It's taken me far too long to read this. In all fairness, I did take a very long break from reading it, probably over a year. My goal for the next Japanese book I read it to finish it within a few months, as opposed to a few years.
I find it harder to rate Japanese novels, if only because the way I process them is very different from how I read English language novels. I tend to remember the books as a collection of images and emotions rather than specific phrases or words. That holds true for Buranko Nori. The primary sense I gleaned from it was that of sadness and loss. The narrator (we never learn the actual names of any of the characters) is the sister of the main protagonist of the story, a young boy who cannot speak but has an uncanny ability to communicate with animals. Most of the book is her remembering a specific period of time when they were children, and the stories her brother used to write for her about animals and the amazing things they can do. There is a sense of magic and whimsy throughout the book as well, despite the sadness of it, that made the whole thing taste rather bittersweet.
I found this book sitting on a tiny bookshelf in a resort by the sea, it is in Thai - and just finished it in only a few hours after that. Beautiful, witty, modern and lonely in Japanese way เด็กชายไกวชิงช้า ในโลกสรรพเสียงสัตว์ สนพ. Earnest