Doujin Picks answers one question that no shop will answer for you: how much Japanese do you actually need to read this?
目次
Who runs this
This site is run by one person, in Japan, whose first language is Japanese.
That is not a detail. Nearly every English-language page about doujinshi is written by someone working from the outside — from wikis, from machine translation, from what other English pages already said. I read the Japanese product page, the Japanese tags, and the Japanese reader reviews directly, because that is my own language. When I tell you a work has almost no dialogue, or that the circle’s own description says something the tags do not, I got that from the source, not from a translation of a summary of it.
I am not a manga professional. I started this because I kept buying works I could not read. Not badly-translated ones — untranslated ones, bought on the strength of a cover and a tag list, opened, and closed again five minutes later. Doing that enough times gets expensive and stops being funny.
So I stopped guessing and started measuring. That is the whole origin of this site: the question I needed answered before buying, answered properly, for every work in the catalogue.
What this site actually does
Every work in the catalogue is graded on how much Japanese it asks of you, in four levels:
- English — an official or community translation exists
- Minimal text — the art carries it
- OCR OK — a translation app copes
- Text-heavy — you will be reading throughout
These are measured, not guessed. For each work I run OCR over the free sample pages and record two numbers: how many characters appear per page, and how many separate text areas appear per page. The second number is what separates “there is barely any text here” from “there is text here but OCR cannot read it” — two situations that look identical if you only count characters, and that mean completely different things when you are sitting there with a translation app open.
Every work page shows you the measurement it was judged on, including the confidence score. You are welcome to disagree with my thresholds. The numbers are there so you can.
What I will not do
Some of these cost me money. They are still the right call.
- No invented numbers. If I do not have data, I say I do not have data. You will not find “80% of readers say…” anywhere on this site.
- No rankings. I have no sales figures and no review dataset, so I cannot honestly rank anything. Lists here are ordered by date, not by quality.
- No hosted artwork. Cover images load from DLsite. Nothing explicit is stored on this server.
- No translation of works involving minors. Forty-one works in the catalogue have no English summary from me for this reason. They are still listed, with the original Japanese and a link to a translation service, so you can find out what they are — but I do not write that text myself.
- No reproduced reviews. Reader reviews on DLsite belong to the people who wrote them. Where I summarise what reviewers keep saying, I write it in my own words rather than translating theirs.
Where the limits are
Worth knowing before you rely on any of this.
Sample pages run lighter than the full work. Circles pick the pages that sell the work, and those are usually from the opening. A grade of Minimal text means “at least this light”, not “this light throughout”.
Thirteen works have no grade at all because they have not been released yet, so there are no sample pages to measure. They are graded automatically once they come out.
The catalogue is small on purpose. There are around 130 works here, not thousands. A site where everything is listed but nothing is assessed would be no more useful than the shop itself.
How this is funded
Links to DLsite are affiliate links. If you buy something after following one, I receive a commission from DLsite at no additional cost to you.
This does not change what gets graded how. A work marked Text-heavy is marked Text-heavy even though that grade makes you less likely to buy it — the measurement is printed underneath so you can check that for yourself. There is no paid placement here, and no circle has ever paid to appear.
Getting in touch
If a grade looks wrong to you, or a work has an English edition I have missed, I would rather hear about it than not. Corrections are the most useful thing you can send me.
There is a form on the contact page. Leaving an email address is optional — without one I cannot reply, but the correction still gets read and acted on.
Where to read further
- The readability dataset — how the Japanese-difficulty judgement is measured, what it cannot tell you, and the full figures as a downloadable CSV.
- Compliance and content policy — our legal position on adult material, 18 U.S.C. § 2257, minors, advertising and affiliate disclosure.