Author: 星新一（ほししんいち）
Reading level: elementary
My rating: 4 out of 5
I loved this little collection of stories! This is far and away the easiest Japanese fiction I've ever read. There are kanji, but there were absolutely zero that I wasn't familiar with, and the vocab is fairly simple as well, with key words repeated often.
It's a bunch of (very) short stories about inventors and robots and space aliens and the like, but it's not what I think of as science-fiction. Each story is self-contained, easy to follow, and has a simple but fun twist at the end.
I highly recommend this book to anyone as their first foray into reading in Japanese, especially for anyone accustomed to reading manga with furigana who's uncertain about reading an actual book.
