It doesn’t sound like this will solve your problem, but just in case:
I have a hard sided carry-on that I pack my clothes into and then pack that into a large carry-on for the flight there. That way I’m only dealing with one suitcase until I go home. (I also think I have that exact same foldable duffle as @Biblio that I bring for packing emergencies 
)
But this also supposes that I’m only staying at one place, or only buying so much stuff at my last stop to make me use the second suitcase.
Mmm, I was pondering the suitcase-in-suitcase approach: if I use the same Tokyo hotel at start and end of the trip I could leave the large case there in the interim. Definitely looking into foldable duffles too.
If you do that, make sure to check with the hotel in advance that it’s possible. I’ve been to a couple of hotels that stored luggage for 24h max.
Last order just arrived:
Top 3 are books 2, 3 and 5 from Yamaneko series book 4 is on the way from Amazon but will be here late December (I already have the first book and can’t yet get book 6).
Bottom like is 山月記 and 坊ちゃん。
Is that edition just full-furigana, or is it also simplified or abridged? (The Natively level for it is massively adrift from that of the standard text, at L22?? vs L48…)
2 books with full furigana. As far as I can tell it’s the same as the higher level one but just has furigana in it. It spans almost 800 pages but does have little annotations which may be grammar related (I haven’t looked at those much). Knowing what I’ve looked at and what I know of the audiobook, it should be a lot higher than Lv 22 but I didn’t know what to mark it as when I added it. It does use some archaic style language in it.
Do you plan to start it any time soon? I’d be curious what you think of that (and also 坊っちゃん) as tubasa bunko/aotoribunko. I don’t get the impression that just adding furigana would help all that much with comprehension, but if there’s annotations maybe that would help…?
I’ve read the (non furigana) book – I guess having furigana would knock it down a little bit from 48, but it’s still mid to high 40s. The main thing I think you need is an edition with lots of endnotes to tell you what all the literary and historical references and allusions are about. The difficulty IMHO is a combination of that plus the cat never using a common word when an obscure one is available. (I think it would be the rare native speaker 11 year old who really enjoys the book, but maybe I underestimate 11 year olds… I suspect a certain amount of “it’s about a cat, it must be for kids”.)
I haven’t read more than the initial few pages worth of 坊っちゃん, but judging from that it is a lot easier.
Not at the moment but if I go back to the audiobook I may use it to read alongside. I can understand parts of the audiobook without text (probably around a 3rd, though I have listened to it mostly passively each time so far). I will put a review up once I’ve read it though. Same for Bocchan but again it will be a bit before I try to read it. I have a list of books I want to read in a certain order and I’m also currently reading through the Zenitendo series as well.
Yeah, I thought it might be, partly why I didn’t choose a level for it and just let the system choose for itself. Unfortunately, me not knowing how difficult books are when I add them, I don’t ever put a level on them so some do show lower than they should.
Might depend on the Kid. I liked to read stuff in Old English and Scots as a Kid (under 12, I used to read Chaucer and a lot of Scottish poems) and could understand most of it even though I struggled with normal English, though I’m quite sure I was in the minority.
My biggest issue in Japanese is not enough vocabulary which is what holds me back from trying to read a lot of the books I have.
I usually don’t trust ? levels unless they’re not a default level (20, 24, 30 I think are the children’s book, manga, and light novel/novel defaults), and even then I imagine they’re close but still not accurate. I definitely don’t expect people adding books to know or guess the levels. I very very rarely bother with it.
Yeah, vocab is a killer and as native speakers even kids have pretty wide vocabularies. I just this weekend picked up a second hand copy of T H White’s The Once and Future King, which I remembered enjoying as a young teenager. Looking at it now with the eyes of somebody who’s learned a second language I notice how wide a range of words it uses (including plenty I must surely have merely guessed from context like metheglyn, austringer, gorecrow, and meerschaum)…
I’ve recently been rereading a series of books I enjoyed as a kid, which were, in retrospect, aimed at adults. Aside from words like you mentioned (did I really know the meaning on “charivari” at 9? Doubtful. But I had a dictionary!) I also noticed the author tends to write in dialectical differences (‘afore’ instead of ‘before’, ex: “afore I came up north”) and sometimes the phonetic spellings of accents to emphasize how certain characters talk (‘Whadju mean ee ain’t comin’). Neither difficulty would phase a native speaker child, but they would be a headache for learners.
Yeah, that’s why a lot of my books I haven’t even attempted yet because I’m quite sure they are way over the estimated level and I’ve very little chance of understanding them at this point.
I’ve noticed that with a lot of the stuff I’ve tried reading, if I know roughly what’s going on and there’s only one or two words in a sentence that I don’t know, I can kind of guess it but if it’s more complex or specialised outside my own interests I have to look it up.
This is something that only trips me up sometimes in Japanese but I don’t know if it’s because my language exchange partner uses Miyazaki ben as well as Tokyo dialect, kind of like how I will use Scots as well as English (and some times American words if he asks for the difference since that was what he learned first). If the dialect is similar to either of those but only has some conjugation differences, I can generally understand it if I already know it in Tokyo dialect (like the speech styles in Zenitendo, Flying witch minus the one you’re not supposed to understand and the accented speech in Sandlands). I dare say that when I get to higher level stuff it may be a lot more difficult though.
I remember @bungakushoujo mentioning that she read an annotated version of 坊っちゃん. I checked various bookoffs for one while in Japan, but no luck. I wonder if they are just rare, or people hold on to them more. 
lots of 漱石 available but not in annotated form… tbf, I didn’t do a serious search (i.e. I didn’t look up the publisher, etc.), so it might just be, that those editions are not with the author but in the 文学 section or something. (It also doesn’t help that bookoffs are not very consistent.)
I had the Kadokawa かまわぬ edition and it was full of annotations.
This teachers blog also has explanations for basically every paragraph and reference in the entire book:
That’s a neat resource, thank you! You are making your name proud. 
Did it have them inline, or were they all endnote style at the end of the book?
They were endnote style so there was a bit of flipping back and forth, but I didn’t mind that so much. I find that inline annotations sometimes bring me out of the story since they can alter the page layout so much!
Finally all my paper treasures have been released from freezer prison and I can give a final overview of this year’s trip to Japan:
Nonfiction:
BL:
Romance:
Fantasy:
Mystery:
General Fiction:
only 6 of those were new books, everything else found in various bookoffs.
I did lightly stab myself trying to get into the package though, that thing was SECURE.