Support this project

This site is free, and it will stay free. The stories, the interview questions, the audio, the furigana — none of it will ever go behind a paywall.

I make it because I want more people to like Japanese, not because I want to charge them for it. But it does take real time and real money to keep going, and the pictures are most of it.

Every story here is illustrated a sentence at a time, so that each sentence has a picture beside it — some pictures are shared by two or three sentences that happen in the same moment. The pictures alone cost about $15 a story, and that is the smallest part of it. It does not count the evenings spent recording the story line by line, checking every line against the script, drawing the scenes again when they get the story wrong, or the translations into the languages I cannot read. Tips have not covered any of that so far; they pay for the next story's pictures, which is a real and immediate thing.

If this site has helped you, a one-off tip pays for the pictures in the next story. I do not ask for a subscription and there are no tiers — just whatever amount feels right to you, once. As a thank-you, anyone who tips and lets Ko-fi share their email address gets a link by email to a storybook page: three PDFs for every story on the site so far, illustrated and made to print — Level 1 with furigana and romaji, Level 2 with furigana only, Level 3 with neither, for practising the kanji. New stories keep getting added there.