Read Real Japanese: All You Need to Enjoy Eight Contemporary Writers

I bought this after reading Giles Murray's excellent 'Breaking into Japanese literature' hoping for something similar and have to say I find this book a little disappointing. The main problem is the book's layout, which features the original Japanese text on the top half of the right hand page, with romanised Japanese on the bottom half of the page, broken up into short phrases and accompanied by the English translations, with grammatical notes on the left hand page. Basically this means that the reader has to frequently switch attention between as many as 5 separate parts of the page (with sentences often broken up and translated out of sequence to fit English sentence structure), making the reading process quite frustrating at times - I've often found myself trying to hold the book with my fingers spread pointing at separate sections trying to keep track! Also, since the author is providing translations of phrases rather than definitions of words - unlike Murray who provides definitions for EVERY kanji on EVERY page plus a lot of the vocabulary that is written in kana - use of a dictionary is also required.
Having said that the book still has its merits. It is nice to be able to say you've read some Murakami in the original, the use of modern idiomatic Japanese is informative and the articles are less esoteric than some of those in Roy Andrew Miller's book for example (no pointless teaching of obscure botanical terms here!) but I think Murray's method makes for a smoother read.

This book was really helpful to me, as someone trying to keep their Japanese skills up during a break from studying. I found the english translation a little confusing (but this would be down to my general inexperience with this type of book), and I would maybe have found it easier if there was more hiragana (I kept mixing up the english and the japanese transliteration...again down to inexperience).
In general I found the stories were at the right level for me, though some were more challenging than others. In all, they are well-written and a good base for beginners-intermediate. I would definitely recommend it.

This collection of excellent short stories is well translated and carefully explained. Personally I would have preferred more hiragana in the narrative rather than italicizing the explanations although I guess this is to make it more accessible to beginner readers. Most importantly, it does acclimatise the reader to the kind of sentence constructions used in Japanese literature which differ from those used in factual narratives or spoken dialogues.

The stories range from confessional monologues to quite esoteric musings but they're never boring. The first story about a bored housewife is actually one of my favourites, and gives a feel for the unusual perspective adopted by some of the authors.

All English explanations are on adjacent pages to the written Japanese so once you get good at reading the Japanese you can cover up the English. A must-have for serious Japanese learners!