Read Japanese

Natsume Soseki, Dazai Osamu, Akutagawa Ryunosuke. 17,372 works of Japanese literature whose copyright has expired, on iPhone, iPad and Mac — set the way a printed Japanese book is set. Reading them is free, and there are no ads.

The works are in the original Japanese

That is the point. You read what the author actually wrote. There is no English translation of the works — instead, the app helps you read the original: furigana above the base characters, a look-up you reach by pressing and holding a word, and an on-device AI that explains that word for the passage it appears in, in the app’s language.

Set as a printed book

True vertical text, right to left, with pages that turn the way a Japanese book opens
Furigana, emphasis dots, side lines, tate-chu-yoko, inline notes and line-breaking rules
Typeface, type size, line spacing, margins and theme, set to your own eyes

The words you look up become your vocabulary

Press and hold to select a word; if it carries furigana, the reading is filled in
The on-device AI reads the passage around it and answers with the meaning in that scene
Every word is kept in Words, with the book and passage where you met it

On Mac, a larger page and the keyboard

The macOS app opens the same library as a Mac application.

Change the window width and the page re-composes where you left off
Page turns, bookmarks and in-text search from the menu bar and the keyboard
Right-click a work and open it in a new window — read two books side by side

Reads offline

A work is downloaded once, then kept on your device. Search across all 17,372 works runs on the device too, so no connection is needed.

Reading costs nothing

Reading all 17,372 works, the vertical typesetting, downloading and reading offline are free. For people who want to keep more of their words, and the tools that support reading — ambient sound, auto page turn and the rest — there is a paid plan (monthly 200 yen / yearly 1,600 yen / lifetime 4,000 yen, including tax; your local price is shown before you buy). Monthly and yearly include a 3-day free trial, and nothing is charged if you cancel during it. Subscribing is optional.

This app uses works whose copyright term has expired, published by 青空文庫 (Aozora Bunko) and by the National Diet Library Digital Collections. Works from the latter rest on the Public Domain Mark (PDM) attached to the material, and their text is a modified work: optical character recognition of the material, tidied by us. See section 9 of the privacy policy.