The last time I was at Kinokuniya, I impulsively bought a puzzle magazine called 漢字てんつなぎ, or “Kanji Connect-the-Dot.” It contains 200 puzzles, most of which ask a question with three possible answers (typically kanji compounds), and then a connect-the-dot puzzle to reveal the correct answer.

For example, puzzle 16 is titled 春の花壇に泳ぐ, or “Swimming in a Spring Flower Bed”. The accompanying text reads:

春から初夏にかけて咲く、背の高い植物です。その英名は「竜の口」という意味があります。てんをつなぐと現れる言葉はどれでしょうか？

It’s a plant that grows tall and blooms between spring and the beginning of summer. It’s English name has the meaning “dragon’s mouth.” Will you connect the dots and see which word will appear?

The following three possibilities are given:

A. 石楠花 (stone / camphor tree / flower) = Rhododendron
B. 女郎花 (woman / son / flower) = Yellow Patrinia
C. 金魚草 (gold / fish / grass) = Snapdragon

The title hints at the correct answer ("swimming"), as does the background image behind the connect-the-dot section. The answer for this one is C. 金魚草

I’m clearly not the target demographic for this magazine (the one advertisement is for a large-print book helping 60-year-olds figure out smartphones), but I find the puzzles very relaxing and it’s fun looking up the compounds and poetic expressions I don’t know. If one were in Japan, one could submit completed answer sheets in to be entered into a drawing for a variety of prizes (ranging from convenience store giftcards up to a Nintendo Switch Lite). For those of us not in Japan, though, it adds another source for Kanji recognition work in a low-stress package. Most of the puzzles seem to have around 150-200 dots, although there are a couple of fold-out puzzles with 400 dots each. A few pages have smaller puzzles that you have to solve together in order to arrive at the answer ("rearrange the four characters you uncover to find the answer" or "compose a character out of these three component pieces") with only 30 dots or so each.