Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-108.70.146.119-20170531052840/@comment-24.176.2.221-20170531060354

It's hard for me to say. I didn't read the novels as a beginner and it's hard to look at them feigning the mindset of someone who can't understand them as well. And it also depends on what you mean by "beginner".

Someone who's only just finished learning Hiragana, Katakana, and has a very basic grasp of grammar? More effort than most people are willing to put up with to read a book. There are many complex sentences, tons and tons of kanji (like, if you're at a level where you know maybe 30 kanji the majority of kanji in the books are probably going to be unfamiliar to you), there's idioms and colloquialisms, sometimes there's keigo and the occasional dialectical speech, etc etc.

Again, I'm guessing to some extent but I would imagine you'd understand probably 1/6th of each page, which is not really enough to get an idea of what's going on. If you're determined to try then I would encourage you to try (and it could be good as a learning aid besides in getting acclimated to reading Japanese), but I don't think you have good odds of getting the basic idea of what's going on.