Upper intermediate · JLPT N2
JLPT N2 reading practice: classic Japanese short stories
At N2 you are reading the texts Japanese students read in school: the famous short stories of Akutagawa, Miyazawa Kenji and Niimi Nankichi, written between the 1910s and the 1940s. The grammar is within reach; the difficulty lies in literary vocabulary, older expressions and longer sentences with several clauses.
Use the notes on each page for the words that are rare today, and the English translation to check how a long sentence breaks down. Hiding furigana for words at your level is a good way to test yourself while still getting help with the unusual readings these authors liked.
Original stories at N2
The Green Frog and the Yellow Frog
Something Red from the Village
The Mushrooms Hold a Meeting
The Shiver Down His Spine
The Note in the Cement Cask
Grandpa Blossom
The Police Chief and His Favourite Pastime
A Persimmon Seed for a Rice Ball
Off to Buy Mittens
蠅横光利一A Fly at the Coach Station
Click-Clack Mountain
The Rail Cart
Gon's Chestnuts
One Lemon
How the Nighthawk Became a Star
The Boy Who Came from a Peach
The Restaurant That Asked Too Much
Ｋの昇天梶井基次郎K on the Moonlit Shore
Urashima Tarō and the Palace Under the Sea
The White Elephant Who Wandered into Otsuberu's Threshing Shed
Beneath the Rashōmon
The Priest's Nose
The Wildcat's Acorn Trial
A Man of Two Parts
The Sorcerer of Ōmori
The Dog Called White
Deep in the Thicket
Night Boat on the Takase River
Toshishun and the Hermit of Mount Gabi
Leaves, Still Green
Keep Running, Melos
A Letter to My Little Ones
The Cats' Town
The Star Twins by the Silver River
The Lamp in Grandfather's Storehouse
My Case Against Dogs
The Distant Hammer
Homoi and the Shell-Fire Jewel
The Man Inside the Chair
Ten Nights, Ten Dreams
二ひきの蛙 — The Green Frog and the Yellow Frog
二ひきの蛙 is a very short fable by Niimi Nankichi, the writer of children's stories best known for ごんぎつね and 手袋を買いに. A green frog and a yellow frog run into each other in the middle of a field. Each thinks its own colour is the finer one, and insults quickly turn…
赤い蝋燭 — Something Red from the Village
赤い蝋燭 is a short animal fable told in the gentle voice of a storyteller speaking to children. A monkey finds a red candle near a human village and, never having seen one before, decides it must be a firework. The animals of the mountain are delighted and gather…
きのこ会議 — The Mushrooms Hold a Meeting
"The Mushrooms Hold a Meeting" is a short children's fable by Yumeno Kyūsaku, told in the gentle, polite voice of a storyteller reading aloud. One night, as the weather turns cold and the mushroom season draws to a close, the mushrooms of the hunting grounds…
予感 — The Shiver Down His Spine
予感 is a very short story by Yamakawa Masao, a writer known for compact stories that turn on a final twist. A young married couple are riding a large sightseeing bus up a winding cliffside road towards Kozaru Pass on a clear early-spring day. Partway up, the…
セメント樽の中の手紙 — The Note in the Cement Cask
This is a short piece of Japanese proletarian fiction, built around a story within a story. Matsudo Yozō is a cement labourer at a power-station site by the Kiso River, grey with dust and worn out by long shifts. Near quitting time he finds a small nailed-shut…
花咲かじじい — Grandpa Blossom
花咲かじじい is one of Japan's best-known folktales, retold by Kusuyama Masao in the gentle, polite voice of a storyteller reading aloud to children. An honest, kind old couple live next door to a greedy pair. When the honest couple's beloved dog Shiro starts…
毒もみのすきな署長さん — The Police Chief and His Favourite Pastime
This is a short comic fable by Miyazawa Kenji. It is set in Puhara, an imaginary country where four icy rivers from the glaciers of Mount Karakon meet. The pools on its wide gravel riverbed are full of fish, and the country's very first law forbids…
猿かに合戦 — A Persimmon Seed for a Rice Ball
This is Kusuyama Masao's retelling of 猿かに合戦, one of Japan's best-known folktales. A crafty monkey cheats a crab out of a rice ball, then out of the persimmons from the tree the crab patiently grew. When the monkey's greed turns deadly, the crab's child finds…
手袋を買いに — Off to Buy Mittens
手袋を買いに is a short children's tale about a mother fox and her small cub on one snowy winter day and night. The cub sees snow for the first time and comes home with frozen paws, so his mother decides he needs mittens from the town. Fear of humans stops her at…
蠅 — A Fly at the Coach Station
