japanese graded readers

in existance, and of those, this is the only one that even gets above a beginner's level. Not only is it
the only book in its field, but it does what it promises perfectly.

That said, everyone is different, so no book is right for everybody. If you want a graded reader that
gets up to a decent level, by all means, buy this; however, if you aren't sure, here's how to tell if this
book is for you. If any one of these criteria apply to you, you'll know whether or not to get the book.

Buy this book if:

- you are willing to put in effort. This might sound odd to mention, but more and more these days you
hear of people who want to learn something without actually working at it. If you want to pick up a
book, read it cover-to-cover, and suddenly be able to read Japanese, forget it. No book on Earth will
let you do that. This is because you are learning something that requires effort to remember. Not much
effort, but certainly a little bit at least, and it's needed constantly.
- you want to read, study, or understand Japanese literature. There are a lot of people who write
enormously complex and detailed analyses of Japanese literature without speaking a word of the
language themselves; such analyses often miss the point entirely for obvious reasons. If you want to
appreciate Japanese literature, this book will get you started and build you up further.
- you want to read Japanese newspapers or novels. Why not?
- you want mastery of Japanese, like the book says. And by mastery, I mean being at a higher
standard than most Japanese adults. This shouldn't have to be explicitly mentioned, but it seems a lot
of other reviewers missed it, so there you go.

Don't buy this book if:

- you are of the opinion that it is normal and reasonable for learning hiragana/katakana to take months
or even years. Come on. There are only 96 things to learn. You could memorise 96 countries over a
week if you put the effort into it. So it's not the amount of things you're learning. It's just that some
people mentally balk at the idea of learning a foreign language or writing system. If you are a person
disabled by such a mindset, then no book will help you learn more than the bare basics of kanji.
- you want a fun book that makes you feel good. This book is neutral and was written back when it was
the students' responsibility to put in the effort to learn, not the teacher's responsibility to convince them
learning is worth their while with bribes of fun. If you actually want to learn something that isn't mind-
boggling easy, fun or not, you will put some work in. As long as it doesn't make you feel bad (I repeat:
this book is neutral), fun won't make much of a difference. If it's something that requires effort, in the
long run, you need to be self-motivated, not driven by pretty pictures and colours. If you refuse to read
anything except what you pre-determine to be fun, avoid this book. There will be lessons that you
simply will not feel passionate about. But then again, such lessons will inevitably occur in any book
that goes to a high level.
- you speak little or no Japanese. It might sound redundant, but I feel it's worth mentioning. The
introduction to this book states that it is designed for those who speak Japanese but have no or basic
ability with reading. If you can't have a normal conversation in Japanese (and I do mean normal, not
contrived text-book conversations), you will struggle with understanding the passages of this book.
You'll be able to read them, sure, but it will be harder to remember them if you don't understand what
you're reading. Can you understand most of a Japanese tv show without subtitles? No? Only
children's shows? Avoid this book.
- you just want to read a little. This book is for MASTERY. You will be more literate than most
Japanese adults if you complete this book. I could read Doraemon manga before I used this book, and
I only had about 200 kanji then. If that's the level you're interested in (children's stuff or just reading
some street signs and so on), this book is far too much.

There are plenty of other kanji books out there. I've read bits of many. I worked through most of
"Remembering the Kanji" while at school, and all of "Kanji ABC". I found that although I could
recognise a lot of kanji, I couldn't understand what I was reading. For a great deal of kanji, knowing
their meanings doesn't actually help you read much. For example, the word for "greengrocer" is written
as "eight hundred rooms", presumably for some weird historical reason. You might be able to read
each of the three kanji: eight, hundred, room; to understand their meaning when together cannot be
done unless the entire word is learnt separately. A lot of Japanese words are like this. Worse, a lot of
kanji have more abstract meanings, or are used in words for the sound they add, so learning their
meaning does not help you at all. So for a great deal of reading, you have to learn words, not
individual kanji. Fortunately, that's what this book does.

For common kanji which are worth learning the meanings of, this book covers them completely. It
further covers the vast majority of words made up of multiple kanji which cannot be guessed from their
components. It covers all bases.

If you are completely new at non-English scripts and find that they all look the same to you, though,
Kanji ABC might be a good one to start with. It can be read in just an hour or so, and it helps show
how a lot of kanji evolved from pictograms to the abstract, square forms we see today. Even if you
don't remember any of the kanji from it, it will help you look at them properly and be able to tell them
apart.

If you are still learning Japanese, this book might have a use as you improve, e.g. only doing one
lesson each week or month as you learn more, but as I haven't used it this way I cannot say if it would
be useful.

