I want to find light novels and manga in Japanese and read them to improve my Japanese.
Do you know where I can find LNs and manga? Ideally, I’d like the LN/manga to be searchable (aka., I can select and copy the sentences and look up kanji).
I’d also love to find it for free (I’ll buy the original in physical format when I visit JP at the end of 2023).
Specifically, I’m currently looking for Vagabond (manga), and Jaku-Chara Tomozaki-kun (LN), but I’d love to find other stuff too.
Thank you!
9 comments
nyaa.si
Book Walker. Not free but usually quite affordable.
I bought Japanese manga off Amazon Japan and can use it on my Kindle app.
It won’t help for these particular titles, but the 小説家になろう website https://syosetu.com/ has tons of web novel material. While they are in web-novel form, many of them eventually became or will become published novels. Sometimes the revisions for print are even on the site, although the majority of the time you’re basically reading a rough draft.
Still, if you’re on a budget, you can’t do better than endless reading material for free, and of course, since it’s just web pages, you can search it however you like, even use rikai(kun/chan) on it.
I use a Japanese amazon account on my kindle and get the books from there. You can also add dictionaries and look up words on your kindle. You won’t be able to do that with a Manga though.
[https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/manga](https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/manga) has a nice collection of material.
In regards to copying kanji/words, I’d recommend using one of the following tools.
* [Capture2Text](https://capture2text.sourceforge.net/) (I usually use this with games, manga, etc. in tandem with [Yomichan’s](https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/) search page)
* [KanjiTomo](https://www.kanjitomo.net/) (OCR for use with manga, also has a built in dictionary which is super convenient)
I like honto. It causes the least amount of problems using a non Japanese credit card.
I don’t know any that are free but there are sites I use that are cheap. My favourite is Book live. You can make purchases with a foreign card and read e versions of books and manga on your phone or tablet.
Others are Book Walker and Honto. If you live in Japan, physical copies can be gotten cheaply from Book off, and there is also Amazon japan, you can use the kindle although you may need a vpn to download books from that
I buy my books digitally through playstore JP (I managed to make an account with VPN and somehow got my PayPal to work), but I mostly buy the magazines on there. My favourite place to buy digital manga and you can use your regular credit card (or a non Japanese credit card I mean), is [EbookJapan](https://ebookjapan.yahoo.co.jp/) (merged with Yahoo Japan a few years ago now). They sometimes post free chapters to read, or the entire first book. They have coupons available after certain purchases and credit points as well. You’ll need to create a [Yahoo Japan Account](https://www.google.com/amp/s/setsumeikudasai.tumblr.com/post/171402077270/make-a-yahoo-japan-email-account/amp) for that, but it’s FREE~
[HERE](https://aheadofthenight.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/ebookjapan-merges-with-yahoo-bookstore/) is some additional information about how to work around this amazing digital store)