Yokomitsu Riichi's 蠅 is a very short modernist story set at a sleepy country coach station on a scorching midsummer day. A farm woman whose son is dying in town, a pair of young runaways, a mother with a little boy, and a gentleman who has just made money in…
かちかち山 — Click-Clack Mountain
かちかち山 is one of Japan's best-known folktales, told here in a retelling by Kusuyama Masao. It opens like a typical 'mukashi mukashi' story: an old man, his wife, and a raccoon dog (tanuki) who keeps ruining the old man's field. It quickly turns dark. The tanuki…
トロッコ — The Rail Cart
トロッコ is a short story told almost entirely from the viewpoint of an eight-year-old boy. Ryōhei lives in a village near the construction site of a light railway between Odawara and Atami, and he is fascinated by the small open carts the labourers push along the…
ごん狐 — Gon's Chestnuts
Gongitsune is one of the best-known children's stories in Japan and has long been a staple of elementary school textbooks. The narrator says he heard it as a child from an old man in his village. It follows Gon, a lonely little fox who lives by himself in the…
檸檬 — One Lemon
Kajii Motojirō's "Lemon" is a short, first-person prose sketch with almost no plot. A young man is weighed down by a vague, ominous dread and wanders the streets of Kyōto. He cannot bear music or poetry, cannot afford the small pretty things he likes, and…
よだかの星 — How the Nighthawk Became a Star
よだかの星 is a short fable by Miyazawa Kenji about a small, plain bird that everyone else looks down on. The nighthawk is mocked for its appearance, and the hawk even resents that the name よだか contains the word たか ('hawk'). The hawk demands that the nighthawk give…
桃太郎 — The Boy Who Came from a Peach
This is Kusuyama Masao's retelling of Momotarō, perhaps Japan's best-known folk tale: a baby boy bursts out of a giant peach, grows up strong and kind, and sets off with millet dumplings to face the ogres of distant Onigashima. Along the way a dog, a monkey…
注文の多い料理店 — The Restaurant That Asked Too Much
Miyazawa Kenji's 注文の多い料理店 is a darkly comic fairy tale. Two young gentlemen from Tōkyō come to the mountains to shoot something, anything, for the fun of it. They lose their guide, grow hungry, and come upon a smart Western-style restaurant called 山猫軒…
Ｋの昇天 — K on the Moonlit Shore
Ｋの昇天 is a short story by Kajii Motojirō, best known for 檸檬 (Lemon). It is written as a letter. The narrator replies to someone grieving the drowning of a young man called K, and offers his own strange explanation of the death. He met K while both were…
浦島太郎 — Urashima Tarō and the Palace Under the Sea
This is Kusuyama Masao's retelling of Urashima Tarō, one of Japan's best-known folktales. A kind young fisherman from the shore of Mizunoe in Tango Province rescues a turtle from a group of village children. The grateful turtle later carries him to the Dragon…
オツベルと象 — The White Elephant Who Wandered into Otsuberu's Threshing Shed
Otsuberu and the Elephant is a short fable by Miyazawa Kenji, told aloud by an unnamed cowherd to a listener. Otsuberu is a rich man whose threshing shed roars with machines and farmhands. One day a white elephant wanders in from the forest. Otsuberu sees his…
羅生門 — Beneath the Rashōmon
Akutagawa's first major story, published in 1915 and drawn from a tale in the medieval collection Konjaku Monogatarishū, is a short, grim study of how a person talks himself into doing wrong. On a cold, rainy evening in a Kyōto ruined by earthquakes, fires and…
鼻 — The Priest's Nose
Nose is a short, darkly comic tale about vanity and the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us. Zenchi Naigu, a respected Buddhist priest at Ike-no-o, has a nose so long it hangs below his chin. He pretends not to care, but secretly frets over…
どんぐりと山猫 — The Wildcat's Acorn Trial
A short fairy tale by Miyazawa Kenji, told in a warm, playful storyteller's voice. A boy named Ichirō receives a clumsy postcard from a wildcat asking him to come and help with a troublesome trial. The next morning he heads up a mountain valley, chatting with…
一人二役 — A Man of Two Parts
一人二役 is a short comic tale by Edogawa Ranpo, a writer best known for detective and mystery fiction. There is no murder here. It is a playful domestic story about deception and jealousy. The narrator tells it aloud to a listener, describing an acquaintance…
魔術 — The Sorcerer of Ōmori
"Magic" is a short fantastic tale by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, told in five brief parts. On a cold, rainy autumn night, the narrator takes a rickshaw to visit Matiram Misra, a young Indian patriot. Misra lives in a shabby Western-style house on the lonely outskirts…