There are 75 lessons in this wonderful book divided into five sections: 17 in "Introductory", which cover
hiragana, katakana, and a few (43 exactly) basic kanji including numbers. The next 13 lessons are in
"Elementary", and are much more interesting. They cover stories and dialogues between people. I
kept count of the kanji learnt as I went by making flashcards, so I can quite confidently say that by the
end of Elementary, you will have exactly 365 kanji, including those from the Introductory section. The
kanji are not just used once and then left alone; rather, after being introduced in a lesson, they
reappear in subsequent lessons, so you stay familiar with them. After Elementary is "Intermediate",
consisting of 17 lessons. These are more interesting again, as they describe various traditions,
discuss why the culture is changing, and basically give you a very good idea of Japanese culture in
general. Very few English works give you this much knowledge over an entire volume, let alone in 17
lessons only 1 or 2 pages long each. One story, "Rokubei's sheep", was absolutely adorable, and
although it had no cultural information in the story itself (there were a few gems in the information
below the vocab list), it's my favourite story from the entire section, and I became teary at the end. By
the end of Intermediate, you will have a little over 1000 kanji, enough to read over 90% of a
newspaper, and enough for nearly all everyday life. After Intermediate, there are two more sections:
"Advanced: Fiction" (12 lessons) and "Advanced: Non-Fiction" (15). The Fiction section has a few
stories written in an older form of Japanese (think Shakespearian English as a similar comparison),
essential if you ever want to read or even study Japanese literature. Finally, the last lesson is a
passage which you read to test yourself at the end of the book.

Each lesson in this book is as follows: you are provided with a vocabulary list which you must
memorise before starting. This is followed by various notes and pieces of cultural information about
the lesson. The text of the lesson itself is in the back of the book. At first I found this annoying, but
quickly realised that it meant I wouldn't succumb to temptation and look each difficult kanji up by letting
my eyes wander across the page.

The texts start off as inane, like most basic language texts. The first few are largely word lists.
However, they quickly build up to short sentences and conversations by the end of the Introductory
section. In Elementary, you have more interesting stories and dialogues. This works up to cultural
monographs, children's stories, anecdotes, and other more interesting pieces in Intermediate and
Advanced.

I will say this: I have yet to do the Advanced: Non-Fiction section. I will, but haven't got there yet. The
titles of each lesson indicate that it's mostly highly-technical articles from newspapers, about
government systems, patriotism, or subtle aspects of religion.
So, how should you use a masterpiece like this? The book itself was written with the express purpose
of being used to enhance a university-level Japanese class. I had done Japanese at school, and had
watched (far too much) J-Horror and had taken speaking lessons, so although my spoken Japanese
was up to scratch, I was not doing any such class when I used this book. Fortunately, the writer
mentions that it was also made to be suitable as a stand-alone, but it requires more effort from the
student to use it this way. It also reccomends at several points a language text called "Essential
Japanese" by Samuel E. Martin. I did not use this text nor have I ever even seen it. It is not required.

In general, we all know, it's better to do a little of something everyday than to do a big block once a
week. I doubt anyone has the exact same circumstances as myself, but just in case, here's how I used
the book.

I have to travel for work, 90 minutes each way, 4 days a week. Since this commute is on the train, I
can read while I travel. I used this time to work through the book. With the exception of the first ten
lessons or so, which are all kana that I already knew, I did one lesson a day like this. At the end of
each section, I'd go back and re-read all texts from that section until I could do so without hesitation
and without looking up any kanji. So it took me about a month to go through each section and another
month to re-read the lessons of that section over and over until I was pretty darn smooth. I'm at the
end of Advanced: Fiction right now.

There are reviews saying that this text is out of date. I strongly disagree for reasons of fact. Unless you
only want to converse with teenagers or read young children's manga, you will need just about all of
the grammatical structures and words used in this book. I myself have used them and heard them
used in speaking in everyday life in Japan, not to mention in films and manga. The book further
includes some equivalent words, e.g. the verb "to see" has a humble and an exalted form. These are
used in subway announcements, for example, making understanding them quite handy. Few books
these days explain such 'equivalent' words or even use them at all. Finally, some reviewers have
argued that since this book was written before the kanji were standardised, it is useless. However, the
standardised kanji were based on those that were already widely in use, i.e. those used in this book. I
have scoured kanji lists and have not found any before senior high school that the book has not taught
me, and I'm not even finished with it yet. That's at least the first 1500 kanji that this book covers as
well as any more modern text, plus several hundred more (again, haven't finished). But perhaps most
convincingly: myself and a good friend of mine used this book and found ourselves completely able to
read in Japan. Not just able to read some signs and things--able to read every piece of text that was
visible the entire time I was there, with the exception only of several that came up during parliamentary
television (I was channel surfing, OK?). I had been to Japan a few years prior for a conference and
found myself unable to read most things. Seven months after starting this book, reading at the pace I
described above, I went back for another conference and was astonished at how universal my reading
was. It's indescribable to be able to read every single thing about you in a foreign language.

Some reviews complain that the text in this book is too small. The one I ordered was about A4 (letter)
size and I had no problems, but perhaps some editions are smaller. If you are worried about this, see if
you can also get one this size. The text was the same size as that found in books and newspapers.

As this book is for MASTERY, not just to be able to read at a basic level, it goes up higher than the
ability of the average adult in Japan. The fact that other reviewers have had Japanese friends glance
at the harder lessons of this book and struggle with them only demonstrates the fact that it really is
designed for achieving mastery and not average reading.

This masterpiece further shows different forms of kanji that were used in the old-days, so you are able
to read ancient texts if you ever wish to. And they come up on TV sometimes anyway if a plot device
involves something from long ago or some such. It explains in depth how to read Japanese names,
information rare to find all in one place in any text.

I reiterate here at the end of this absurdly long review: this book is useful only to those who wish to
read Japanese at a high level and who are realistic enough to work for that. If you are such a person,
buy this book and enjoy your blossoming abilities. Highly, highly recommended.