Easy Japanese stories for beginners

The Travels of Tan is a six-panel comic in Japanese, written so that every single word in it is JLPT N5. Read it, understand all of it, and keep the words.

What “all N5” means, and why it matters

Most Japanese reading material aimed at beginners is nearly within reach — a graded story with three unknown words per sentence still stops you three times a sentence, and stopping is what ends a reading habit. Every episode here is checked against the N5 kanji list by a script before it is published: if a character outside the list appears anywhere in the dialogue, the build fails and the episode does not go up.

That constraint costs the stories their plot. You cannot build cause and effect out of N5 grammar, so these are journeys rather than dramas: Tan the tanuki goes somewhere, meets someone, notices something. What you get in exchange is the thing that actually matters at this level — a page of Japanese you can read straight through without looking anything up.

How to use an episode

Read the six panels first, ignoring the English captions. Guess at whatever you do not know.
Read the transcript underneath with the translations, and see how close your guesses were.
Tap the words the episode teaches. Each one opens that kanji’s page with its stroke order, readings and example sentences.
Read the six panels again. This is the part people skip and the part that works.

Who it is for

Someone who has finished — or is part-way through — hiragana, katakana and the first hundred or so kanji, and has nothing to read. If you are studying for JLPT N5, this is reading practice at exactly the level of the exam. If you dropped Japanese once and came back, this is a way in that does not start with a textbook.