30 Easy Japanese Classics on Aozora Bunko for Learners

Aozora Bunko is a volunteer library of Japanese books whose copyright has expired. It holds more than 17,000 works, all free to read online. For a learner it is a treasure and a maze at the same time. The famous names are all there, but so are Meiji-era essays in old spelling, and nothing on the list tells you which is which until you open the text.

When I built Niho, a Japanese reader for learners, I made a shelf called “Start here” for exactly this problem. It holds thirty short, plainly written works, ordered roughly from easiest to hardest. This post is that shelf with a note on each work. Every title links to the work’s card page on Aozora Bunko, where you can read it in the browser or download the text.

The order is my judgement, not a measurement. It moves from children’s folk tales to short stories that Japanese schoolchildren read in class, and ends with a few full novels. The lengths, though, I did count. I took the text of each work from Aozora, left out the furigana, the headings and the publishing notes at the end, and counted the characters, punctuation included. The numbers are rounded. As a rough guide, a page of a Japanese paperback holds somewhere around 600 characters.

Folk tales and children’s stories

These were written for children. The sentences are short, and most of the text is in kana.

二ひきの蛙 (Nihiki no kaeru, “The Two Frogs”), Niimi Nankichi. A green frog and a yellow frog start a fight about their colours, and put it off when winter comes. In spring, washed clean in the pond, they see each other differently. About 900 characters, and the best place to start.
桃太郎 (Momotarō, “The Peach Boy”), Kusuyama Masao. The folk tale every Japanese child knows, retold for children. Knowing the story already makes it much easier. About 5,400 characters.
一寸法師 (Issun-bōshi, “The Inch-High Samurai”), Kusuyama Masao. A boy no bigger than a thumb sets off with a needle for a sword. About 5,500 characters.
浦島太郎 (Urashima Tarō), Kusuyama Masao. A fisherman saves a turtle, visits the palace under the sea, and is given a box he must not open. About 5,500 characters.
かちかち山 (Kachi-kachi yama), Kusuyama Masao. A rabbit takes revenge on a tanuki. Fair warning: in this telling the tanuki kills the old woman and serves her to the old man as soup, a part that some picture books leave out. About 4,200 characters.
花咲かじじい (Hanasaka jijii, “The Old Man Who Made Trees Bloom”), Kusuyama Masao. A kind old man, a greedy neighbour, and ash that makes dead trees flower. About 3,600 characters.
舌切りすずめ (Shita-kiri suzume, “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow”), Kusuyama Masao. Another kind old man and greedy neighbour story, with a choice between a small basket and a large one. About 4,000 characters.
野ばら (Nobara, “The Wild Rose”), Ogawa Mimei. An old soldier and a young soldier guard the border between two countries. Quiet and sad. About 2,300 characters.
ごん狐 (Gongitsune, “Gon the Fox”), Niimi Nankichi. A little fox plays a prank and then tries to make up for it. Japanese children read it at school, so it is also a good conversation topic. About 4,800 characters.
手袋を買いに (Tebukuro o kai ni, “Buying Mittens”), Niimi Nankichi. A fox cub goes into town to buy mittens, and holds out the wrong paw. Gentle and warm. About 3,500 characters.
赤い蝋燭と人魚 (Akai rōsoku to ningyo, “The Red Candles and the Mermaid”), Ogawa Mimei. A mermaid leaves her baby with an old couple who make candles. Darker than the stories before it. About 6,500 characters.

Short stories from the school canon

A step up. More kanji, more literary vocabulary, but each one is still short.

蜘蛛の糸 (Kumo no ito, “The Spider’s Thread”), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. A thief in hell is offered one thread to climb. A good first taste of Akutagawa. About 2,900 characters.
杜子春 (Toshishun), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. A young man in old China is tested by a hermit. Based on a Chinese tale and written for young readers. About 9,100 characters.
よだかの星 (Yodaka no hoshi, “The Nighthawk Star”), Miyazawa Kenji. An ugly bird, mocked by the others, flies towards the stars. Short and moving. About 5,200 characters.
注文の多い料理店 (Chūmon no ōi ryōriten, “The Restaurant of Many Orders”), Miyazawa Kenji. Two hunters find a restaurant in the mountains with a lot of instructions for its guests. Funny, and a little frightening. About 5,400 characters.
セロ弾きのゴーシュ (Sero-hiki no Gōshu, “Gauche the Cellist”), Miyazawa Kenji. A poor cellist is visited by a different animal each night. Longer than the two before it, but easy to follow. About 11,600 characters.
走れメロス (Hashire Merosu, “Run, Melos”), Dazai Osamu. Melos must run back to save his friend. Dramatic, rhythmic prose, and another school favourite. About 9,800 characters.
一房の葡萄 (Hitofusa no budō, “A Bunch of Grapes”), Arishima Takeo. A boy steals a classmate’s paints and a teacher handles it kindly. Plain first-person narration. About 6,300 characters.
トロッコ (Torokko, “The Handcart”), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. A boy helps push a railway handcart and goes much further from home than he meant to. About 4,300 characters.
鼻 (Hana, “The Nose”), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. A priest is ashamed of his very long nose. Some older vocabulary. About 5,700 characters.
羅生門 (Rashōmon), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. A servant shelters under a ruined city gate in hard times. The vocabulary is noticeably harder. About 5,700 characters.

