The Tokuma publishing house (徳間アニメ絵) artbook presents the movie Spirited Away. A beautifully published album interweaves stills from the film with original Japanese text that tells Chihiro’s story. It will be of interest to both fans of this particular animation and Ghibli’s works, as well as people looking for their first contact with the Japanese language. The illustrations match the text on a given page, helping to understand the content through context.
We recommend the book for beginners – there is a limited number of kanji characters (all with furigana), and the grammar is more or less capped at N3 level (similar to Nihongo Short Stories series, which are however slightly more difficult.) So if you already know the basics of Japanese language, reading should be enjoyable, but you will definitely learn a lot from it.
