My first attempt at visual novels failed miserably before it even started: the game I downloaded turned out to be a translated version without an apparent method to revert it back to Japanese, and despite its length it was rated as hard (8/10) filled with tons of legit and made up medical terms.
So putting visual novels aside, I decided to search for a way to read raw light novels. At my current Jap lvl it would be torturous to look up almost every single sentence manually on Kindle reader, so PC route I went, for the ease of copy pasta.
The first hurdle: Amazon.jp refused to sell Kindle books to foreigners, so one had to find a way round it, namely IP faking. Dedicated Japanese-IP VPN is the best, but I would look stupid shelling out $6 a month to buy a $5 kindle book, but putting my credit card number through free/open proxies didn't sound wise either. Eventually, I decided on http://www.vpngate.net/, which advertised itself as 'a free academic experiment to help poor folks living under opressing regimes to circumvent media censorship' (or something along that line). Its Japanese proxy IP belonged to a university helped relieve my worry a little. After the VPN client installed and connected, my IP proofed to a Japanese one, it was time to buy a book. Found a guide here, was a straightforward one so nothing noteworthy beside reminder of always buying ebook using Japanese IP (after the 5th purchases or so from non JP IP an Amazon customer service person would ask for your real address to confirm residency). I talked my way out when a CS asked for my US address on US Amazon account earlier, but I doubted my Japanese would allow me to do the same. Better safe than regret later.
The next hurdle was quite amusing: Japanese kindle books weren't allowed onto Amazon's own PC kindle software. I couldn't even login using the JP account (would really like to know in what world those JP businessmen was dwelling to make such decision!). The all popular Caliber was no-good, it was unable to render those beautiful vertical text in viewer, instead lining them all horizontally while keeping individual vertical letter orientation. Converting the book to other formats did turn the letters to correct orientation, but no solution for vertical paragraphs sill. I spent a few evenings trying out various PC ebook viewers, from sparking new to obsolete ones without avail, and was about to give up till I realized Kindle PC allowed for reading personal documents.
Amazon PC Kindle software did render the free sample book correctly (after all it was an Amazon product!), but accepted non-DRM files only. Fortunately many people found the idea of DRM'ed legally purchased ebook stupid, and some even stepped forward to offer tools to get rid of it. This guide here helped, also the tool's homepage. After stripping the book off its DRM, simply put it into My Kindle Content folder (found in My Documents on Windows 8), and this was the final result:
Beautiful, wasn't it?
Before you ask: yes, this is a guide to reading Japanese kindle novels on PC. About the Jap learning journal part, there wasnt much to tell... Work at this time of the year is always busy :\