白 — The Dog Called White
白 is a short fable-like tale by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke about a white dog named Shiro who, in a moment of fear, fails to warn his best friend Kuro about a dogcatcher. When he runs home, he finds that his own coat has turned completely black, and the children who…
藪の中 — Deep in the Thicket
Akutagawa's 藪の中 is a short crime story with no narrator, set in an earlier age of the capital. A samurai has been found dead in a remote thicket off the Yamashina road, and seven people give accounts of what happened: a woodcutter, a travelling monk, a…
高瀬舟 — Night Boat on the Takase River
高瀬舟 is a short historical story by Mori Ōgai, first published in 1916. It is set in Kyōto during the Tokugawa period, when criminals sentenced to exile were sent downriver to Ōsaka by boat. On one hazy spring night, the constable Haneda Shōbē escorts a…
杜子春 — Toshishun and the Hermit of Mount Gabi
Toshishun is a short literary fairy tale by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, retold from a Tang-dynasty Chinese story and first written for the children's magazine Akai Tori. On a spring evening at the west gate of Rakuyō, a young man who has wasted his inheritance meets…
葉 — Leaves, Still Green
葉 is less a single story than a collage: dozens of fragments, some only a line or two long, set side by side without explanation. A man who had meant to die decides to keep living until summer because someone gave him a summer kimono. From there the pieces…
走れメロス — Keep Running, Melos
Keep Running, Melos (走れメロス) is a short heroic tale set in a legendary Greek city. Melos, a plain-spoken shepherd, openly defies Dionis, the tyrant king of Syracuse, who trusts no one. To keep a promise and save a friend's life, he must make a desperate journey…
小さき者へ — A Letter to My Little Ones
小さき者へ is a short work written as a letter. A father writes to his three small children, for them to read when they are grown, after their mother has died the previous year. Writing late at night while they sleep in the next room, he goes back to the…
猫町 — The Cats' Town
"The Cats' Town" is a short prose work by the poet Hagiwara Sakutarō, part essay and part strange tale. The first-person narrator, tired of ordinary travel, looks for ways to escape the dull everyday world. His real interest is how a familiar place can…
双子の星 — The Star Twins by the Silver River
双子の星 is a fairy tale by Miyazawa Kenji set in the night sky. Chunse and Pōse are two small blue stars who live in crystal palaces on the western bank of the Silver River, the Milky Way. Every night they play silver flutes in time with the star-circling song.…
おじいさんのランプ — The Lamp in Grandfather's Storehouse
This is a story within a story. On a spring day, a boy named Tōichi finds a strange old lamp in the family storehouse while playing hide-and-seek. His grandfather is gruff at first, then softens and begins to tell the story behind it. The tale goes back to the…
畜犬談 — My Case Against Dogs
畜犬談 is a comic first-person story told as a mock essay. A self-declared dog-hater explains, at great length and with pretend-scholarly gravity, why dogs are dangerous and contemptible. He lives with his wife in a rented cottage on the edge of Kōfu while they…
トカトントン — The Distant Hammer
"Tokatonton" is a short story by Dazai Osamu set in the first year after Japan's defeat. Most of it is a long, confessional letter from a twenty-six-year-old post-office clerk in a coastal village near Aomori to a novelist he admires. A brief note and the…
貝の火 — Homoi and the Shell-Fire Jewel
Kai no Hi is a fairy tale set in a meadow of birches and lilies of the valley, where the animals talk. A young rabbit, Homoi, jumps into a stream to save a lark chick that is being swept away. Soon afterwards the larks bring him the Shell-Fire, a glowing jewel…
人間椅子 — The Man Inside the Chair
人間椅子 is a short tale of psychological horror by Edogawa Ranpo, first published in 1925. Most of it takes the form of a letter. One morning Yoshiko, a famous woman writer, opens a thick envelope from an unknown admirer. Inside is a long confession. The writer…
夢十夜 — Ten Nights, Ten Dreams
Ten Nights, Ten Dreams is a sequence of ten short, unconnected dream-stories. The first night opens with the phrase こんな夢を見た ("I had a dream like this"), and each dream is told in the first person by a narrator who calls himself 自分. A man keeps watch at a…