JapanNewbie

Miyazawa Kenji – The Restaurant with Many Orders

Posted on 22. Jul, 2008 @ 10:10 pm by harvey in Books, Language, Media Views: 736

The TheJapanShop.com now has one of Miyazawa Kenji’s most famous stories, 「注文の多い料理店」The Restaurant with Many Orders, available as a 5-dollar downloadable package that includes the story text, and an accompanying audio file with a native speaker reading the text.

Kenji Miyazawa

Kenji Miyazawa

In addition, the furigana for every Kanji is provided, and you also get a definition for every vocabulary word in context. You’ll be familiar with this type of product if you tried the JapanShop’s previous e-book/audio product to learn Japanese through Proverb’s.

Most Japanese children (from my wife’s generation anyway) read this story when they are in elementary school. Children read this story, but actually it’s pretty scary. You’ll know what I mean if you give it a read.

You can also read the entire text of The Restaurant with Many Orders on Aozora Bunko for free (it’s like Japan’s Gutenberg Project). However, because Aozora is meant for native Japanese, you won’t get any explanations or many furigana for the Kanji (especially uncommon furigana are given however). You can also read many other Miyazawa stories on Aozora as well, it’s a great resource.

More Miyazawa…

Another one of Miyazawa’s famous pieces is 「雨にも負けず」(ami ni mo makezu, roughly, I won’t lose to the rain). You can read the full text of ami ni mo makezu online as well.

Stay tuned for more enlightening Japanese literature!

- Harvey

Tags: Books, literature