Japanese web novels in English

Japan writes stories every night.
Most never cross the ocean.

Japan publishes an enormous number of web novels: isekai, romance, slow-burn fantasy, stories serialized chapter by chapter for years. Only a fraction ever reaches English.

The author settles the Japanese first. A machine drafts the English from it, a person reads that draft through, and the author decides whether it goes out. We say so on every page where you can start reading a story.

Free to read. No account, no paywall.

Read chapter 1: The Kabukimono Chronicles: The Flight of the Twin Blade… →
AN EDO YOKAI COMEDY THE KABUKIMONO CHRONICLES The Flight of the Twin Blade Dragon Kazuya Tsurugino

The Kabukimono Chronicles: The Flight of the Twin Blade Dragon

FantasyComedyHistoricalActionAdventure
Male ProtagonistPerverted ProtagonistYandereYoukai+2

In Toyoashihara, a fantasy world in the mold of old Japan overrun by roaming yokai, those who slay these monsters and settle the troubles they cause are known as Kabukimono—wandering adventurer-warriors. Among these Kabukimono, one twin-blade swordsman would come to be hailed in later generations as the strongest of all: Ashino Yasutaka. The man he sought to surpass was history's greatest swordsman, Sukebei, who scattered his seed across the world and was known as the legendary 'Breeding King.' This is the story of Ashino Yasutaka, chasing the legend of the Breeding King, and his fiancée, Matsuoka Mani-hime, who chases after him.

48 chapters · ~196 min Ongoing

FAKESTAR/YUICA ~A Lie Told in Earnest Surpasses the Real Thing~

DramaContemporaryVTuberMusicComedy
Female ProtagonistSecret IdentityShowbizSiblings+2

Misaki Tanaka is thirty-six, works part-time at a publisher, and has never once had a boyfriend. Her parents are gone. Her younger sister Yui has just walked out of the house with a backpack, swearing she is done with VTubing forever. Alone in Yui's abandoned room, Misaki presses a large red button on her sister's streaming rig—and the chat starts moving. She is live. As YUICA. As a fake. The viewers ask for the usual things, and thirty-six years of swallowed anger finally comes up. "Shut up... you pigs..." For some reason, the chat goes wild. A story about a woman who had given up on her life, borrowing her sister's face, and climbing to the top while still being a fake.

18 chapters · ~131 min Ongoing
THE STAR COURIER Delivers Your Heart A. Kadoyama

The Star Courier Delivers Your Heart

SFSpace OperaAdventureComedyMystery
Female ProtagonistArtificial IntelligenceSpace TravelMystery Solving+2

It's been thousands of years since humanity spread across the galaxy, and where there are stars, there are jobs, cargo, and trouble waiting behind every one of them. Celestina, a courier of the stars, cruises through the cosmos every day alongside her partners: Lilith, an all-purpose AI, and Lemurias, a state-of-the-art transport ship. Her latest job seems simple enough at first: deliver a capsule known as the "coffin," said to contain a corpse. Blinded by the generous reward, she takes the job, only to hear strange noises coming from inside the coffin mid-transport. That moment marks the beginning of the Echo Incident, a mystery that will shake entire star systems to their core. Traveling from star system to star system, Celestina meets new companions and bids farewell to others, uncovering fragments of a lost past, sealed research, and a path leading toward a legendary stellar region. Today, as always, the courier of the stars takes flight, carrying someone's feelings along with the cargo.

10 chapters · ~70 min Ongoing

The person who wrote a story should be the one who decides how it sounds in another language.

How a chapter gets here

  1. The author brings the work. Nothing is scraped. Every story is here because the person who wrote it asked for it to be.
  2. The author fixes the reading, in Japanese. Who speaks each line, how each character sounds, how every name is spelled, which terms have to stay the same from chapter to chapter.
  3. A machine writes the first draft of the English, held to those decisions.
  4. A person reads the whole chapter through before it goes anywhere.
  5. The author decides whether it goes out, and can take the work down themselves at any time.

You can check the first step yourself. Every story page links to the Japanese original on the site where its author published it.

8 works from 7 authors, 133 chapters.

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