Which ones can you actually enjoy without Japanese?

Japanese doujin audio is enormous, cheap, and almost entirely undocumented in English. The catalogue pages are in Japanese. The auto-translated titles are nonsense. So most people outside Japan end up buying on cover art and hoping.

This site does one thing about that. For every work I cover, I say how much Japanese you actually need: whether it is carried by breathing and binaural texture, or whether the dialogue is the whole point. Nobody else publishes that, because you cannot scrape it. Someone has to sit down with the sample.

I live in Japan and read the original pages. I do not claim to have bought or listened to every work in full. Where a number comes from the shop, I say so, and I show the date it was checked.

Everything so far

• Review

  A 56-minute free trial that turned out to be ten short ones, and why that changed the answer

  23,890 buyers, 4.77 from six thousand ratings, and a trial I was sure had broken my measurement. It had not. I had misread what "long" means.

• Guide

  One voice actress, 846 works, and no way to use that as a shortcut

  Two of the works measured here share a performer. Following her catalogue seemed like an obvious way to find more. It is not, and the reason says something about how this shelf is built.

• Guide

  One trial was 24 minutes and unusable. The next was 96 seconds of an advert. Neither got a rating.

  Seven works measured, three rated. The four failures are more useful than the successes, because they show what a free trial is actually worth to you.

• Guide

  Every single work I have looked at was discounted. All seven, on the same day.

  20%, 30%, 50%, 90%. Not a sale event, just Tuesday. If you are converting yen to your own currency and deciding, you are working from the wrong number.

• Guide

  Two works with 88,000 sales between them, and neither will let you hear a second of it first

  Free trials are so standard on DLsite that their absence barely registers. It should. Here is what it costs you, and how to spot it before you are attached to something.

• Round-up

  Two works, 35,000 copies, one circle you have probably never heard of in English

  Chastity Fancier has no English presence at all. It also has two works that have each sold more than most tie-in releases manage in a year. Here is the order to approach them in.

• Review

  A third of it is speech, and even that third is mostly not words

  Everything else measured so far runs at conversational pace. This one does not, and the gap is the entire reason this site exists.

• Gear

  The audio work that needs hardware costs ¥770. The hardware costs US$14.

  One of the works covered here assumes you already own a prostate massager. If you do not, that assumption is a shopping problem, and it is smaller than it sounds.

• Gear

  One chastity device ships in three days, the other takes two months, and only one of them tells you its size

  Two devices from the same shop, US$24 and US$33, rated 5.0 and 2.2. Both of those ratings are meaningless, and the reason why is the useful part.

• Gear

  Nobody will tell you what shipping from a Japanese sex shop costs, and there is a reason

  A US$18 toy from Tokyo is not an US$18 purchase. Here is how the shipping is actually calculated, and why every shop is vague about it until the last screen.

• Review

  18,349 copies for a 2019 audio work aimed at people who already own a prostate massager

  A seven-year-old work in a niche so specific it names the hardware in the title, and it has outsold most of this year's releases. That combination is worth explaining.

• Guide

  The question nobody answers: how much Japanese does this thing actually need?

  Every English guide to Japanese audio work tells you what a work is about. None of them tell you whether you will understand it. That gap is the whole reason this site exists.

• Guide

  How the Japanese rating is measured, including the threshold I got wrong on the first try

  Four numbers, pulled from the free trial audio, and the exact cutoffs they map to. Published so you can disagree with them.