This topic makes my head hurt a bit... ahem, anyway.
Would that genki series be one of them?
I just commented about textbooks here,
here
If you
really want to learn by reading, someone has adapted the L-R (listening-reading) method to Japanese,
! L-R the most important passages
However, just so you know, in order to to learn 'just by reading' you first build up your fundamentals by going through simple-sentence audio courses following along with their written materials, grader readers, etc., you don't start with a novel on day one. It does get you to books much more quickly (first to simple books in translation, books which you should first be familiar with in your own language), but before you get to that you do first have to go through a *lot* of learning materials. Those learning materials would add up to quite a lot of money store-bought, but you can perhaps find them used or by other methods.
That said, I think this method worked for the author of the linked article and a handful of other people only because they were polyglots who had already used this method on several other languages. It seems like a viable if eccentric method for learning languages with phonetic spelling, but you have to be particularly stubborn about learning by reading instead of by textbooks to learn a kanji/hanzi/etc. language this way.
Anyway, if you insist on learning Japanese by immersing yourself in reading from the start, that resource will give you some rough guidance on how to do it but you're mostly on your own.
It's not all or nothing either; personally, I borrowed a number of the L-R techniques in my own studies.... but I also did a textbook (two different ones actually, plus tae kim... ) as well as flashcards and all the usual stuff.
Personally, I think you'd be best off getting started with a textbook and not worrying about alternative or additional learning methods until you've gotten past that. You'll find there's a lot more support surrounding learning the textbook way since, well, that's the way almost everybody who is actually successful at learning the language learns.