Harder short pieces

Still short, but dense. Expect to look up more words per page here than in some of the novels below.

〔雨ニモマケズ〕 (Ame ni mo makezu, “Unbeaten by the Rain”), Miyazawa Kenji. A poem found in his notebook after he died. It is written in katakana and in old kana spelling, which I explain below. About 350 characters, and worth reading slowly.
山月記 (Sangetsuki, “The Moon Over the Mountain”), Nakajima Atsushi. A proud poet turns into a tiger. The style is modelled on classical Chinese, full of rare kanji compounds. About a third of its characters are kanji, the highest share on this list. About 5,800 characters.
檸檬 (Remon, “Lemon”), Kajii Motojirō. A restless young man carries a lemon through Kyoto. More mood than plot. About 4,900 characters.
高瀬舟 (Takasebune, “The Boat on the Takase River”), Mori Ōgai. A constable escorts a convicted man down the river by boat and listens to his story. Calm and serious. About 8,700 characters.

Longer works

The last five are real books. I would not start with them, but they are where most learners want to end up.

風の又三郎 (Kaze no Matasaburō), Miyazawa Kenji. A mysterious boy joins a small mountain school. The children speak in Tōhoku dialect, which is the main difficulty. About 30,000 characters.
銀河鉄道の夜 (Ginga tetsudō no yoru, “Night on the Galactic Railroad”), Miyazawa Kenji. Two boys ride a train across the night sky. Kenji kept revising it until his death, and it was published afterwards. About 38,000 characters.
坊っちゃん (Botchan), Natsume Sōseki. A hot-headed young teacher from Tokyo takes a job at a country school. A full novel, fast and funny, and easier than its length suggests. About 88,000 characters.
こころ (Kokoro), Natsume Sōseki. A student and the older man he calls Sensei. A long novel in three parts, slow and introspective. About 160,000 characters.
人間失格 (Ningen shikkaku, “No Longer Human”), Dazai Osamu. A man’s confessions, told in notebooks. The Japanese is not hard. The subject is heavy. About 73,000 characters.

Old kana spelling

Aozora Bunko keeps each work in the spelling of the edition it was typed from. Some editions use modern kana spelling (新仮名, shin-kana). Others use the historical spelling (旧仮名, kyū-kana) that was standard until 1946. In old kana, いう is written いふ and きょう can be けふ.

For a native reader this is a small bump. For a learner it is a real obstacle, because a dictionary looks up the modern spelling. Search for いふ and nothing useful comes back.

Every Aozora card page states which spelling a work uses, in the line 文字遣い種別. 新字新仮名 means modern kanji and modern kana, which is what you want. Twenty-nine of the thirty works above are 新字新仮名. The exception is 雨ニモマケズ, which is 新字旧仮名: modern kanji, old kana. サウイフモノニ in the poem is そういうものに in modern spelling, and ワラッテヰル is わらっている. The poem is short enough to work through line by line, and I left it on the list because it is one of the most quoted poems in Japan.

Furigana

Aozora texts record furigana exactly as the source edition printed them, and editions differ a lot. When I counted, Kusuyama Masao’s 桃太郎 and 舌切りすずめ carry readings on most of their kanji, while his 花咲かじじい on Aozora has no furigana at all and gives some readings in brackets after the word instead, as in 一緒（いっしょ）. Niimi Nankichi’s stories carry few, but they barely need them, because they are written mostly in kana.

That second point matters more than the furigana. In the first eleven works above, kanji make up roughly 11 to 25 percent of the characters. In Akutagawa and Nakajima Atsushi it is closer to 30 percent. I think that share is a better quick guide to difficulty than the furigana, which tell you how a word is read but not what it means.

Reading them with a dictionary

All thirty works are on the “Start here” shelf in Niho, the free Japanese reader I make for iPhone and iPad. It shows the furigana printed in the edition, and you can turn them off when you no longer need them. Long-press a word and tap Look up, and the meaning appears over the page, inflected forms included: 食べました finds 食べる. The word is saved with the sentence you found it in, and comes back a few days later in a short quiz. Editions in old kana are marked before you download them. There are no ads and no account.

You can also read every work above directly on Aozora Bunko, in the browser. Whichever way you read, my suggestion is to finish number 1 tonight. At about 900 characters, it takes about as long as a cup of tea.