Pathway to Japanese Literature

This website is a project conducted as part of the social implementation of automatic translation.
As part of this initiative, automatically translated English versions of Japanese publications are presented to English-speaking audiences.
By collecting evaluations of readers’ interest and engagement, perceived market potential, and assessments of the translation results, the project aims to assess the usefulness of automatic translation and to identify challenges in its practical application.

All of the original texts are sourced from Aozora Bunko, a public digital library of works that are generally in the public domain in Japan. All works used for this website are in the public domain in Japan.

All translations are generated using advanced machine translation technology developed by NICT (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan). We strive to maintain the author's voice and the literary nuances of the original text, even through machine processing.

No.
The original Japanese texts are in the public domain in Japan; however, if you wish to use the translated texts for commercial purposes, please contact NICT in advance.
For detailed information on usage restrictions, please review the Terms of Use.

We welcome your feedback!
As this site provides automatically translated English versions of Japanese publications, perfect accuracy is not guaranteed; however, your feedback will be used to identify issues and improve automatic translation.
Please report any errors via the Contact Us page, clearly specifying the title of the work and the relevant section.

Your feedback will be used to assess the usefulness of automatic translation and to identify challenges in its practical application.

Yes.
As of January 9, 2026 (the public release date), 250 works are available.
500 works are available from January 26, 2026. As the project progresses, we plan to make more works available.

Yes.
You can freely read both the original Japanese publications and their automatically translated English versions.
However, redistribution or commercial use of the automatically translated English versions is not permitted.
For details, please refer to the Terms of Use.

• 1. From the content list or the genre list on the top page, select the content you would like to read.
• 2. The screen will change and the detailed information for the selected content will be displayed. You can view two types of content: the English translation and the Japanese original.
• 3. After finishing the English or Japanese content, click “Back” at the top of the screen to return to the content detail page.
• 4. To return to the top page, click the banner in the header.

You can find content using the By Author and By Work tabs on the homepage. You can use the A-Z index to navigate lists sorted by the English translation of the name/title.