Review: Crystal Hunters #1, by Nathaniel French
by
Stuart Holland
これは凄い本だ！ (“This is an amazing book!”, for my English readers.)
I’ve been learning Japanese since last July (mostly Duolingo). This manga has been a great first foray into using those new language skills for something that I’m already interested in.
Crystal Hunters is designed for new language speakers/readers, and that definitely shows. The vocabulary and sentence structure used in it are extremely simple. It’s very much a “my first Japanese reading” exercise, but it doesn’t scrimp on the story or the art. It tells a simple but fun story and is a great way to put your early language skills to the test while also having fun at the same time.
Cal, Bansom, and Subasa are (as the title suggests) hunting crystals, which they can sell for money. (I think of them as quasi-D&D adventurers, but due to the story’s simplicity I haven’t seen too much of the world yet - I assume that will come in the sequels.) This first book is about how they become a team (/adventuring party).
I definitely had to do Google translating for specific vocabulary (and particularly what new kanji meant), but because the vocabulary repeated often, that became less and less necessary as I got through the book.
I actually read this book twice, first in Japanese and then again in English, to see if I’d missed anything. I was surprised that I hadn’t really. There were some small subtleties that I only saw in the English version, but I’d understood all of the major story beats in my Japanese run. I particularly enjoyed that I immediately understood “Goodbye, machine man!” when one of the villains attacked Bansom (one of the protagonists).
You’ll also see based on when I started this book that I put it down for a while in the middle. That was more a function of my own time rather than the book itself. But one thing that did show me was that my Japanese had improved in the time between December and March, because it was much easier reading when I read the latter third today.
For perspective on length, reading it through in English only took me about 15 minutes (speed boosted by also knowing what happened). Japanese obviously took me a lot longer.
Overall, it’s a great book! Serves its purpose very well of a beginner language learner story that’s also fun and interesting. I look forward to reading the rest of them as I learn more!
I do wish that it was distributed some other way aside from Kindle. I don’t buy books with DRM, but I had to for this one because there was no other way.
