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A book by Len Walsh, originally from 1969, for people interested in starting to learn to read Japanese. It is a nice little book that almost in a story-like fashion explains and builds up around 300 of the most common kanji characters. For example, it starts with the pictograph for sun, and shows how it evolved into the kanji character for sun. Then "tree" is treated in a similar fashion, "roots" (or "origin") is derived from "tree", and then the characters of sun and roots are put together to form a compound "origin-of-the-sun", which is the name of Japan in Japanese, pronounced NIPPON or NIHON.

For sure, you should not expect to be able to read Japanese texts after finishing this book, as it covers only 300 kanji out of the thousands, and hardly any kana at all. But what it covers, it covers in a very pleasant and captivating way. For me, the book was a real pleasure to read, and I would recommend it to everybody who is interested in starting to understand written Japanese, and in why the characters look they way they do.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804804966