About

The name

Edogawa Ranpo, who more or less invented the Japanese mystery story, had a motto he liked to write out for anyone who asked for his autograph: うつし世はゆめ　よるの夢こそまこと. The waking world is a dream; only the dreams of night are real. Yoru no yume means “dreams of night”.

It suits the books here. A man assures the police that he is perfectly sane, then tells them about his double. A patient wakes in a locked ward with no idea who he is, and everyone who offers to help him remember makes things worse.

How the translations are made

Each book is translated from the Japanese by AI, a section at a time. More AI then checks the English against the original, passage by passage, and the corrections go back into the text.

Before a book goes on sale, a person reads the whole English text from start to finish. That reading is of the English only; nobody has compared the translations with the Japanese by hand. If you read Japanese and something looks off, we’d be glad to hear about it.

The translations try to keep what makes the originals strange: narrators who repeat themselves, contradict themselves and occasionally argue with themselves, and the odd inconsistency in the source text itself.

Buying a book

Every book’s page has its first pages to read and a free sample to download. You pay through Stripe and go straight to Your books, and we email you a link that brings you back from any device.

Get in touch

Is there a Japanese book you’d like to read in English? Send suggestions to requests@yorunoyume.com. The stranger, the better.

Something wrong with an order? Write to support@yorunoyume.com and mention the email address you used at checkout.

Copyright

The original Japanese works are in the public domain in Japan, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada. The first pages of every translation are free; the rest are for sale here.