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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.